BY JOANNA C. VALENTE

I'm always looking for new tunes. As a poet, I think a lot about music and how it affects our moods, how we hold our bodies, how we breathe, how we use it in conversation, how everything around us is music, even if ambient and atmospheric.

For me, especially, I love writing to ambient music while I'm working on art, because it challenges me and sets a tone without the distraction of lyrics. This is why I love Geo Metro's new album Ravage 2099, released on indie label Tiger Blood Tapes in October 2017. While the tapes are sold out, you can still buy a digital version of the album (which is forever because digital never really dies).

The music sounds kind of like a rain forest dubbed in reverb in an urban landscape, creating a strangely calm yet cybernetic world. The songs work as tone poems in a way, acutely aware of the technological world we live in while also creating a new one.

Some of the songs also have videos, like "Prowler," which work as both visual art pieces and songs that capture the blurred areas in our lives we don't necessarily have words for. You can watch one below:

Another one:

But, of course, you can stream and buy the entire album here:

Joanna C. Valente is a ghost who lives in Brooklyn, New York, and is the author of Sirs & Madams (Aldrich Press, 2014), The Gods Are Dead (Deadly Chaps Press, 2015), Marys of the Sea (The Operating System, 2017), Xenos (Agape Editions, 2016), and Sexting Ghosts (Unknown Press, 2018). They are the editor of A Shadow Map: An Anthology by Survivors of Sexual Assault (CCM, 2017), and received a MFA in writing at Sarah Lawrence College. Joanna is also the founder of Yes, Poetry, a managing editor for Luna Luna Magazine and CCM, as well as an instructor at Brooklyn Poets. Some of their writing has appeared in Brooklyn Magazine, BUST, Them, Prelude, Apogee, Spork, The Feminist Wire, and elsewhere.