Erica Quinn Studio

Not Your Ordinary None is a project established by Chunyuan Di and Nicole Gargiulo in 2022, both ensemble members of Open Music. Erica Quinn joined as a collaborator in 2023, adding long-form prose poem collage to NYON’s feminist soundscapes.

NYON conjure sigh-full swirls with their humming drones, atonal melodies, and percussive landscapes. At once haunting and playful, severe and serene, NYON plumbs the immense depths & ascends the blissful heights of feminine collaboration and expression.

Last summer at Gorinto's Experimental Series at Zeno's, I saw NYON perform one of the most arresting, playful, mournful, sublime, feminist 20 minutes of music I've ever seen . I was starstruck by two stellar humans, artists who would become dear friends.

So, when they invited me to collaborate on their Rhoneymeade Fest set this summer, I was honored and moved. I've spent my career supporting the creative practices of those around me- and in so doing, I often forget to support my own.

I've written for as long as I can remember, and so many of my words seem to slink off the page. I have always asked of them- what shape should you be?

Collaborating with NYON, I realize that they should be tonal, they should listen to the soundscapes of conversation, they should expand and contract and pay attention to body language. They should fill architecture.

Early in this practice Nicole noted that women are always rehearsing; at a recent NYON performance it was said that the music about to be played will map a conversation between its performers that had occurred the night before.

This work feels nothing short of radical.

2020

The house we lived in before I moved to this house was built on the foundation of a house that had been destroyed by floodwater. One rectangle stacked upon another, the ruined walls and floors preserved and molding, just beneath our pacing feet. Our house was perched on a mound, sopping with groundwater, hiding the footprint, the memory of the forgotten swallowed house below. Ours was a floodplain.

Just as slowly as it began, it ended. Pieces unraveled each day, the threads of us no longer able to be gathered, or viewed in one place. Our edges corroded into sand and I began to wonder if it had ever been complete, something able to be held in my hands, turned over, pressed against the light of a window. A piece of polished wood, a hunk of seaglass, a jar of coffee beans: all of it turned back into steam, the great swallow of a barometer’s rise and fall, as if it had never existed at all.

“My marriage was the boat and I knew that if I swam back to it, I would drown” -Deborah Levy, The Cost of Living

These images were taken in spaces of deep personal significance which, through loss and dislocation, are no longer places I can inhabit. I traveled through these landscapes on foot and shot them with expired film, the physical and visual effects of which cannot be anticipated. The artifacts these contemplative walks have yielded are meditations not just on the landscapes they represent, but on the psychological act of remembering, and retracing.