Process Of Elimination ꩜

Thoughts now my second album is out in the world & embracing slowness amidst emergency

First, a little note from me

I began my newsletter a couple of months back via Squarespace. I did not realise that after sending out three emails, I would be asked to upgrade to a paid plan to continue, so I have now migrated this newsletter to Substack. This change should not affect you as a subscriber, but I wanted to communicate incase it affects your choice to continue receiving these emails!

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I am writing this email from what many call Santa Fe, but is known as Oga Po’geh (White Shell Water Place) by the Tewa people. I have been here with my partner Orion for two weeks, on a creative residency at The Parador. We have been exploring together, through photography and written word, the search for belonging; encapsulated both by our experience as a queer couple seeking representation of queerness outside of urban spaces, but also when family is dispersed on either side of the ocean - where that ‘other side’ has a different kind of light that evokes memories that are conjured like a long-forgotten dream only when returning to distant terrains far from a rainy ‘home’ - where the skies are less visible, and nature is somewhat more ‘tamed’.

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Orion and I were also here this time last year to visit friends and family. With an early 00s handicam in our pocket, lent by our friend Anna, we filmed part of the footage that was included in my new music video Wildest Imagination, which was serendipitously released into the world last week. The video also includes footage from my back garden, my thirtieth birthday in Cornwall, and a glorious weekend at Camp Trans. This was the final single to be unveiled from my new album, Process of Elimination, before it was released into the world on Friday.

Music-making for me is a practice that I always wish to approach without urgency. It is rare for me to focus on a project in any other medium over a span of years — and with such slowness, sometimes what you sow into its earliest iteration unfurls new meanings further down the line. Having the privilege to witness how something you began creating a while ago is still, if not more, relevant, can be a beautiful bi-product in not moving too fast.

The music on Process of Elimination considers what slowness has to teach us, and it makes sense that it has come out in this very nonlinear, unhurried way. It journeys the listener from a more mechanised, layered sound world, that gradually deconstructs itself off the grid to somewhere more organic and free flowing; much like my own journey of reimagining my sense of time to sync in relationship to the earth — beyond capitalist ideas of what my body should be.

Alt text: Cover artwork for El Hardwick’s album ‘Process of Elimination’. An abstract square image in earthy bronze and sepia tones resembles natural textures of leaves, roots and mycorrhizae, with italic cursive text in white on the left side reading ‘Process of Elimination’.

The first seed of this record was planted in 2019, as I was in the depths of starting to live with chronic illness. Since then, we have witnessed (and are still witnessing) mass-disabling events in the form of a global pandemic and multiple livestreamed genocides. Whilst I have many more questions than I do answers, I wonder how we can meet the urgent necessity of mutual aid and solidarity that is required amidst these crises, whilst also integrating the knowledge that such crises are not new, and thus not quick to dismantle. Putting pressure upon the systems that created such atrocities is a lifelong commitment. It is slow work. I try my hardest not to become fatigued by the destruction of precious life by broken systems — whilst also recognising that it was the urgent pace of this same system that led me to live with chronic fatigue in the first place.

Much like my sickness, there is no concrete treatment for recovering from the destruction of capitalism, colonialism and extraction. But I sense that connecting to the beauty of our earth and the preciousness of life is a good place to start.

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