“[A single which] draws on Moore’s interest in knitting to weave a metaphor for the personal transformations which so often accompany grief. Namely the technique of unravelling (or ‘frogging’) a knit in order to rework the stitches, the song describing a person not only undone by loss but slowly fashioned into something new.” So we wrote of ‘Lessons in Textiles’, the lead track from koleżanka‘s forthcoming album Zone 2, back in June.
The song, the first new music from Kristina Moore’s project since 2023 full-length Alone with the Sound the Mind Makes, was a fitting first taste of an album written in the aftermath of injury, Moore penning the record on a borrowed Casio Privia weighted keyboard after surgery on a severed tendon in her middle finger left her unable to play guitar. The period was a kind of liminal space between trauma and health, a time in which everything is slightly strange and the future remains uncertain. “‘Zone 2’ is an anatomical term used to describe the area between the distal palmar crease to the middle of the finger in which a flexor tendon injury can occur,” she explains. “Because of the increased risk of complications and generally unpredictable post-op outcome, it is also referred to as ‘No Man’s Land’.”
With the album set for release this September, koleżanka has returned with new single ‘Levers and Pulleys’. Described by the artist on social media as the record’s “flagship track,” the song is rather more threadbare than its predecessor, stripped back to the harsh and tender truths as demanded by the limitations at its point of origin. “The core of the song was written within the first week of my injury,” the post continues. “I wrote and performed the treble and bass cleft piano at the end with just my right hand on the original demo. It was grueling to learn with both later on, and felt like it became an essential full circle part of my recovery.” The result, like ‘Lessons in Textiles’ before it, plays like recovery unfolding in real time. A process not necessarily as joyous nor neatly linear as we might hope, rather something won hour by hour, day by day as the cells replicate and repair themselves, and the body relearns the world according to its new shape.
learning anatomy
levers and pulleys
and articulations between ends and beginnings
beautiful machinery
broken hand a hand is fixing
trim the threads against your seams
a new line in your topography
back to the drawing board again
I thought I’d written it all down
its all rewritten soon