Colin Self, “respite ∞ levity for the nameless ghost in crisis (Expanded)”
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February 11, 2026
Long before Rosalía’s operatic theatrics broke the internet, Colin Self was injecting joy into the artform via an experimental trans-feminist opera project called Elation. Launched in 2011, the series consisted of multiple parts with 2018’s Siblings followed by Orphans in 2019. Self re-emerged five years later with the lemniscate EP, after enduring a particularly challenging period marked by “loss and uncertainty.”
Originally released last February, respite ∞ levity for the nameless ghost in crisis became the follow-up to lemniscate and the third full-length album for the U.S.-born composer, producer, choreographer, and multidisciplinary artist—a record described in the press notes as “a greeting after years of conscious exile.” Now, a newly expanded reissue brings 11 new delights to the table, nearly half of which are collaborative pieces made with “old friends,” including Will Wiesenfeld—aka Baths—and Geo Wyex. These additions comprise the second half of this shapeshifting album, where the voice is the protagonist and an operatic phantom twists and twirls through red-velvet corridors bedazzled with hyper-pop gems, deconstructed club spikes, and twitchy 2-step beats.
“Communicating with my own spirit and sense of self propelled so much of this music into existence!” Self told Rewire festival last year of the album’s achingly beautiful falsetto opening track, “respite for the tulpamancer.” The song references the cultural practice thought to be derived from Tibetan Buddhism, which involves the creation of and communication with multiple tulpas, or spiritual beings that one thinks into existence. While tulpamancy is both deeply complex and deeply personal, the album seemingly harnesses similar feelings of plurality through its communion with gone-but-not-forgotten “trans or queer ghosts,” a guiding force that positions the album as a “sonic shrine.”
The use of Polari—a form of cant or slang that originally developed in the UK within queer subcultures—helps to cement this communion, while threading the needle back to Self’s previous offerings and long-running interest in the political and radical potential of the human voice. On respite, songs are sung in English, Latin, and Polari, and run the gamut from the virtuosic to the uncanny: Quasi-devotional vocals and chandelier-shattering runs merge with digitally altered cyber-human cut-ups and poetic spoken word passages, like the medieval-troubadour-conjuring “gaolbreaker’s dream.” Meanwhile, the monumental ∞ (the mathematical symbol for infinity, or the “lemniscate,” a recurring motif in Self’s work) stirs somber choral singing into a distortion-caked bad trip that toggles between the angelic and the truly nightmarish. There’s also naked beauty and 2026-appropriate yearning via the Baths-assisted candlelit pop ballad “The Thief’s Journal,” plus a buttery piano-soul link-up with Geo Wyex on “alphabet’s chant.”
Many of the LP’s tracks—like the fragile “Nanti Polari,” on which melancholy strings are woven into operatic Polari singing from Polish soprano Iwona Sobotka—project a detached classical splendor or pop coolness that belies their upfront lyrics, speaking to the duality at the heart of the album. “These songs sound gorgeous,” said Self in the LP’s accompanying press statement. “But they’re all about police, eating ass, and sex work, these profane things. I wanted to find a way to breathe life into this act of hiding the explicit in the quotidian-sounding atmosphere of pop music.”
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