Geo Metro Just Released Its Second Album & It Is Timely AF
By Joanna C. Valente
Just last week, Geo Metro released its second album, SCIVIAS, on Tiger Blood Tapes. The album is an 11-song exploration on spirituality, gender, and language. How did we, as humans, come into conscious being? The songs, through their ambient gaze, meditate on longing and being.
Andrew Salyer, the musician behind Geo Metro, told YP that the first side is a “a telling of the assault of St. Lucy. Roman wanted her due to her beautiful eyes, [but] she plucked them out to spite him, [and] God restored them. The second side tells “the story of Hildegard Von Bingen's receiving of divinely-inspired and development of 'lingua ignota' (or [the] language [and] alphabet she intuited [or] received as being the language of the divine).”
Knowing this makes the listening experience richer, as the narrative provides a thread to the sonic world that is often at once naturalistic, clinical, and man-made. This complements the idea that the relationship between the divine and humanity is at once human-born and made, but also beyond what we could possibly understand or comprehend.
Of course, in a time where gender dynamics and sexuality is politically rife, and women and queer rights are being threatened, the subject matter of the album couldn’t be timelier. The story of St. Lucy, for instance, is a portrayal of men trying to take ownership over women’s bodies - and the consequences that happen as a result, and as a result of a woman trying to protect herself in any way possible, even in a grotesque way.
Watch the music video for “Carbon Cathedral” below:
You can listen below and download/buy a physical copy of the album here:
Joanna C. Valente is a human who lives in Brooklyn, New York. They are the author of Sirs & Madams (Aldrich Press, 2014),The Gods Are Dead (Deadly Chaps Press, 2015), Marys of the Sea (Operating System, 2017), Sexting Ghosts (Unknown Press, 2018), Xenos (Agape Editions, 2016), and the editor of A Shadow Map: Writing by Survivors of Sexual Assault (CCM, 2017). They received their MFA in writing at Sarah Lawrence College. Joanna is the founder of Yes Poetry and the managing editor for Luna Luna Magazine. Some of their writing has appeared in Brooklyn Magazine, Prelude, BUST, Spork Press, and elsewhere. Joanna also leads workshops at Brooklyn Poets. joannavalente.com / Twitter: @joannasaid / IG: joannacvalente
