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Vetor Interviews: Bijoux Cone

Bijoux Cone is surviving through her music: She has two records out and is in the middle of a tour through Brazil, bringing her queer joy and punk revolution with her


Text and interview by Pedro Paulo Furlan

Photography by Ana Vohs


São Paulo, 5PM / Portland, 1PM. Bijoux Cone was in Brazil in January for bottom surgery, and, during that time, she got to watch Star Amerasu perform. When we sit down for our interview, our mutual admiration of her bleeds through and we start by fangirling for a couple minutes - in which, one of Cone's art's pillars is clear: the strength she gets from watching queer people, or, more specifically, another trans woman do her thing.


“It gives me the joy and inspiration that I need to keep centered on my shit”, she explains, telling me that she went to watch Star's show while in the recovery process, that's how important it was to her.


Visual artist, keyboardist for the band Gossip, bassist and singer in the duo The Mommys, singer, songwriter, and a whole lot more, Bijoux Cone is a Portland-based trans musician, whose sound roots itself in its own distortion. With two solo records out, "Magnetism" and “Love Is Trash", she has used music to ride the waves of her own emotions, but refusing to settle into one specific sound.


While in "Magnetism", Bijoux dives head first into a more synth-focused rock sound, with emotional lyrics and distortion effects on her voice, "Love Is Trash” brings out a different side of her, creating a record that's almost band-led, singing about new topics, specially as she moved forward with her transition.


“I have so much vocal dysphoria that I spent time playing 'Love Is Trash’ faster through a tape recorder just for it to be higher, but then I just sounded like a chipmunk [...] So, I pinched it down, because that was more empowering to me, then it became something other than myself, other than my concept of what's a voice, now it sounds strange".


And it becomes clear during our conversation that the "strange” is one of the places where the Bijoux Cone project lives. Setting out to create music that's the most honest and genuine, the artist develops her own universe, where she's the singer, songwriter and producer of what she needs to transmit.


Photography by Ana Vohs


“MOSTLY BASED ON THE JOY OF IT”


Growing up between houses, Bijoux tells me that she spent most of her childhood living with her very religious grandparents. And, while that may not be ideal for a queer kid, the church was where she first discovered her love of music. Her grandma was a piano player for the church they went to, and quickly Bijoux followed in her steps.


“For kids there's like only three things they love, and, for me, I literally just loved playing the piano" - she describes this moment of her childhood as one of learning and discovering her first love, but she also says that she never became "formally trained”.


Deciding to go to school for visual arts, Bijoux Cone never really gave up on her love of music, instead just connected her two passions. I would buy old tape machines, do installations and glue tapes to the ceiling. It was all choir music, I would hang like 50 tape players in the room and sing into each one and you'd hear it from each side”, she tells me, really laying down the foundation of her real soulmate: self-expression.


In her albums, Bijoux sets out to tell the story of what she's going through at the time of recording, really centering her music in this place of being a narrative tool for her own experiences. In that, she tells me that “at some point, I realized that things don't have to be good”, valuing more the process of creation and the catharsis it provides her.


“For me, the process of making and hearing it is more exciting than being like I finished the song. I just love the process of making things so much and my relationship with music is mostly based on the joy of it”.


Saying that “my experience with production was all experimentation", Bijoux and I start to talk about an important part of her music: the synthesizer. At first, I asked her about it. The instrument can be heard in most of her tracks and its non-organic sounds quickly become the anchor that connect the two Bijoux Cone records we have so far.


"Synth playing is such a fetish", she says, “but I did not want it to sound like old 80s records, I was more interested in what textural sounds I could make".


The synth's history has always been entangled with the trans community. From the pioneer likes of Wendy Carlos, a trans woman musician that is widely credited as one of the first to use synths as an instrument, the synth, and “synthetic” music, has connected a multitude of trans people - and Bijoux is one of those, citing the industrial music pioneer Genesis P-Orridge as one of her main influences.


“Genesis is very sensitive, very aggressive, it's like, this is how it feels to be endangered”, Bijoux Cone explains, “I saw her perform a poetry reading once and it really changed me, really early in my transition, like, I knew forever, but, my fight with courage took a minute to get there".


“THERE'S SO MANY WAYS TO TELL OUR STORIES”


Photography by Ana Vohs


With two records out so far, Bijoux is deep into creating her third one, telling me that this one “is gonna be much more intense", but “the music is much more druggy club, dark, but also very 90s dance", taking a turn from her more band-based first albums.


The new record also plans to focus on the more confrontational experiences she's had while travelling and being a visible trans woman, and, also on her sex work experiences. “It took a lot of different pools of money for me to pay for my last surgery and I did a lot of sex work for it, so I'm writing songs about that too", she says, adding that this album plans to be “more of an open dialogue than a diary".


Before, in "Magnetism" and "Love Is Trash", Bijoux really saw her music as a diary of sorts. In her first record, the artist wrote songs to deal with a divorce that she went through, but also to deal with her newly diagnosis as intersex, after having been diagnosed as bipolar many times. The music moves through that, with her writing to try to unpack the fact that a lot of her psychological hardship came from her hormones "not being in a harmonious state", which all changed after starting hormone replacement therapy.


In "Love Is Trash” though, her sources of inspiration were a lot more diverse. Already existing as a trans woman, the record was born out of grief, “a lot of it was saying goodbye to people”. Telling me about being exiled from her family, and not being welcome at her parents' funerals, Bijoux tells a story that is well known to a lot of queer people.


Also that album deals with erasure and her experiences with men while she transitioned. “Being with DL men and always being a secret, never the girlfriend, that is stamped into the blueprint of the album", she says, explaining a bit of what's behind the title.


“A lot of 'Magnetism’ came from new discoveries and feeling chaotic inside but the world treating me, before transitioning, okay. While all that was happening though, I was thinking of how the world is gonna treat me if I transition and feel good inside, but, when I actually did, I couldn't give a fuck. Those records tell my relationship with that process".


Valuing her position as a trans songwriter, Bijoux tells me that her music has always been the way she's connected to other members of the queer community, which have now become her real family. Equipped with her music knowledge and what she wants to say, Cone explains that her music is her full-on expression.


“Emotional catharsis is one of my favourite things about art, and I feel more articulate working through music than if I have to talk through how I feel, like, I can fucking show you how I feel".


Photography by Ana Vohs


“IT'S NOT ONLY ABOUT MAKING SOMETHING, IT'S ABOUT SURVIVAL”


In 2023, Bijoux got the opportunity to audition to play the keys for Gossip. Even though she doubted she was gonna get in, she was selected to be in the live band for them - and now, she has travelled the world on tours with them playing big festivals, like C6 in Brazil or Glastonbury in the UK.


About those experiences, besides her own personal bucket list, Bijoux Cone tells me that they tend to mean a lot to her because “you can feel people's queer pride exploding, these queens on the front just screaming”. Talking about her love of performing, the artist connects that to her own pride and her own sense of community.


“This concept of the pride and the sharing and the catharsis in music, it's so important. Big, small, on the TV, on the radio, you can tell, you can hear it. It's really beautiful".


For Bijoux, performing is connecting to a crowd and connecting to everyone that's a part of it. Saying that it doesn't matter if it's a huge festival, or “12 kids in a makeshift warehouse”, her live experiences have always been about looking for connection.


“I know how important it is to do those things and to feel that people get it. It's not about only making something, it's about survival and shared trauma, and it's also just a celebration”, she explains when I ask her about how it feels to create a community around her music, telling me that those are the people she looks for at every stop in her tours.


In an age where queer rights, and specially trans rights, seem to always be on the cutting board, Bijoux highlights the importance of developing connection and community. 


Talking about her plans for the future, she tells me one of her ideas: bedazzled tasers with a download code to her new single, “because it's scary out there”. She'll soon be touring the south of the United States, a region known for it's conservative ideals, and she truly wants to be a beacon of hope, of joy, of revolution, in the hearts of the queer people there.


“This country has taken a hard turn and it's crazy - so I think these moments of joy just sustain our desire to carry, our desire to want to keep moving towards our goals, our desire for self care".


Bijoux Cone is doing a tour through Brazil right now, you can check out her dates below!


30/5: Jundiaí, SP - SESC JUNDIAÍ

31/5: Santa Cecilia, SP - Boto Eléctrico

5/6: Uberaba, MG - Lab 96

6/6: Goiânia, GO - Shiva Alt Bar

7/6: Brasília, DF - Infinu

12/6: Casa Rockambole - São Paulo (com Catto)

13/6: Sorocaba, SP - Asteroid Bar 

14/6: Porto Alegre, RS - Casa Trama


 
 
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