'There Is No Done': Gavin Rayna Russom On The Dialogue Between Creation And Identity

There are times one can sense deep changes before you can see them. When, in a July interview, the synthesizer player and composer Gavin Russom revealed that she was transitioning from life as a man to one as a woman, Gavin Rayna, she says it did not come as a total shock to the people who knew Gavin Russom well.

"'Oh yeah, that makes sense, totally, psyched,'" is how she voiced their reactions to me, as we sat in the café at Manhattan's Rubin Museum of Art in early October.

It was the first time I'd seen Gavin Rayna since she went public about the transitioning, encouraged by a break in the touring schedule of LCD Soundsystem, in which Gavin has played since 2010 and whose record label home, DFA, she has been associated with almost since its founding.

Since the turn of the century, Gavin has created art-kosmiche soundscapes with one-time partner Delia Gonzales, solo hardware techno tracks as Black Meteoric Star, and more glamorous, conscious disco as part of Crystal Ark. This has been in addition to building synths for DFA, playing live with James Murphy and with various downtown veterans reinterpreting the music of Arthur Russell, occasionally throwing the (great) techno party C//TY CLUB with Lauren Flax, all the while holding down a modestly powerful fine-art practice. Taken together, it all amounts to one the more adventurous art-music careers in 21st century New York, and a body of work that, amidst the monumental changes in her life, Gavin Rayna has been reviewing by reissuing old recordings and posting on her SoundCloud page tracks previously available only on vinyl.

I professed that Gavin Rayna going public about her transitioning did not come as a surprise to me, and that I'd been trying to not only unpack why that might be, but how her lifelong engagement with her gender un-specificity manifested itself in her art — or didn't. What was it in her music, her history and her philosophical outlook that made who she was make sense? And what the experience of coming out and transitioning now — on a world tour with LCD Soundsystem, behind a No. 1 album — could possibly be like? It was a long, spirited conversation, and has been edited for length and clarity.

Piotr Orlov: Talk about how your ongoing exploration of your gender identity influenced you as a creator.

One thing that I can track as a thread through my experience is that, from a very early age, exploring music became