Melissa Guion is a musician, graphic designer, radio DJ, and multidisciplinary artist from New Orleans, LA. She makes music under the moniker MJ Guider, performing nationally and internationally, and releasing music on Kranky, Constellation Tatsu, and most recently modemain - an imprint she launched to serve as a conduit for future collaboration and collective contribution as well as her own music releases through multimedia editions. She founded the experimental radio program Night Gallery on WTUL and produces visual work across a variety of mediums.

Even though I’m not entirely between projects and do have some in progress that I’ll talk about soon, a few big ones have just come to a proper close and that makes it feel like I’m in an in-between place. To take advantage of that feeling, in the spirit of renewal (or nostalgia?), I’ve been revisiting some old practices - ones I’ve done since I was young and feel like a re-centering.

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I did some sewing.

My abuela worked as a seamstress when she came to the US with my mom and abuelo, sewing things like mail carrier bags and uniforms in a factory. She taught me to sew when I was little on her home machine, a Singer Fashion Mate 362, and we’d make miniature clothes for my barbie doll. I’m not the most skilled sewist, much as I’d like to be, so there’s always something to learn when I’m working on a sewing project. This latest one involved me bootlegging an expensive French terry tank top. My machine (my abuela’s old machine) is extremely basic. Two stitches - straight and zig-zag. This limitation prompts finding workarounds and improvising to get results similar to what you could get from a more modern machine with more bells and whistles, but I love that. Something I’ve always sought out in making work of any kind is the challenge of limitation. Things won’t come as easily and won’t come out exactly “right,” but usually the results are more interesting and the process more satisfying.

I played some piano.

Banging out a whole bunch of noisy nonsense on the piano is a favorite pastime of mine. I took 9 years of lessons to learn to play “properly,” but my first love is sitting down and making incomprehensible cacophony during which something sounding like a song will surface periodically. The practice of writing music like this - just kind of riffing and waiting for those moments to surface - is extremely cathartic and feels more natural to me than “composing” music in a more formal way. Doing this has long informed my music-making practice. Songs become fully carved out during the production process, but are written and recorded mostly simultaneously, so most of the components come out of riffing over top of an idea again and again. Most moves are made very carefully and considered endlessly when it comes to my music life, but the foundational blocks of the music itself are rooted in improvisation. Sitting at my (electric) piano, headphones on, just letting my fingers wander felt really good.

I sketched some drawings.

I outlined a few frames, took out three pens, put on some music, and gave myself the task of filling space without thinking about it too hard. The results look like some kind of absurdist chaos I might have done in middle school but it was fun to do and got me thinking about new projects / gave me some ideas for ones already in motion. Drawing has always been a good companion and a practice that has played a role in a lot of my work - if not directly, in how it’s influenced my thinking about form, layout, storytelling…the list goes on.

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This was all time well spent.