On December 8th, Nesey Gallons is celebrating the 11-year anniversary of her album “When I was an Ice Skater” with a limited vinyl pressing on Ghost Mountain Records, available for pre-order beginning November 3rd. After befriending members of the Elephant 6 Collective as a teenager in the late nineties, Anna “Nesey” Gallons joined Neutral Milk Hotel offshoot The Music Tapes in 2001, and later took the reins of Will Cullen Hart’s post-Olivia Tremor Control project Circulatory System to aid in the completion of their first album in 8 years, “Signal Morning,” while finally releasing her own proper solo debut with 2009’s quietly influential “Eyes & Eyes & Eyes Ago” on Cloud Recordings. “When I was an Ice Skater,” originally released in 2012, further explored the hauntological terrain established by “Eyes Ago,” but was mostly overlooked and lost in the shuffle. Featuring contributions from E6 stalwarts Julian Koster (Music Tapes/Orbiting Human Circus and Neutral Milk Hotel) Will Cullen Hart and John Fernandes (Olivia Tremor Control and Circulatory System,) Derek Almstead and Andy Gonzales (of Montreal and Marshmallow Coast,) it was recorded and released between the Gallons/Koster spearheaded Holiday Surprise tour of 2008 and Neutral Milk Hotel’s long-awaited reunion in 2013. While the album is an unmistakable product of that joyful era of E6 revival (near the conclusion of “I Believe in Love” collective co-founder Will Hart is caught happily exclaiming “Elephant Six is coming back!”) its more exuberant moments belie a profound darkness. Nesey refers to “Ice Skater” as “an often challenging album (track four is a 6 and a half minute field recording of miserable traumatized geese on a beach in winter) written from the perspective of someone who has recently departed an earthly existence thinking back over life as their soul drifts into the cosmos,” admitting that she “originally intended [the record] to be a suicide note.” After living through multiple efforts to take her own life, Gallons resolved to live, and eventually came out as trans in 2016. It is through this lens that her album may now be properly understood both for what it truly was in 2012, and what it has become eleven years later: an expression of queer suffering and despair transmuted to an assertion of life and queer survival. TThe limited 2LP run of “when i was an ice skater” by Nesey Gallons, pressed by Gotta Groove Pressing, features gatefold artwork as well as an 8-page lyric and photo book. Listeners can preorder the LP here beginning November 3rd.
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