Pre-order of Egg. You get 1 track now (streaming via the free Bandcamp app and also available as a high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more), plus the complete album the moment it’s released.
Purchasable with gift card
releases June 21, 2024
$7USD or more
Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album
A wallet with an eight page booklet with lyrics and etc.
Includes digital pre-order of Egg.
You get 1 track now
(streaming via the free Bandcamp app
and also available as a high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more), plus the
complete album the moment it’s released.
digital album releases June 21, 2024
item ships out on or around June 15, 2024
edition of 50
$10USDor more
T-Shirt/Shirt
100% cotton shirt designed originally for Diskette Press.
All proceeds are split between Trans Lifeline and the Michigan Trans Assistance Project
ships out within 3 days
edition of 16
3 remaining
$20USDor more
T-Shirt/Shirt
Black Comfort Colors shirt with the EGG logo. Bigger sizes coming soon!
Orders fulfilled by At A Glance Agency.
“Being trans is a prayer for something better”- Carta Monir
This album is a prayer.
Egg is the first full-length from Durham, NC artist Riggings, the newest name sad-folk stalwart Alex Riggs has adopted for means of personal expression. It was recorded over three days in the summer of 2022 at Betty’s in Chapel Hill, NC under the watchful, owl-like eyes of Alli Rogers (Dirty Flowers, Alli Blois, engineer, recorder, and all around secret weapon for albums by Sluice, The Tallest Man on Earth, Bon Iver, many many others), with overdubs by some of Riggs’ favorite people (Mya Byrne and Swan Real offering ghostly beauty on “The High and Lonesome Racket”, Libby Rodenbough with string arrangements all over the record and vocals on “Old Bones”, and Landlady’s Adam Schatz on woodwinds moaning and soaring on “Sophie’s Moon”).
Much like the titular egg, it’s been sat on and kept warm until something inside was ready to emerge, arms open and beak wide open, screaming and wailing. What begins with stuttering, glitchy Steve Reich-ian patterns soon morphs into cobweb-encrusted folk, exercises in loping, broken piano jazz, guitar solos that sound like dying animals,
and heartfelt elegies that are also about cat vomit.
Yeah, it’s a lot for 10 songs. No one said rebirth was an easy process, or that it made a whole lot of sense. If it sounds patchwork then think about the goal of patchwork; a collection of disparate ideas stitched together under the common goal of understanding and eventual comfort. Egg is very much a warm blanket with holes in it, scary and uncompromising as it is warm and reassuring. Put on your good headphones.
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TRACK BIO FOR "OLD BONES" BY COLETTE ARRAND
Typically, an elegy serves as a reflection upon a person or an age, a figurehead or event that marks time in felled heroes and bloody struggle, the sort of things humans extrapolate grand meanings from because, in the absence of that meaning, there is nothing. “Old Bones,” the new song by Riggings, is an elegy, but what songwriter Alex Riggs casts her gaze at is not the grandiosity of lives led by others, but of lives that could have been led were it not for the fear and uncertainty of life as a transgender person, an elegy for time that’s not allowed to pass.
“It’s a song about a fear of death compounding with living amongst lawmakers and tastemakers attempting to warp the narrative of being trans in America for their own selfish needs,” Riggs explains. “It’s an angry motherfucker.”
At first accompanied by spare percussion and echoing piano, Riggs stretches her voice in a way words like “raw” and “vulnerable” are ill-equipped to describe, sending it out like a search party into the wilderness. What does she seek? Meaning. Community. Healing. The question central to the song — “Will I make old bones?” — goes unanswered. Later, when Riggs sings “I’m not sure that I can make my own old bones,” the instrumentation fleshes itself out, breaking into a guitar solo that would be triumphant were it not also so deeply wounded, a proud animal screaming its existence in the hope that something just as proud and angry will scream back. Will you?
credits
releases June 21, 2024
All songs written by Alex Riggs
Recorded by Alli Rogers at Betty's, Chapel Hill, NC
Produced by Alli Rogers and Alex Riggs
Mixed by Alli Rogers
Mastered by Alex Thompson at BNB Audio
String Arrangements by Libby Rodenbough
Riggings is Alex Riggs
-with-
Libby Rodenbough- strings on "A New Opening" and "Song for Pregnant Astronaut", backing vocals on "Old Bones"
Mya Byrne and Swan Real- backing vocals on "The High and Lonesome Racket"
Adam Schatz- saxophones and woodwinds on "Sophie's Moon"
When my CD copy arrived in the mail I was actually already listening to the digital version for maybe the 3rd time. The whole thing is just so beautiful and triumphant sounding the entire way through. It has the exact energy I need right now in my life. I'll have to add a favorite track later, its so hard to choose. Thank you Al for the music. janieryan
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