By Connor Wroe Southard
What is the antidote to the despair of the contemporary artist? I can already hear the wry responses of my peers: ‘Be born rich or marry rich’ or ‘Become untouchably famous and successful’ or ‘Be a clueless dope.’
I get it. In every creative or intellectual field, AI is as unignorable as an upstairs neighbor pounding on the floor with a sledgehammer while blasting doom metal and letting his toilet overflow. An Amazon AI training facility literally has a dinosaur shredding a book to pieces as its logo. Not exactly a subtle metaphor.
The political situation in these United States and elsewhere is also, as David Roth would say, ‘not what you want,’ with specific impacts on artists such as reduced public funding, censorship (not the kind that gets you on the NYT op-ed circuit), and a deepening of the structural crisis in higher education. And just when it feels like there can’t be any more gigs, publications, venues, galleries, grants to be eliminated, we hear about another round of closures and cuts (most recently it was Catapult). After processing all that, we then get on the Internet and use computers for their true purpose: Making each other feel even worse.
Still, here in the windy meatspace of Laramie, Wyoming, I keep finding new reasons to feel hopeful about the capacity to create and the people I know who are making use of theirs. One reason for my comparative chipperness is quaint and nostalgic: I can go down the street and feel the good vibes in the same hallways where I once took karate classes and played pickup basketball.
I recently made the short walk to the Laramie Plains Civic Center to attend the latest installment of the Wyoming Fringe Festival. The festival happened to be run in part by an old friend, Anne Mason, who is also a statewide independent theater maven. The Civic Center itself is a brick Prewar former school building I’ve spent plenty of time in—even though, not so long ago, it was largely in cobwebby ruin. The upper floors now play host to studios for local artists of many stripes; the independent theater org of which I’m a board member, Relative Theatrics, keeps an office on the first floor. I came to LPCC because another friend of mine was performing a set at Wyoming Fringe: The audiovisual artist Tinderdust.
I first saw Tinderdust (aka Adeline) perform in a crowded room at my favorite local bar, The Great Untamed. I was told to expect the otherworldly. What I encountered was Adeline playing her synth and crooning hauntingly while projecting uncanny visions of animals and deities and landscapes behind her. The effect was indeed a bit slipstream, like re-encountering a dream you’d forgotten you had.
Tinderdust’s songs "exists on a different plane of reality, where digital entities roam through fantastical landscapes," Adeline told Typebar Magazine. "There are creatures and microcosms that exist within each one of my songs, and during my holographic live performances, they transcend from the world of Aves, into our reality, where they appear alongside me as holographic entities when I perform live." Creating the sense that beings from another plane are being conjured by one’s music is an ambitious target to hit. I’d say Tinderdust carries it off, not least because of the warmth and earnestness that characterize not only Tinderdust but, I’ve come to learn, Adeline herself.
I’ve seen other good shows here, but Laramie predictably tends to hew more toward folk, country, rockabilly. Tinderdust is an entirely different sort of project from anything Wyoming-based I’ve encountered. It would take a better music critic than me to situate Tinderdust, but I’d describe it as one part nouveau synthwave, one part old-school synthpop, and one part straightforward New Age. Adeline cites Joy Division, Radiohead, and The Cranberries, among others, as her influences, but Tinderdust is entirely its own ethereal beast. The visuals are key. Tinderdust explains itself most completely when Adeline at her synth is dwarfed by a massive turquoise wolf-spirit, as was the case when she took the stage at Wyoming Fringe.
It’s cool enough, relative to my well-managed expectations, that an audiovisual artist as accomplished and distinctive as Tinderdust is working out of my hometown. What makes Adeline’s arc even more compelling is the unlikely saga that first led her to Laramie. Having grown up in Singapore—which, being a city-state on a tropical island, is about as different from the Wyoming high desert as you can get—Adeline briefly studied in New York City before settling in London. She had a decorated career in the UK music scene, including playing synth for the rock band Junkstar. While very much in the thick of her career in London, Adeline happened to be taking a solo bus trip across the United States and found herself in Laramie on March 18, 2020.
Stepping out of a bus in Wyoming right as the world was shutting down, stranding her in a place she knew nothing about, Adeline describes herself "surrounded by wilderness, and I saw a train passing through the mountains in the distance…. It was a very surreal first encounter with Laramie." Perhaps it was precisely because Adeline is so comfortable operating in the surreal that something unexpected happened: She fell in love with Laramie. She got an "extraordinary talent" (O-1) visa that would allow for longer stays, and she’s been a fixture of the Laramie music scene ever since she was fatefully marooned here. Wyoming’s once-disorienting landscapes and ecosystems have become important to her artistic practice, as evidenced in Tinderdust’s nature references. Adeline says she’s lived in two places where the landscape itself often made her feel like she was in a "waking dream": The English coast near Margate, and here in Wyoming.
As to the people inhabiting those landscapes, Adeline echoes some of my own takes on Laramie: "I love the community spirit here, and how most people genuinely care for their neighbours, and those around them. Friends feel like family here. Laramie is a very unique and precious place."
She’s not alone in her fondness for this town. Sean Coyle serves as both artistic director and executive director for Relative Theatrics, the independent theatre organization of which I’m on the board, and when speaking with Typebar Magazine he echoed Adeline about Laramie being fertile ground for his work: "Here I have space to try and fail as much as I need." A sense of forgiving possibility I’ve also felt.
Anne Mason, who founded Relative Theatrics, notes the particular sense here of simply showing up and making time. "Our community members show up for each other, even when we don’t quite know what we’re in for," she told Typebar. This sentiment hit home for me, as someone who left New York City in part because, despite the city’s unassailable cultural standing, it started to feel like no one there made time for each other.
The risk I face in foregrounding this kind of complimentary sentiment about my hometown is to romanticize it to the point of indefensible sentimentality. Despite the ‘Laradise’ moniker, this is not a hidden utopia. Not every artist can literally get off a bus, as Adeline did, and thrive here. Moving here won’t solve all your problems; it might even bring you some new ones. The list of downsides of living in a small town in a right-wing state is long and predictable. But I nonetheless happen to agree with Adeline and many others: Laramie is where I feel best making art.
Why exactly does Laramie work so well as an artistic homebase for Tinderdust, and for me, and for so many others I know? I don’t believe there’s a tangible, structural answer that would make sociologists happy, other than this town demanding a modicum less financial overhead than more oversubscribed cultural centers. If you wanted to spin a story about geographic archetypes and commonplaces about small towns, you could call Laramie artists hard-bitten, gritty, resilient.
But what I feel here in my hometown doesn’t strike me as a cowboy thing, an aw-shucks small-town thing, nor even a high desert thing. I would guess none of what I’m valorizing in this essay is unique to Laramie at all. I suspect it’s as simple as this: You can’t choose much, but you can choose to do your work. You can choose to spend less time online making yourself and others miserable. You can choose to confront the sometimes-inconvenient realness of whichever place you happen to be. You can do all of these things even if you’ve just stepped off a bus in a strange place, been blasted in the face with a cold wind, and found nothing around you except tumbleweeds, sagebrush, and the sense that, far off in the distance, a wolf might be howling.
Connor Wroe Southard is a writer living in Laramie, Wyoming. He writes the newsletter A Lonely Impulse of Delight.