“It goes without saying I was in a bad headspace at the time,” sighs Xandria Metcalfe about making Uboa’s third album, The Origin Of My Depression. “I was living in the living room in a dilapidated share-house. Luckily, it wasn’t open plan, just a slightly bigger room, so I had some space for recording equipment and a bit of privacy.”
The Origin Of My Depression, out now via the Flenser, is a dark and atmospheric journey into the depths of the human psyche, awash in distorted noise, haunting vocals, and ethereal soundscapes, creating a sound that is both unsettling and beautiful. Originally conceived of as an EP of improvisations, it kept expanding as she wrote and added. While some of the songs came more easily, “Detransitioning” was the most difficult track to write.
“I always do my best to make the first track of a release stand out and even threw out the entirety of an earlier track sharing the same name before starting the current form of “Detransitioning” from scratch,” she explains. “A lot of the sounds were incidental or based on whatever was around or whatever I could access. I’d often walk the streets with a dictaphone and just mumble thoughts and improvised poetry in them. I also love using non-standard instruments whenever possible, for example the Zippy Zither that appears in “Epilation Joy” and “Misspent Youth.” A friend of mine found it in their house, and it turns out it is a kid’s toy from the 1950s.
While the clearly apparent themes of depression and dysphoria are definitely present on the album, Uboa is quick to point out these are not the only takeaways from the record.
“The themes were just the stuff I was going through at the time. Not all of them are about either gender dysphoria or depression as many seem to assume, but also personal experiences and just words that felt right for reasons I don’t know. The titles were incidental, too. Detransitioning is a word I bumped into online, and the concept was so confrontational I had to make it into a song title. “Misspent Youth” I took from a book. The title of “An Angel of Great and Terrible Light” comes from my poetry, and the lyrics were based on a theological/philosophical discussion with somebody about gender and theodicy, although not of my own experience of religion. My upbringing was mercifully secular,” she laughs.
While many have received this album with open arms, both because of the musical rawness and the thematic vulnerability, Uboa pushes back on the idea of rating or reviewing it like a traditional record.
“I dislike how some people have responded to it in their reviews,” she admits. “Somebody giving your trauma a number is very insensitive. Great, you gave my trauma a ‘5’ or a ‘10.’ Please don’t rate my—or anybody else’s—trauma with a number or a star. Luckily, some reviewers saw this was insensitive and just discussed their subjective experience to it rather than the reductive and capitalist category of good/ok/bad, even if they dislike it. It’s not reviewing, as a whole, that’s an issue. It’s just I think people should think more carefully about how most music is from flesh-and-blood people rather than abstractions on the internet.”
She also says that while she is homebound to Australia for now, she is working on being able to tour soon.
“It’s expensive to tour overseas from Australia, but hopefully I can go around and see the world, or at least the parts of the world where there isn’t a genocide against trans people underway. For now, I am playing a few shows around Naarm (Melbourne) and Australia so I can feel more confident about taking my mostly improvised laptop bullshit overseas. I also just like playing and hanging out with my friends, but hopefully I can see my overseas friends soon too, insofar as it is safe.”
