El Hardwick is Embracing Imperfection in their Sophomore Album ‘Process Of Elimination’
Words: Nali Simukulwa
Make it stand out
When creating their sophomore album, Process of Elimination, interdisciplinary artist El Hardwick abandoned orthodoxy in favour of embracing the imperfect and it shows, right down to the album art. “My dad sent me the cover - he told me it was a watercolour piece he’d been working on and I thought it was amazing and so experimental,” El smiles. “Then he told me he was kidding and it was actually a photo of the rotting lino flooring in the shed and that felt like the perfect visual representation of what this album is all about.”
Following a genre-blending, electronic debut which examined how disembodiment becomes the only reprieve from a world ravaged by climate change, for their newest project, Hardwick turns inwards, focusing on the corporeal and examining what it means to truly embrace fluidity. Inspired by the artist’s journey with navigating chronic illness and understanding their transness, Process of Elimination. Offers an ambient soundscape designed to zoom into individual, bodily experience and explore how the relationships we cultivate with our bodies can become tools of resistance in the face of wider, global crises.
Below, El unpacks their journey with gender and illness, becoming rewilded from a capitalist definition of productivity and how turning towards a radical acceptance of imperfect spontaneity has become central to their creative practice.
What thoughts, feelings and events prompted you to create this album following on from your previous work?
When I made my last album, 8, I was really thinking about the climate crisis through the lens of digital justice. I was imagining a sci-fi world where people gave up their bodies to live within cyberspace as a way to escape the devastation of climate change, this was the narrative behind that piece of work. That body of work felt really driven by the theme of disconnection and alienation from the body. But after making that album, I became chronically ill and disabled and I also started to explore my gender and identify more with transness. These experiences taught me so much about what it means to connect with your surroundings and It made me really rethink the way we approach the looming global and social crises we face. So this album feels like a logical sequel to the record before; that was about considering collective issues on a macro scale and this focuses on individual experience and understanding how small actions can ripple out and how that can allow us to create and embody the world we want to live in. I feel like this approach is a less overwhelming way to chart our way towards a better future.
Could you tell me more about what you learned from your journey with navigating gender identity and your journey with illness and seeking diagnoses, do you feel like they are connected? And how have they shaped your creative process?
I suppose illness and discovering my gender identity do feel connected to me because they both happened around the same time. I came out as non-binary around a year before I became chronically ill. I sort of see my gender as a process of elimination; I get closer to understanding what I am by ruling out what I’m not and the very institutionalised process of trying to get a medical diagnosis is similar, especially with ME, my specific condition. Also there are so many parallels between accessing trans affirming healthcare and general care for chronic illness, both are often stigmatised and pathologised as mental health conditions, so in both cases you spend a lot of time proving that your symptoms and experiences are legitimate.
I’ve found that the boundaries between the two experiences are very blurred and that interconnectivity helps me bring a sense of fluidity to my work, especially as an interdisciplinary artist. I started as a photographer and when I found electronic music, I realised that, despite the hyper-formulaic, manual process of creating the music, it’s really this space with no rules and that was very freeing. I also decouple my music from any financial aims and it allows me to keep exploring, move slowly, be messy and keep trying new things without the burden of expectation.
This album feels much more loose and experimental than my last, there are fragments of spoken word that were recorded as voice notes on my phone and it felt important to me for it not to feel overly polished. When my chronic fatigue would be so bad that I couldn't type text messages, voice notes were my only method of connecting to the outside world, so having these elements in the album is important to me. This album is really about embracing these so-called imperfections and understanding that they are meaningful.
Thinking about your influences for this album more broadly, what other pieces of work shaped the album?
Whilst making the album, I was reading Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch, as well as other works by Jenny Odell and Donna J. Haraway, all of it really centred on the experiences of deviant women throughout history, like sex workers and magical healers, and how the threat they posed to patriarchal capitalist systems through their refusal to use their bodies as instructed led to their harsh treatment. I was also thinking about Descartes’ theory of dualism which encourages thinking about the mind and body as separate entities. Thinking about these frameworks made me really want to dig deeper and interrogate the ways we’ve been encouraged to accept disembodiment and understand what success and failure look like under these systems which benefit from our conformity; especially since understanding illness and my transness forced me to have to reconsider my place in a system which measured success by metrics I could no longer fulfil.
How do you think this anti-capitalist understanding of time and activity shows up sonically in the album?
I feel like embracing fluidity and resisting deterministic ways of knowing have led me to make two albums that are very genre-blending. I’m less interested in creating a cohesive piece of work and way more into understanding the journey of the album, and how tracks come together to tell a story. I wanted the start of the album to feel sonically overwhelming, more electronic strong beats, quite intense and abrasive. Before it slowly journeys into this soothing, spacious world where it's more fluid and organic. Towards the end, my friend Laura plays saxophone and another friend Marysia Osu plays the harp and it has this more euphoric, utopian feel. Ambient music played such an important role in my healing when I was really sick I became really interested in listening to binaural beats and these kinds of alternative sound healing approaches and they really helped me, so it feels really important for the album to go on this journey and incorporate this element into the album. The end of the album is really reaching towards a sense of grounded slowness and I hope that when people listen they will feel that journey and be able to get back in touch with their bodies. To me, that would feel super powerful.
