Kat Parent (she/they). Photo courtesy to Buck Holzemer.
KAT PARENT
CEDAR COMMISSIONS SPOTLIGHT INTERVIEWS
Over the next few weeks we’re featuring the six artists of the 2021-2022 Cedar Commissions (taking place Friday, February 18th, and Saturday, February 19th at The Cedar) in a series of interviews on our site. The Cedar Commissions is a flagship program for emerging Minnesotan composers and musicians made possible with a grant from the Jerome Foundation.
In the second and now third year of the COVID-19 pandemic where shifts in daily life have been ever-present, these artists have been riding the waves. They’ve been composing, exploring new ideas, and assembling teams of musicians to bring their work to fruition in a mix of virtual and in-person work sessions. Over the two nights of the Eleventh Annual Cedar Commissions, audience members will witness performances about uncovering hidden truths of one's ancestors, uniting African music traditions across drawn lines, illuminating the Third Culture Kid experience, pushing oneself to the ultimate limit, the relational process of self discovery, honoring the disrespected beauty of our planet, and so much more.
Our sixth and final spotlight interview is with Kat Parent (they/she). Kat is a singer-songwriter and historian. Their new work for the 2021-2022 Cedar Commissions Swampling is a visit into the realm of eco-horror through electronic folk music. Swampling looks to honor the heartbreaking realities of humans mistreating the earth, and to highlight the beauty that remains. Kat spoke with Marketing and Communications Manager Shasa Sartin about the importance and value of death and decay, their relationship to studying history, and the 80s comic book series “Swamp Thing.”
“So [I’m] trying to learn that I am important, but also so are trees and also so is water and also so are mussels and microbes and other people, and it’s not in any hierarchy. Everything’s important, and that’s part of the Swampling idea, that I’m this little piece of a big ecosystem.”
Shasa Sartin (she/her): Your Cedar Commissions project is titled Swampling, and in your blurb about the project you describe it as an eco-horror electronic folk show. I'd never heard of eco-horror before, can you explain this genre and your interpretation of it?
Kat Parent (they/she): Yeah. I think I've always lived in wounded places. Arguably, there is no other kind of place on earth at this moment. So for me, the beauty and nurture of connecting with nature is always really deeply connected to pain and horrifying histories. For this project, I learned a lot about Minnesota wetlands and really fell in love in a lot of ways with all these different kinds of marsh and flood plain and peat bog. But also, as a historian, [I] know that my settler ancestors intentionally destroyed a lot of wetlands in the process of colonizing this region, which is damage that will take hundreds of years to grow back and be repaired, if ever. So I think for me, eco-horror is about that deep sense of grief and pain of loving a place that is so deeply hurting, and also connected to climate chaos as well.
Kat spent time in various Minnesota wetlands in order to make this project. Photo courtesy to Kat Parent.
Shasa: I want to follow up on you noting yourself as a historian. Can you speak to identifying in that way and to your work as a historian? And is the work you did as a historian directly connected to environmental matters?
Kat: Yes, it's kind of directly and indirectly connected to this project. For seven years I studied the history of colonialism, racism and religion at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, and I wrote a dissertation about Lutherans and racism in Minnesota. And it started because I was in this seminary history program, and I was working for a church that was doing a lot of racial justice work, and I thought like, "okay, part of my work as a white, nerdy academic should be to go learn what I can and what I don't know about the history of this place and about specifically how my Christian ancestors participated in violence and continued to do so," and then there were like, two books that related to it. And there was no book about the history of Lutherans and racism in Minnesota. So I was like, "dang, well, maybe I can at least read books about parts of that and then connect the dots." So that's what my dissertation was about. And it all does connect deeply to land, because the story goes back to European settlers' violent theft of land from Native people. And the exploitation of Black and brown labor through very racist capitalism in this place. And for that project, I had to dig through a lot of really, kind of horrifyingly not-horrified accounts of people doing these things, if that makes sense. People just being like, "yep, this is what we're doing, this is how God has blessed us with this stolen land!" And so I finished that dissertation and I graduated and I was really burnt out and really sad, because a lot of my experience in academia was not having space to actually feel the weight of what I was reading about. I was finding it in protest spaces and community processing spaces, led by a lot of amazing BIPOC people who were naming community grief and historical trauma. But just generally, I don't think writing a dissertation is a good way to process historical trauma and violence. So when I got out of that I started writing songs about it. And that's been super healing. They're not really directly telling the story the same way ... I got to do a lot of things I couldn't do in my dissertation. I got to really pay attention to landscapes and plants and water and feelings and things that white dominated academia doesn't really want you to talk about 'cause it's not considered evidence or professional. But I think it's incredibly important to stories about places and histories.
Shasa: That's really important work. This gives really interesting context for your songwriting. I'm hearing that it's significant to you to honor horrifying realities and not deny that they are horrifying.
Kat: Yeah, very, I think it's really important. But I also think that there are a lot of different tools to process horror, and that's been something I've been working on. Growing up I did a lot of church music, and I was a choir singer for many, many years. And in the church spaces I was in, there was a big sense of "God is the light, and you just need to turn away from all the darkness and God will protect you from anything that's bad." And of course, it can be much more complex than that, but when I was trying to come to terms with horrifying things that are as big as a continent, literally, and as deep as history, I felt like those tools were not strong enough to deal with that. And so folktales and movies and music that really deeply grapple with pain and horror just really spoke to me. So before in my life, a lot of the music I made was very focused on being beautiful and pretty, and I still carry that with me, but now I feel like there's more work for it to do.
The cover from a 2019 hardcover edition of Volume 1 of “Swamp Thing” by Alan Moore created in 1983. Photo courtesy to Amazon.com.
Shasa: Can you speak more about the title of your project Swampling?
Kat: Yeah, for sure. So one of the things that I got really into while I was finishing my PhD was this horror comic book series from the 80s that my partner introduced me to called "Swamp Thing." He is a DC superhero, but also it's just a story that's full of deeply existential questions about what it means to be a person. And the main character is a researcher who gets murdered — sometimes for finding out too much, digging too deep into the history of the corporation who hired him. And instead of dying, his consciousness is absorbed by the swamp and he becomes a sentient plant being who's psychically connected to all plants on earth. So he fights monsters, he has to defeat vampire mermaids and stuff. But the 80s comic written by Alan Moore is also this gorgeously psychedelic exploration of existential questions about what it means to be human and what it means to be deeply connected to the more-than-human world. And a lot of questions about environmental poisoning and nuclear waste, and climate change, all of which still feel super relevant. And it's like a really queer story in a lot of ways.
So I started riffing on that as I was writing songs and really enjoying the idea of dying and being reborn as someone who's been awakened to the beauty of the water and the plants and the whole more-than-human world around you, 'cause I feel that. And also really thinking about how trying to dismantle oppressive systems in myself and also outside, it is a process of dying. And it is scary and hard, and it means letting go of things that I was taught were really important. But it also can be this glorious awakening and connecting, and then also might mean being seen as monstrous by people who are still very [much] in those mindsets. So coming out as queer and becoming more accepting of my own neurodivergence sometimes means that people look at me and they're like, "wow, you're weird,” or “you're an inhuman abomination," especially when it comes to queerness and genderqueerness. But I don't think that, I think I'm beautiful. And I also think shadows are beautiful, night is beautiful. Decay and decomposition are agents of transformation. And there's also all this playfulness that can come with facing death and change that is really lovely. That's also, I feel like, a gift that getting more in touch with horror has given me.
Also, I used to be a straight acoustic folk musician and choral singer, and while going through all these transformations and realizing like, "okay, well, I'm not gonna be who some people want me to be, so I can actually figure out who I'm gonna be, and I can be as weird as I want in ways that are healthy." So I've been playing with a loop station, doing a lot of harmonies with myself. I've started playing electric guitar and doing some of that folk stuff with different effects and also layering rhythms. My partner is the hip-hop artist, the producer, and so we've been jamming for this project. He has a sampler and is making all these different, interesting live drum sounds and beat boxing, and then we've also been sampling sounds from local wetlands of bugs and frogs and tree noises. Just having permission to make it really weird, potentially sometimes creepy, but in a beautiful and life giving way.
Kat and their partner and collaborator SEE MORE PERSPECTIVE. Photo courtesy to Kat Parent.
Shasa: Wonderful. When I was preparing for this interview, and now hearing you explain the “Swamp Thing” comic, I thought to myself "I wanna ask them about panpsychism." Panpsychism describes the belief that there is consciousness in all things.
Kat: That's totally something I think about, even though I don't necessarily have words for it. But I can say it's really important to me as I'm thinking about what from my faith tradition I want to honor and practice, and what I want to unlearn and let go of. One of the things I wanna unlearn is … I feel like white imperial Christianity in the US has this sense that God is above humans and humans are above everything else. And being a human is more valuable than being water or a tree, and certain humans are more valuable than others in that system. And that has enabled and fueled a lot of violence against humans and ecosystems. So trying to learn that I am important, but also so are trees and also so is water and also so are mussels and microbes and other people, and it's not in any hierarchy. Everything's important, and that's part of the Swampling idea, that I'm this little piece of a big ecosystem.
So Swamp Thing's, a superhero, he's kind of like this guy who can come and be very powerful and save people, and I don't see myself like that. I see myself as one beetle in a big nest of beetles thats decomposing a log. Or one little sprout in the sphagnum moss that's making a peat bog over hundreds of years. And that also really connects with me knowing my own limitations, and learning about disability justice and seeing that there's a lot of ways to be a person. I just think people and plants and everything is inherently valuable because we are. You don't have to be somebody special or have these particular abilities in order to be valued. You should just be valued as a human.
Photo courtesy to Kat Parent.
Shasa: What do you want your audience members to take away from your project when they get to see at The Cedar?
Kat: I think I would love for them to feel nourished. For me, when I visit a bog and the sun is going down, and the shadows are deepening, and there's the sound of slowly running water, and you can smell the Tamarack trees and the spruces, and you're looking at their needles as their turning and glowing against the black bark of the trees and just noticing all this beauty. I would love to create an experience where people feel unexpected beauty and that maybe opens up some sadness in a way that is a little bit healing. Or let things go a little bit. And also, I would love for them to have fun! 'Cause the beats make me wanna dance. And I think that there can be something really powerful about music that makes you sad, but also wanna dance.
Catch Kat Parent’s performance of The Edge premiering live at The Cedar on Saturday, February 19th as part of the Eleventh Annual Cedar Commissions. Buy tickets here.