Radical Acceptance
“Radical Acceptance is a personal practice that has evolved in my life over the past year. This doesn't mean there aren't still tough times, but times of warmth and comfort are much more present these days. I will never be able to change my past, the things that hurt me, but I can live in a peaceful and beautiful life of my own creation. The most important thing I've had to teach myself is that there is nothing wrong with my body or my brain. My body is fat, and I struggle with my mental health daily, and neither of those things make me any less of a human being. I know that my Black, Fat, Queer and Non binary body is valid in every way. Learning to love my whole self unconditionally will be a lifelong journey, but I am just so happy to be where I am today. This is my radical acceptance.” - Joy Guidry
“Radical Acceptance is a radical geography that defies the status quo of everyday harm that speaks straight to the senses and emotions of the listener. The organizations of sounds, tracks, rapid fingering and figures of soul-piercing resonance bring our bodies, feelings, and intuition to an evocation of a powerful relationship with those who we’re performing alongside, and those who are listening to us.” - Marshall Trammell
Released on February 4th, 2022 on Whited Sepulchre Records
Listen and purchase on Bandcamp and Spotify
Shot by: Shala Miller
Dressed by: Dylan Mekhi
Reviews
During the opening track on Radical Acceptance, "Just Because I Have A Dick Doesn't Mean I'm A Man", bassoonist and composer Joy Guidry speaks in a stream of consciousness about the state of the world and their place in it over a wafting electronic backdrop. Their voice might not be angry, but it isn't calm either they're matter of fact about the hate that exists in society. By the end, they wonder why we're so worried about other people, especially their happiness, instead of our own. Those words set the stage for the rest of the album's mood and themes. Radical Acceptance is about Guidry accepting their self as Black, as queer, as nonbinary. The New York based artist is known for their work in improvisation and experimental composition, drawing from the past to create something in the present. On Radical Acceptance, these ideas manifest by see-sawing from eerie, ambient electronics to free improvisations. Through this sonic palette, Guidry ties personal experience to a broader picture of the world today. Guidry's instruments tell stories as much as their words. During "Inner Child", a bassoon erupts in a frenetic melody while other instruments hang back, interweaving with each other in what feels like a representation of how the past impacts the present. On "Why Is Toxicity So Yummy", a cello's anxious tremolo and overblown bassoon rumble in subdued chaos until they explode in full, untamed energy. In these moments, Guidry illustrates the feeling of searching for acceptance, and the barriers to finding it, without needing a word. The rhythm of their instruments says enough. On the closing track "Grace", there's a surprising moment of rest. The piece is made of amorphous electronics that hover and eventually float away. This is the first time on the album that there's some semblance of certainty and a moment of resolution. The weight of the world is still present, but it isn't all-consuming. Here is a pause for acceptance, an allowance to keep moving, to carry on being.
-Vanessa Ague
The Best Contemporary Classical on Bandcamp: February 2022
New York bassoonist Joy Guidry opens their debut album with the bluntly titled “Just Because I Have a Dick Doesn’t Mean I’m a Man,” a casual spoken-word piece that lays out where the artist is coming from. While it may not be required listening to get the music that follows, it does explain how Guidry struggled to figure themself out. That individual reality is inextricably linked to the fiercely undefined shift between, say, the haunted ambiance of “Face to Face” and the howling, overdubbed free jazz-like duet with percussionist Jessie Cox called “Inner Child.” There’s harrowing darkness to “72 Hours,” an electro-acoustic piece rich in striations and unstable timbre that glides with an ominous grace, while “Why is Toxicity so Yummy” is an ensemble piece; Guidry’s keening lines are joined by the sobs and sighs of alto saxophonist Alfredo Colon and cellist Olivia Harris, colliding with elastic rhythms sculpted by Cox and bassist Nick Dunston. There’s no missing the resistance in the multi-voiced bassoon clusters in “How to Breathe While Dying.”
-Peter Margasak
Pitchfork: 26 Great Records You May Have Missed: Winter 2022
Bassoon player and sound collagist Joy Guidry learned about the concept of radical acceptance—where one honors their whole self, imperfections and all—in therapy, where they also began to process some of their questions about body image, queer community, mental health, and gender identity. On February’s Radical Acceptance, the interdisciplinary artist pulls together spoken-word pieces with quivering electronic soundscapes, freeform woodwind blasts, and rich rhythmic spirals. It’s an intense, vulnerable work that demands equally thoughtful attention and engagement. –Allison Hussey
The Vinyl District: New Release Picks
The vinyl for this release (180 gram lavender) isn’t likely to arrive until June, but waiting until then to sing the praises of NYC-based bassoonist and composer Guidry’s music simply makes no sense. It’s available digitally now and it’s a doozy, so fans of free expression should check it out and get those orders in. “Just Because I Have a Dick Doesn’t Mean I’m a Man,” Radical Acceptance’s opening spoken word piece, illuminates Guidry’s experience as a trans person, with their insights impacting everything that comes after, which ranges from electronic ambience (“Face to Face,” “Grace”) to wildly skronking and achily emotive free jazz (numerous selections, with “Inner Child” a rip-roaring delight) to a short bit of a cappella singing suggestive of a field recording (“Down in the Valley”) to a stretch of ambience that registers as being more environmentally derived (“72 Hours”). Also noteworthy is how Guidry’s use of electronics seems to extend into the improvised pieces, lending them a raw texture that’s utterly splendid.
-Joseph Neff
“Whether this is still free jazz, already contemporary music or even sound performance does not matter. Radical Acceptance is one of the strongest statements that free music has made recently.”
-Andrian Kreye
Various Small Flames: Albums We Missed in 2022
“One of the best guides to how to be self-loving is to give ourselves the love we are often dreaming about receiving from others.” So wrote bell hooks in All About Love, gracefully unmasking the cruelty which internalised trauma can bring. That Joy Guidry released Radical Acceptance in the year the world lost hooks feels like the most fitting testament to her legacy. A clear indication that her work is not only being acted upon but developed further, pushed in new directions. A personal practice brought to life in music, the album sees Guidry combine ambient, jazz and classical styles with direct and often humorous spoken word delivery to short-circuit the self-judgement of which hooks wrote. To connect with the reality of one’s identity in a way beyond labels, and learn to love it precisely for what it is.
-Jon Doyle
“Guidry accents these soft, pensive moments with high-frequency bassoon screeches and wails, a sharp reminder that even as we find this acceptance and build better lives, there’s still pain to work through along the way.”
-Brad Rose
Track List
1. Just Because I Have a Dick Doesn't Mean I'm a Man
2. Face to Face
3. Inner Child
4. Down in the Valley
5. 72 Hours
6. Why is Toxicity So Yummy?
7. How to Breathe While Dying
8. Voices of the Ancestors
9. Grace
Album art by Robyn Smith
Layout and Design: Dustin Bowen
From Marshall Trammell:
Somewhere it is written that the American author James Baldwin said that the English language is the enemy of Black people. Indeed, the straight-jacket of systemic limitations needs to be perceived to be overcome. I hear Guidry’s vernacular as a cultural methodology relevant to addressing the roles of artists making an impact on society today. Their tempered and hybrid phonics renders revelations of beauty, revelations of possibility, validation, self-awareness, creative problem solving, balance of openness with structure and other virtues of Improvisation, as stated by long-time Houston-based, music educator and Improviser David Dove in “Music is the Pedagogy.”
Ambient electronic tracks wait for you like light pools of warmth and resonance. Their placement in a timeline of the album designates them as unique transformative portals and democratic spaces within the narrative. Synthesizing Chela Sandoval’s five technologies of the Methodologies of the Oppressed which incorporates how we see the world (semiotics), make sense of it (deconstruction), relate it to history (meta-ideologizing), formulate new modalities of action (differential movement) to, finally, erect, defend and maintain democratic spaces (democratics). The journey of Radical Acceptance opens your eyes to move beyond sense-making into the creation of knowledge itself and our social environment.
Radical Acceptance sounds like tactical media quilt code from the Underground Railroad. Imagine next to the concrete examples of the “North Star,” the “Log Cabin, the Drunkard’s Path,'' and now we have “Radical Acceptance.” The album is a community informatic and liberatory tool for your emancipation and self-determination travel kit from a cultural archive of a disciplined, mind tempest. I believe the album is a conduit distributing the listener into a resonant real or imagined geography. With tracks as appendages, the recording moves on its own: auto-motive. Its own power embodies statements, scars and wisdom, offering a modality for when navigating community accountability. Entropic tracks like “Inner child,” “Why Is Toxicity So Yummy” and “How To Breathe While Dying” are sweetly deceptive and agile transgressions of common arcs in narrative formations of collective performance amidst layered solo versatility adds a nuanced blend of vernacular wisdom.
The poetics of the archival sounding material in “72 Hours,” each feels like an environmental sound design installation reminiscent of Leroy Jones’ (Amiri Baraka, of course) Blues People when he addresses the ownership and limitations of the recording technologies in shaping Black Music today. “Down In The Valley '' and “Voices Of The Ancestors' ' utilize uncommodifiable cultural weaponry that impossible to copyright, like Kente cloth, anchored in transformative tensegrity invoking a limitless healing rooted in African Diasporic indigeneity.
Radical Acceptance is a radical geography that defies the status quo of everyday harm that speaks straight to the senses and emotions of the listener. The organizations of sounds, tracks, rapid fingering and figures of soul-piercing resonance bring our bodies, feelings, and intuition to an evocation of a powerful relationship with those who we’re performing alongside, and those who are listening to us.
Wave after wave of sonic blasts fuel my descent into an afrological discipline of unique technologies. The album is welcoming intoning agency, social necessity, personality, difference and community accountability, in recognition of a strong relationship to sonic popular, experimental folk cultures. I have been hungry to hear a voice of a Creative musician speaking directly to listeners communicating critical information. Their words are not ambiguous.
I chased down references while driving. In the tracks I hear a timeline archived moving back and forth between the different layers of technologies and cultural methodologies amidst their musical consciousness in the interpretation, creation and transmission of self-determination in a historical continuum. Radical Acceptance is an interpersonal healing narrative carrying the ethos of a warrior that is responsive and inspiring community accountability. Radical Acceptance presents both the warrior and their ecology of a disciplined, mind tempest.
I urge listeners to get Radical Acceptance into your soul. Get it under your fingertips. Throughout the moving landscape of the recording I hear familiar colloquial blends of disciplines contributing a dialect erected from the need to describe and control one's circumstances, to confront life and outwit death, and, finally, as a proof of power. Hybridity-smacking, creole statements ring out as manifestation of a tight cultural and familial background suggests places and conditions of the Southern US, and simultaneously a legacy of sonorous defiance in NYC.
Album credits
Joy Guidry: Electronics, Voice, Bassoon
Maudry Richard Davis, Voice
Oli Harris: Cello
Alfredo Colon: Sax
Jessie Cox: Drums
Nick Dunston: Bass
Chioneso Bakr: Drums
Hasan Bakr: Drums
Victor See Yuen: Drums
Edwin Kenzo Huet: Mixing
Murat Colak: Mastering
Released on: Whited Sepulcher Records