Work in Progress
Damiá Modal Music Demos, 2025-
Demos for “Seven Songs of Yearning for a New World, Sung by a Starship,” a new performance work and the first onstage collaboration between ONCE WE WERE ISLANDS and Ruby Louise Rose. This Queer Futurist work combines original music and songs with poetic text to tell the story of a group of Queer refugees who leave Earth. They are carried through space by a starship powered by desire. The starship sings songs that are expressions of the yearning for a new home where Queer people can thrive and live to our full potential. It is our artistic ambition with this work to blend together elements of a sci-fi concept album with theatre to create an event that is tender and intimate yet also inspiring and political. Music and songs will be composed by Ruby Louise Rose to text and lyrics created by ONCE WE WERE ISLANDS. These elements are woven together into a 60-minute event performed live by Aslan, Gylee and Ruby with modulated voice, bass guitar, and electronics.
When Aslan was a teenager, they invented a language called Damiá. Later, they imagined it to be a Queer language for Queer people and a tool to imagine how Queer community and culture can be cared for. Damiá is now a living language with a small community of learners and is a central part of ONCE WE WERE ISLANDS’ artmaking practice, appearing in plays, films, bookworks, an EP of original songs, and exhibitions. Ruby has been a part of the Damiá speech community since 2024 and attends regular Damiá classes with an international group of students. Together as a long-distance collaboration, we have devised the Damiá Modal Music System comprising five pentatonic and two tetratonic scales, each with its own progression of intervals to evoke particular emotions. It is the first step in an attempt to create a new ‘folk’ tradition for Damiá and the Damiá speech community. In 2025, Ruby has been developing various early demos for “Seven Songs of Yearning” using the Damiá Modal Music System.
Transsexual Slowcore Demos, 2025-
Sketches for bass guitar and drum machine.
for Bob, 2024-
