ROCK DOVE album & folio: Cat Kidd, Jack Beets, Kiva Stimac

UPDATE: An anonymous donor has reached out to me and will match donations, dollar for dollar, up to $10,000!

ROCK DOVE will be a new studio recording from poet Cat Kidd and long-time soundscape collaborator Jack Beets, presented in a limited-edition hand-crafted folio by print artist Kiva Stimac. I'm happy and fortunate to be working with these two artists, they're world class.

I'm reaching out to you directly, friends and fellow artists who know my work, and how particularly important this project is to me. If I were to reapply for funding from the usual government sources, it would be challenging to meet the deadline of the launch next summer.

The funds will be divided between the three artists involved, to cover studio hours and material costs, as well as artist fees. I need to be able to pay collaborators. The project will culminate in a launch and performance of the album, at festival Suoni per il Popolo in June 2025.

As some of you know, I was a pigeon rehabber for a number of years. Though don't keep birds anymore, I’d never turn one away who needs a few months care. But Rock Dove has been at the centre of my creative focus for a while now, it needs to be released from me and into itself.

Jack will compose soundscapes, arrange, and record the album. Kiva will design and create hand-printed folios which open like bird wings. I'll tell of a time there was a murmuration in my mind, and about thirty pigeons living free-range in my apartment.

These events were to coincide with a late diagnosis of bipolar disorder, which surprised me not one bit, but did give pause to consider the fatal wobble in my narrative trajectory. How cyclically it had seemed to steer me off-course, and how this ragged band of rescued rock doves were themselves on a rescue mission.

Happy, Beckett, and Spook - based on pigeons known to me personally - describe the collective memory shared by their species, as they recount their 5000 (at least!) year history with humans, their days as deliverers of billets-doux, symbols of peace and fertility, subjects of laboratory experiments.

They recall their massive sacrifice over two World Wars, and their subsequent fall from grace, their lives as homeless veterans. Rock Dove draws parallels between the fate of feral pigeons, and of those human sectors made disposable once their value has expired, grey populations pushed to the periphery by barest circumstance.

Appearing to the narrator at a particularly bleak epoch in her own mental health history, and through their growing reliance on her time and care, they provide not only sense of purpose, but vital lessons in heart maintenance and in not losing hope.

Here's a couple of examples of the kind of thing I do, if it's new to you - they're oldies but i still like them:

SEA PEACH

HUMAN FISH