SELF HELL by neither

*** If you pay a dollar or more, you can download both this LP and the 18-track EP "SELF HELL 2: b-sides from the mental hospital" ***

I consider myself to be almost psychically tuned to pianos, which are really just nets for catching vibrations, so I was surprised to find that after a whole week on a unit at a mental hospital I hadn't stumbled across the upright piano near north wing window. I normally feel an almost magnetic pull to pianos. When the piano finally revealed itself to me, I set out to play it every day.

I spent 21 days at McLean Hospital in Belmont, MA this fall. I was in a different unit than last time and my stay was considerably rockier. I made over 150 recordings of improvised songs while I was there. Everything had to be very secret; I could have gotten my phone taken away if I was caught using the voice recorder. Despite the success I'd found with the last neither record, I wasn't planning on publishing these songs. That wasn't part of the plan. I made these recordings as a kind of musical journal, a way of archiving the feelings I was having over hospitalization and sexual assault.

I've spent the month or so since I've gotten off the unit sifting through these recordings, editing them and interpreting them. It can be overpowering; when I spend more than an hour or so with them I feel like I'm being sucked back into the hospital headspace. McLean feels very real to me, but very separate from my normal life. These songs are a kind of time capsule, and I've decided to release them as a way of distancing myself from that space.

Infinite thanks to my friends, to my community, and to Rose and the rest of the system.

Content Warning: suicide, self-harm, hospitals, sexual assault, abuse, CSA, dissociation, internalized fatphobia/ableism, mental illness.

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