Around the same time I lost control of my body to puberty I began home recording music. The dysphoria and confusion I'd felt from childhood amplified to such an overwhelming degree that I left my body entirely, wearing the largest clothes I could get my hands on and spending as much time as possible in my bedroom recording. The regular life things that everyone around me was doing so casually seemed so alien and wrong when I tried them, so instead I taught myself guitar and circuit bending and recording and obsessively tried to shape these things into something more concrete. Of course this never worked, but it created strange neural pathways in my brain so that music was essentially the only emotional outlet I had. It wasn't healthy ! But I was doing my best.

At 21 I started slowly transitioning in private while I publicly and manically recorded and toured, stuck in a cycle of discovery and self destruction. This is most evident in the arc of how I performed live : first with all of the lights off except my own, then behind a sheet so no-one could look at me, then abruptly grinding to a halt. When you have spent your whole life feeling incredibly uncomfortable it's pretty hard to know what's right for you, but the more I sang the more I realized I wasn't living any sort of life. I was barely human, constantly collapsing. So I finally came out to everyone else and started hormones and then realized I had absolutely no clue what to do about this documented dysphoria I'd been recording for years. I took most of it off the internet, stopped writing songs, and didn't know what to say when anyone talked to me about music.

"Exile Nothing" means I am learning to be proud of that terrified pubescent girl, to embrace that manic early 20's self, to love the version of me that was so uncomfortable she had to hide from everyone. I am understanding my past by listening to the only language I had : my music. This is a small selection of that recorded output, focused on what I wrote from 2015 - 2018 (otherwise known as age 22-25). I hope you enjoy these dissociated pop songs, these longings for a utopic existence in which I could articulate my feelings exactly when I was feeling them, these songs that maybe only make total sense to me. I'm so happy it's all in the past !!!! And excited for whatever music I eventually end up making when I can sit down and record again :)

<3 <3 <3
Ana Woulfe
June 2022