Buffalo musician Chrysalisamidst — also known simply as ‘K’ — has been working for five years now on ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights,’ a weighty project that focuses on her journey as a trans black woman, particularly the period during which she left her father and his evangelical household after he refused to accept her transition.
A musical and image-laced piece of art, ‘…Garden’ includes more than 30 songs, some of which are now available on Bandcamp.
“I grew up in a time where albums were longer, there were more songs, there was intention behind it, and I kind of wanted to bring that back,” she said. “When I was conceptualizing ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’ it was an idea of there would be the music, but there would be also ‘a book of hours.’”
That book traces back to a sort of personal prayer book for the laity, often with artwork depicting the life of Jesus Christ and other saintly images. She described them as illustrated pamphlets interspersed with scriptures and art — a vessel to show her own poetry and artwork that could be read and viewed while listening to her music.
K grew up performing a cappella in the choir at school and church and listened to R&B and jazz at her grandmother’s house. Later, as a teenager, she started listening to electronic music.
“Once I got into my late teens, I would dive, here and there, into the processes of EDM and how it was made. Some house music, some techno stuff. Then, as I got older — when the dub step craze came up and a lot of that music — that kind of inspired me to infuse that with some other things I had dealt with before: the a cappella music, a lot of acoustic kind of things,” she said. “Over the past decade... I was very much aware that, ‘OK, I’m making the music I want to make, but also it’s not necessarily how I would want it to be, I guess in a commercial context.’ But also, I don’t know if I want it to be that.”
K’s mother died when she was young, and she knew since childhood she was not expressing her true gender identity. When she found the courage and will to come out and transition, she was not supported by her family. Her father, from whom she has had a long estrangement, is highly religious and his church excommunicated her entirely. Yet while his rejection left them estranged, the feelings that surround the relationship remain complicated. One of the items K sent to 1120 Press during the reporting of this story was an article that featured her father written by a Christian publication regarding the May 2022 racially motivated massacre at Tops on Jefferson Avenue. K’s father worked at the supermarket and led people from the store through a backdoor to safety.
“I am very much proud of my dad. I understood that, apart from talking to the smaller Christian newspaper, he doesn’t really see himself (as a heroic person.) I felt it was necessary to acknowledge him as such. I was already chronicling the experience of transitioning with a parent like that. I am not one of the people who had a nice coming out process, so that really colors that,” she said, referring to her father’s actions during the Tops massacre and how they so sharply contrast his refusal to accept his own child’s transition.
Her family’s past, in fact — as well the untaught Black history throughout the City of Buffalo — plays a notable part in K’s music, including her paternal cousin, Kevin Blackford, who was the leader of a Black Panther chapter in 1968 in Buffalo. Previously unbeknownst to her, that piece of family history was only recently revealed during a family funeral, K said. Such moments of revelation, she said, have inspired her to incorporate that history into ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights.’” (Which can also be found HERE on Soundcloud)
A counselor, advocate and outreach worker to those in Buffalo’s LGBTQ+ community, K knows, too, that no Black history would be complete without also acknowledging the marginalized community living within the Black community itself.
“There’s not very much visibility in terms of integrating that idea of Black history with the fact that Black LGBTQ+ people are part of Black history and the Black history in Buffalo,” she said. “In a lot of cases we are sidelined, marginalized, and erased from the conversation completely.”
That, K said, must change. And one way to effect that change, she said, is by taking that history and “infusing it in my music.”
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