Welcome! I make music and connected ephemera (especially fragrances) under the moniker Ziemba, and am NYC-based. Since first making an incense for my debut album Hope is Never, I've expanded the ways I use multisensory media to transform spaces. For example, in a commission with Guerilla Science at National Sawdust, I composed original five-part a cappella music for Fire Organ, where the voices of the vocalists directly transformed the scent in the room, using a fragrance apparatus within the fire organ as the translator between the human voice and a continually changing scent. A performance at MoMA Ps1 involved a mist-laden fragrant fountain, while a Trevorshaus show encouraged viewers to slather their friends in scented lotion, and yet another show offered attendees fragrant lollipops made in collaboration with Bad Taste.
\n \nMy new full-length album Ardis is a feminist sci-fi adventure and multisensory experiment. In March of 2019 I was music artist-in-residence at Pioneer Works. I’ve toured throughout the United States and internationally, have held artistic residencies with Guerilla Science, and the French Institute in Fez, Morocco; and have performed widely at music and art spaces in New York City, including: MoMA Ps1, La Mama, National Sawdust, Fourth Arts Block/ Creative Time, Issue Project Room, Knockdown Center, Queens Museum, the Museum of Art and Design, and more. I have composed original music for Comedy Central's Broad City, Cocoon Central Dance Team’s film “Snowy Bing Bongs Across the North Star Combat Zone,” Fusion’s “Shade: Queens of NYC,” and more. I write about culture, music, and U.S./Mexico border issues for publications including Teen Vogue, i-D, Listen to This, and Ravelin Magazine. I sometimes lead the NYC iteration of Colin Self’s experimental vocal group, Xhoir, and xhoral explorations have been a significant source of inspiration for me.
\n \nYou can reach me at ziembathe@gmail.com.
\n\n\nInstagram - Twitter - Facebook\n
\n \n\nI’m proud of how frequently I collaborate with wonderfully imaginative people, and would love if you explored their work.\n
\n\n\nCollaborators:\n
Ardis = Earth, the necessary changes having been made [mutatis mutandis].
\n\nArdis is an imagined parallel world, and a very real place that you are currently located within. It is inhabited by opening portals using song and scent. An ardis is the point of an arrow, a nexus in time and space, shooting toward the unknown future. This particular Ardis is the pregnant present as it incubates future vision.\n
\nArdis is inspired by speculative science fiction, feminist geography, and the feeling of ecstasy that can happen when a bunch of people are singing together. As an album and performative project, it has been fueled by collaboration. Please see the list of collaborators in the ABOUT section to explore the work of fellow Ardisians.\n
\n \nArdis is organized into three territories, and was released sequentially throughout the spring of 2019.\n\n\n
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Ziemba, \"ARDIS\" = \n[an essay by Anna Kladzyk].\n
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ARDISIAN MOODS = \n \nThe first time I heard about Ardis, René and I were driving into the Mimbres Valley toward San Lorenzo, NM. This area has an ancient yet emergent feel, and holds a special magic for René and me-- it was where our aunt spent her last years. Indistinct nostalgia and the potential for reinvention wind through the valley floor here, and we were immersed in it. While filming one of René’s performances at a former brothel in the area, a math professor originally from Iran leaned over and shared “this is a home for outsiders.” \n \nSo here is where it began for me. We filmed parts of the I Built Utopia, It Became a Nightmare music video at our aunt’s home and down along NM-61 into the City of Rocks. I built my world free from fear, but something else trembles the air. René described Ardis with trepidatious tones: \n \nIt is profoundly difficult to construct an imaginative utopia while grounded in earth logic. I would see that as I read speculative science fiction attempting to design utopia. My first inclination was always to find the faults; how would that utopia go wrong? Even if the novel didn’t turn into a dystopia, I found a way to follow the path to that inevitable conclusion.\n \nWe discussed potential iterations of Ardis and I began to see across the vast blackness-- twinkling nodes that were friends, artworks, ideas, failures, puncturing outer space and woven together. How though? At René’s song nodes I perceived emerging scenes: an underground laboratory on an inhospitable terrain, an alpine landscape cold and bright with three lakes, a lush tropical sanctuary with a fountain, a city pink and gray, crumbling and humid. René, the spider, was linking these now into an interstellar ecosystem:\n \nThe times when I felt I was really narrowing in on “what Ardis is” was when I abandoned finite and solution-oriented thinking, or even future-oriented thinking. The most compelling changes, and the ones I would call necessary involve a surrender to the ambiguities of the present, and rejection of absolute truth in favor of bearing witness to cycles of growth and decay. I came to understand Ardis as a multiscalar witnessing of the present, and a tool for de-humaning myself in order to situate Earth more fully within a fantastical narrative of possibility. \n \nAs Ardis took shape over a three-year period, I participated with some of René’s 30+ other collaborators in the development, design, and public unfolding of this parallel world. This involved recording sessions of course, but also: interactive performances with choirs, instrumentalists, fire, and fragrance; custom Ardisian attire, tools, and structures; and the promotion of an alternate style of body awareness, emphasizing interconnection through shared senses. We dug into exotic matter and out the other side of black holes, sang, and built a scent-infused fountain. Today, Ardis is an ongoing multisensory experiment that includes a 15 song album, organized into three territories each bearing accompanying fragrance. Ardis can be accessed anywhere using song and scent. So I can be here in the arid kitchen, bombarded by the too-bright California morning sun, and take a break there, in a dark pink Ardisian boudoir with Night Buzzing and the tuberose of Lips 2 Lips stretching my heart.\n \n \n THE NECESSARY CHANGES HAVING BEEN MADE = \n \nWhy do I need Ardis? Why are the changes necessary? Ask any Ugly Ambitious Woman. For me, I can feel the conflict arise when I direct my experience and sensuality to be focused inward. Amid so much chaos and injustice, the self can seem a precious reliquary of control and definition. But I also know that orienting my experience to be static and disconnected from the collective inhibits growth. I don’t want to be a cocoon on the dancefloor. \n \nArdis is an experiment in hope. This involves observing the whole present with all of its complexities, flaws, and beauty from somewhat of a tyrannical perspective--in that seeking to completely reconstitute it based on a singular perspective of justice. And by virtue of employing a singular perspective to reshape a new world, the world fails--we know this story. There is concurrent failing and rebuilding throughout Ardis, perpetual landslides and uplift. And it is through the construction envisioned by the collective, rather than the singular architect, that the just, verdant world emerges, as does the dewy web of worlds.\n \nSo with Ardis we straddle the poles of truth and fiction, of real and imagined, of dream and waking; experimenting with future vision to help build a more just world. A multisensory album is an unusual way to approach this, but consider the impacts of pervasive nihilism in pop culture, especially when pop culture is fuel for cultural change. Look at me. When we accept our ambiguous, shifting condition but relinquish responsibility for re-imagining our world and creating change, we are left stuck on the fly paper, alone in the cocoon.\n \n \n THE PREGNANT PRESENT = \n \nNow we are on a plane where we embrace the necessary changes and grasp the balloon which takes us up, up and down too if we release a little. From here we can observe the green lacewing eating the aphid, the oil field on fire, and take a lick of the thermohaline swirl in the Atlantic. We acknowledge that maybe we don’t even know what justice means because of where we have been sitting. Spinning Wheel Spin narrates the iterative process of re-imagining and enacting a new world where no one is sacrificed. Wave after wave; time before time. From this perspective, we are liberated to abandon frameworks that bracket problems in familiar scales, like that of our own lifespan.\n \nI would say that Ardis is neither specific in space nor specific in time. It is an approach to scale and perspective that is playful. Can you assess a bedroom by the same metrics that you would a city, or by the same metrics that you would a constellation in the night sky? That seems like an absurd activity, but there is utility in approaching different scales from a similar lens. This sort of approach to learning and engaging with the world is a macro/microcosmic type of awareness that decenters humans and is constantly situating and re-situating. \n \nAs I welcome the concurrent failing and rebuilding throughout Ardis, my impact expands. I can more readily cross-pollinate and connect the spheres with my Ardisian companions. And remember, All Doors Have Keys, you can create and participate in Ardis from any node. \n \nSo, where is the world you sing to, and when?\n \n-Anna Kladzyk, 5/14/2019\n"}],"title":"ardis"}]}