Music
Montreal artist Mind Bath has always had a literary flair to his work. Crafting immersive alt-R&B journeys through sound, new album ‘Aqueous’ is intended to function on multiple levels.
Out on September 4th, it’s a deeply imaginative, highly creative work, a conceptual literary-musical work that functions both as a full-length album and companion debut novel.
Completed during a two-year residency at Camp Flirty, a secluded gay cabin in the woods, ‘Aqueous’ is a psychedelic odyssey through queer fantasy and mysticism.
June is obviously Pride month, so CLASH decided to let Mind Bath loose, recommending some essential tomes for our bookshelves…
Ok, I truly can never pick favourites of anything because I love so many things, and I love hard, but these reads popped into mind.
Who Is Wellness For? An Examination of Wellness Culture and Who It Leaves Behind by Fariha Róisín
There is no greater joy in my life than the fact that some of my favourite artists are some of my closest friends. Typically, when I read, I like to have a pen close by to highlight passages and pages, to write little notes back to the author, or to future me. While reading Fariha’s book I filled half a notebook, directly transcribing their words with my pen to cement them in my consciousness. Fariha’s work is spellwork, protecting us from patriarchal rewiring of thought, colonization of the imagination, flattening of feeling.
Fariha blends personal experience with wildly thorough research and sharp cultural insight to reveal how the modern wellness industry often profits from and appropriates the very cultures and communities it systematically excludes. They unpack the ways capitalism, colonialism, and white supremacy have distorted healing, asking what it would mean to reclaim wellness as a birthright rather than a luxury.
Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black by Cookie Mueller
Cookie Mueller strutted so Julia Fox could stomp. My heart always beats for deeply intelligent, brilliantly creative women who can present as baddie airheads when it serves them, and Cookie is patron saint territory. A writer, artist, downtown icon, John Waters muse, and OG fag hag (forgive me, I don’t use that phrase myself, but I think she would’ve claimed it), this eclectic collection of essays chronicles her rebellious, prolific, absolutely fucked up, and adventurous life on the edge.
She is an incredible writer. Sharp, funny, devastating, and impossibly cool. Doesn’t the title alone make you want to dive in? Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black is one of the great books of bohemian survival, queer kinship, and making art and making love in the midst of chaos.
The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon by Tom Spanbauer
A sublimely mystical and psychedelic coming of age story, set in the American West at the turn of the 20th century, we follow Shed (one of my fav fictional characters of all time), a bisexual Indigenous teenager working at a brothel in a small town in Idaho. This story covers everything. Identity, sex, love, desire, racism, violence, resilience, spirit, magic, heart, grit, cum.
Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration by David Wojnarowicz
In modernity’s artscape, I crave radical, anti-establishment voices and talents – those which remind me that the light of the counterculture is always stronger than the shadow of the dominant culture. Seeking out radical ways of life and upholding revolutionary art keeps me spiralling upwards.
This is part memoir, part stream of consciousness, part self-portrait. It is overflowing sacral-energy. Embodied creative invocation. An offering for us all to feel more deeply and care more fully. A work of absolute and brutal honesty, it probes the catastrophic ways political systems function to silence the unwelcome and unwanted.
David Wojnarowicz, my love in gay heaven cruising the angels. If you’re looking for more David, you should also read Weight of the Earth.
The Keys to Healing Our Nervous System: An Expressive Guidebook by Orion Crook
Orion and I quickly became sisters, kissing once only to swap enough spit to twirl the DNA of our lives together like the dance when slugs fuck. They are too many things to name. They’re Either Ori. But worth mentioning: shabboblin freak, artist, lover, emotional landscape, throat-goat, activist, and psychological magician/healer/therapist.
An expressive workbook, nervous system field guide, and compassionate watery companion, The Keys to Healing Our Nervous System offers both practical tools and magical thinking for understanding trauma, reactivity, dissociation, self-sabotage, core beliefs, cognitive distortions, and the winding path back to ourselves. Orion has spent a lifetime sitting with queer and trans trauma, and the guidebook synthesizes that wisdom and experience through their Re-encountering the Core Therapeutic Technique ™ to help readers radicalize as they cultivate awareness, acceptance, and lifelong movement away from cis-hetero-patriarchy.
~ and gotta plug my own book! ~
Aqueous by Mind Bath
Mind Bath’s, Aqueous, is a conceptual literary-musical project – a psychedelic odyssey through the land of queer fantasy and mysticism. Part auto-fiction, part perverse hero’s journey where an effervescent stardust boy cuts a hole in the sky and wakes up in a utopic new land, far removed from the oppressive dusty dominions of the violent world on Earth in search of healing and liberation.
Is it odd? Or is it God(dess consciousness)? N.E.W.T. arrives in Aqueous to a wisdom-dropping leather daddy daylily and a transcendental dog. Welcome home, to a new way of being, a universe of pleasure, a sanctuary where dreamers live in harmony with the natural world, guided by a looping energy blueprint from the 10 Days of Celestial Bodies. Only on Day of Moon can one remember what came before. Like a flower turns to face the sun, N.E.W.T. faces shadows of the unconscious mind to plant imaginative seeds of hope.
From radical queer joyous faerie woo to an underground darling’s music career, abuse of power to vignettes of a sex angel, Aqueous is healing text. Enriched by a cast of rebellious artists and sublime outsiders in collective search of liberating the core wound in every gay inner child, Aqueous is an evocative and profound meditation on the fragments of a world of trauma and the resilience, humour, and self-interrogation required to see beyond it – right through to the heart.
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‘Aqueous’ will be released on September 4th – pre-order it now.
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