Listen here: Gentle Mothh - Paper Thin

LIMITED EDITION OF 200

Gentle Mothh is a queer Taiwanese-American performance artist based in the Hudson Valley. Her background as a communications professional, TCM practitioner, and sex worker shapes the form and ethos of her practice. Mothh is also a legislative advocate for sex work decriminalization in New York State. She believes all beings should be free, and makes work as an exercise of freedom for herself and as an action to realize freedom for her community. She founded Amahh Studio, a virtual qigong platform, for this purpose.

"These songs are stills from my life the past five years. Emerging from the pandemic while living and working between Hollywood, Silverlake, Brooklyn, Atlanta, and the Hudson Valley. There’s a sense of transience about these songs for me, because throughout the creation I was pretty much living out of a suitcase, traveling from east to west coast, or in temporary housing situations.

This album marks a chapter of insecurities - housing, financial, emotional, where the medium of music was a through line, a creative outlet for processing my own narrative. I didn’t realize this collection was an album, or even that I’d finished this many songs until I sat down to plan for an album I haven’t written yet.

It’s hard to see what you have sometimes when you are in accelerated motion. Once I slowed down, had stable-enough housing for the first time in years, and tended to my malnourished body, I realized with amazement that I already had what I was striving for - a finished album.

The title track is Paper Thin - a song I wrote about my “paper thin heart” while indulging a feeling of helplessness. I remember writing it in a voice memo pretty much in one go and then figuring out the melody on a guitar I got for free at a garage sale in LA.

At that point in time I felt like if I was an open book, kept an open heart, was honest, and was a ‘cool girl’ with no expectations, I was owed reciprocity. The situationships I kept getting into were giving me some hard lessons to the contrary. Paper Thin is a reference to the innocence, confusion, indignance, of trusting others with my heart and expecting them to know what to do with it, when in fact everyone involved was clueless about what to do with my paper thin heart.

The cover started as a selfie I took in my studio in Kingston. My friend Pea the Feary created the album image with the photo and the album tracks as inspiration. My request was to create a paper doll feeling world. I thrifted some cute animal toys and sent her photos of these friends to include in the portrait. And then I asked my friend ashley molesso to design the layout of the album and risograph print it."

Side A: Cold / Paper Thin / Carried Away / Beyond Reason / Big Idea
Side B: Keep Me Up / Brand New / More Love, Calypso / Over You

Includes unlimited streaming of Paper Thin via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

Gentle Mothh Paper Thin - VINYL ALBUM