Trace

T4thirteen is the beginning (and opening track) of the sonic voyage TRACE takes us on in her up-coming album t4tears. The musician explores healing from grief and the importance of self-discovery supported by the collective. Interdependence and interconnectedness come up in the multi-layered, haunting songs too. On the introduction t4thirteen provides, TRACE elucidates, “T4thirteen opens up a musical and narrative channel into the world of T4TEARS, which in itself becomes a journey through trans past, trans childhood, and trans mourning. At one point in the track, I speak to myself while recording, then shifting my vocal register to reach closer into the past and connect more deeply with that part of me. The track becomes both an emotional portal and a continual act of approximation, luring us into a multilayered world of mourning, healing, and collective gathering.” It’s a powerful message for an intimate performance.

Leaning out the car in motion during the video puts TRACE as an artist down as a risk-taker. She’s always been a very passionate, physical, and sensual performer capturing ecstasy and transgression in these moments. TRACE as an entity gives space to the woman behind it, allowing truths to exist in music and the show that she “might not be able to face, see, or even feel in day-to-day life”, as she puts it. Meanwhile, with her friends she’s usually calm and soft, except for when she’s laughing loudly, that happens often and wholeheartedly.

Since releasing her debut album Fucking and Dreaming, this new offering presents a significant stylistic softening. It’s an active choice by the musician whose decision stems from shifting focus onto the first instrument she taught herself and connected with musically: the acoustic guitar. Here the guitar becomes “less of an instrument and more of a temporal and narrative vehicle” according to TRACE who bravely steps back into past memories with t4tears.

When considering the specificity of being a Cologne-based songwriter singing in English, TRACE tells us, “Germany, in general, is a tough space for radical and emotionally intense art and especially music. Even if I wrote in German, it wouldn’t change much about the appeal of my work inside of Germany.” She adds, “The more pressing questions I ask myself are: can people stand listening to trans pain or mourning or rage? Are they ashamed if they find it enjoyable? Do people like being screamed at by trans girls? Are people generally irritated or repelled when they identify certain voices as trans? Do these dynamics shift across geographies, cities, and communities?” These considerations might tie to the safety (or lack of safety) for trans women in Germany and Europe. 

Whilst the video might look like a sort of going home, the artist insists it’s about revisiting a younger version of herself “buried in an inner graveyard”. Facing pain, mourning and making peace with it is part of this imagined time-traveling encounter with herself. 

The music video ends circling what looks like a digitally rendered house that might be an invented vision of her family home then a lyric cut short. Use of unreal imagery and the cut-off lyric “give me all of your...” leaves space for the imagination. Meticulous and detailed, experimental and courageous TRACE aspires to encounter unresolved moments in composition, “something that demands respect for its autonomy and will. That’s what cut-offs are all about: surrendering to depths and unknowns.” She concluded.