Lora-Faye Åshuvud Dreams of Chaos
"Actually letting the chaos in forces a process of deciding what you actually think and believe. What's goodness? What's love? It’s complicated."
I met Lora-Faye Åshuvud, the visionary force behind indie rock’s Arthur Moon, because they went on tour with my wife. We were all a whole lot younger — my wife and I didn’t have any kids yet, for one — and both bands were playing all kinds of questionable venues up and down the east coast. I remember my wife texting me from the road, something like “this person is really cool, let’s be friends with them.”
She was right, Åshuvud is really cool. And smart, and interesting, and a kind, good friend. Over the years, our friendship has been seen a lot of laughs, thoughtful conversations, and very delicious food. They have an interesting mind, a singular way of thinking about the world. Their music reflects that quirky contemplation. It’s pop, but not really. It’s rock, but not exactly. It’s avant-garde, but also a bop. Y’all gotta listen to it. Seriously.
Their two most recent releases are Chaos! Chaos! Chaos! Side A and Chaos! Chaos! Chaos! Side B. So, I naturally had to chat with them for this column. Our conversation was even better than I could have imagined (and I imagined it as pretty great). We talked about gender, and incoherence, and neoliberalism, and leaning into the chaos as an exercise in understanding oneself. I hope you love it as much as I did.
Tell me about the genesis of this new album. How does it connect to your personal story?
Right when I was beginning to write this record, I got a bunch of old home videos from my childhood. There's this one video of me in like, ‘90s jorts and short hair — I basically had the haircut I have now — and a backwards baseball cap. In the video, my best friend and I are outside and we're singing Spice Girls songs. My body language is this femininity through masculinity thing that may read as stereotypically gay.
When I first saw the video, my immediate response was shame. You know, I was taught by society that I couldn't do that, I wouldn't be safe if I behaved that way. It wasn’t a lesson I was overtly taught by my family in a way I would consider cruel. It's just the way society is. I feel like, for me, a lot of the project of coming into adulthood was about erasing the person in that video.
Seeing the video, I felt an urgent need to erase that person, but I also felt this deep understanding of their magic. I was suddenly overcome with sadness and connection to this little genderfluid freak — who was me. That began the process of exploring an almost triple kaleidoscopic perspective on my gender, and my past, and my present. Of being able to see all the different genders that I am and how that has changed and shifted over time. Of being able to see how chaotic it is — sometimes in really painful ways, but also in other ways that feel really beautiful and resilient. Because it feels like through the chaos, that little kid survived anyway. Even though part of me really tried to shut them down. And now I get to hold them, and be them, and make them feel safe.
Part of this project has felt like an embracing of all the feelings I have around who I was and who I am. Accepting that the things you did to try to hide who you were are valid. Maybe some of those feelings are disgust and shame, and that's just a part of the big swirling chaos. It’s okay to look at those things, too, to see them as a part of the beauty of the whole.
Tell me about your new record. Why is it called Chaos! Chaos! Chaos! Side B? And how does it connect to this personal chaos theory you’re describing?
Part of that title was social and political commentary, which feels like a very big part of my chaos origin story, as a person and an artist. And a big part of that is my experience of gender. Which is kind of the, the sort of like, kaleidoscopic thing at the center of this record, which is like, Chaos! Chaos! Chaos! Side A and Chaos! Chaos! Chaos! Side B, which came out within like, a year and a half of each other.
The idea I had was to make something that felt coherently incoherent. Which is to say, I wanted to express the chaos and disorientation of the experience of coming into a new understanding of my gender that had always been there, but that I didn't really have like language or the right glasses to see until more recently. So, there's this really chaotic experience of time and identity and perspective that comes with that. I understand certain kinds of gender expression in my own life as being drag, in a way. At the time, I was really, really trying to fit in and be normal, you know. And now, I'm able to see it as camp, and drag, and fun. But at the time, it felt really heavy and fraught and uncomfortable. Like, proof of my unworthiness, you know?
The chaos was akin to the experience of flipping through Tik Tok and the algorithm being creepily totally all the things you're interested in, in a totally disjointed way that probably wouldn't necessarily make sense to anyone else Or, like listening to a mix CD that your friend made you in high school, where it goes from Jay Z to Ani DiFranco, but both artists mean a similar thing to you somehow anyway. That’s what coherently incoherent meant to me for this particular project, that’s how it relates to who I am right now, I guess.
How does that translate to your artistic process?
When I’m writing, I just sit down and try to be really, really present in whatever it is that I'm feeling, not to try to control or guide or steer. If I can have a strong, deliberate feeling in this moment I'm just gonna go with it, not question it or try to control or suppress it. That's how those songs end up coming about and it's just kind of like a collection of the chaotic feelings. I let the chaos be chaos, even within a song.
You know, I think when we make a record we're often aiming for a broader aesthetic, an overarching set of sounds that are rearranged and rethought to say different things. Usually, at the end of the day, it feels like there's a consistent — almost linear — throughline to a record. Maybe it’s the same production approach or the same set of instruments, but something’s creating a cohesive experience.
I wanted this record to feel like the opposite of that. I want you to almost not be sure it's the same band, to wonder — maybe it is a mix CD, you know? But then, at the same time, you can feel a coherent sensibility at the center that remains calm and grounded amongst all of the chaos around. It’s kind of a spiritual idea.
And on Trouble, which is track eight of the album, you are literally flipping through radio stations. Disorienting the listener.
Yeah, ha, that track was produced by Andrew Sheron. We recorded it back in 2015. And listening to it this time around, I just felt like the song was made by such a different person, such a different band — even though there are a lot of the same people playing on it. We didn't actually put the whole song on, even though it felt like it lived on this record. Instead, I sent it back to him and asked him to make a recording of himself flipping through the radio. Then I mixed it up. Maybe one day we'll do a secret release of the full track.
How do you think about the recipient of these tunes? Because often the drive to create a linearity or coherence on a record is borne of an awareness to the listener’s experience.
In some ways, people today are really primed for this incoherent experience because of the mode in which we listen to music right now. So many people are listening to a Spotify playlist or teeny clips of music on Tik Tok, so that lack of a linear album is pretty common. Personally, I wanted to lean really hard into that, to almost make it a little uncomfortable, and then see if we can pull you back around the other side. I'm sure this idea is successful with some people and annoying or confusing for other people. But, you know, everything you release is gonna annoy some people.
Speaking of the modern age, I’d love to hear more about the political messaging embedded in Chaos! Chaos! Chaos! Side B.
There's a very neoliberal desire to try to equivocate experience, to imagine that we’re all suffering in the great “family of man,” or something. And I feel really allergic to that attempt to boil down human experiences and assign equal value to all of the opinions that people spew.
All that has done is created the nightmare, monstrous situation we find ourselves in where somebody can come on to Fox News and say something patently untrue about HRT (Hormone Replacement Therapy) and we give that statement equal weight as an entire medical industry. That’s what the New York Times does, right? They try to represent both sides because they feel it's their neoliberal journalistic imperative, but they end up giving equal weight to one random dude with a wrong opinion as they do to hundreds of thousands of medically trained scientists. If you're going to present an opinion that is proven to be false, then that's okay. But we can couch that argument by being clear that this opinion is not based in fact.
So, on this album, I wanted to almost echo that noise. I wanted to explore what it would mean to create something that felt totally disjointed, something that would force people to think about what kinds of expression they inherently value more than others. At the center of it is the difference between giving equal weight to all of the noise and picking your way through the chaos with thoughtfulness and clarity.
And that’s different than denying the chaos. Denial would mean finding your way through the chaos by putting blinders on and only choosing the path that is easiest to follow. And I think folks like you and I, folks who don't fit in the boxes, don't have the privilege of keeping the blinders on because don’t fucking fit. They aren’t comfortable. They hurt.
The thing that's so scary to people is the idea that the second you look at the chaos, once you start to let other perspectives and ideas in, you will no longer retain your sense of self. But I think it’s good, because actually letting the chaos in forces a process of deciding what you actually think and believe. What's goodness? What's love? It’s complicated.
Lora-Faye Åshuvud is the award-winning composer, singer, and instrumentalist behind the band Arthur Moon. Lora-Faye writes many of their lyrics using cut up newspaper and magazine articles, and describes the process of composing the band's experimental pop arrangements as similarly collage-like. Lora-Faye was raised in Brooklyn, where they still live.