mirrored fatality (mf): mirrored fatality remembers wholeness from dismembered flesh and mutates as cross pollinating perennial terratoids. mirrored fatality intertwines glitch rage webs with corroded resonance and regenerates forsaken spores across their current biome: ECOCIDE 3URTH.

mirrored fatality survives the apocalypse

interviewed by jo davis-mcelligatt

Who - and/or what - is mirrored fatality? Introduce yourselves!

mirrored fatality is an underground interdependent Kapampangan and South Asian xenotrans experimental and healing noise punk farmer duo sharing their rituals + altars. mirrored fatality creates their “cocoon webs” combining performance art, music, spoken word, film, photography, painting, drawing, upcycled garments, anti-imperialist education, and healing justice practice spaces to mobilize a warrior community responding to transnational calls-to-action for mutual aid, land sovereignty, and prison abolition.

They have toured across Turtle Island (United States of America), United Kingdom, Mexico, Thailand, and Spain (Editor’s Note: check out mirrored fatality’s timeline at tinyurl.com/mftimeline). As farmer artists, mirrored fatality has completed several residencies. mirrored fatality internationally performs their sonic metamorphosis container, COCOON WEBS: a ferocious affirmation of chaos to harness ancestral power, primal spirit, collective fury, and interconnectedness to our multiverse in a world numbing us with toxic forces. VALE, BIOME(TRICS), BLOOM, UTOPIA, INVALIDATION, REINCARNAGE, PRIMALDIAL MAGMA, and EARTHBODY(S) are restorative anthems to sustain us through the revolution to ground ancestrally, move through feelings of invalidation, cathartically release remnants imprinted by systemic and intergenerational trauma, and imagine visions towards collective liberation and land justice.

How would you define your style aesthetic?

During our performance at 143rd Dimension, a Queer and Trans Punk Festival in Oakland + San Francisco, our friend Gaia WXYZ called us “apocalyptic spasms from anticolonial mutants.” Although our current spirits are adorned inhuman flesh + bones, we activate our true forms through armor + warrior ware reflecting the hybridity of utilitarian_cyborg, primordial_endangered species, and decaying earth_landscapes. Our aesthetic combines technological trash, cyberpunk, upcycled wares, the international underground trans +queer punk/rave scene, and naturally sourced materials. We try to embody the hybridity of animals+cyborgs+transhumans: the laman haiwaan and labuad meklooq (kampangan_urdu for: flesh beast and earth creature); the multispecies inhabitants of 2022 & 3033 living on ECOCIDE 3URTH; the corpses of natural ecosystems of planet earth murdered by apathetic humans and artificial intelligence seeking vengeance. Our aesthetic combines dystopian futurism with ancient matter rooted from our South Asian + Kapampangan ancestors + future descendants and allows us to morph into the creatures we hope to exist in when capitalism and climate catastrophe are obliterated and all living beings live free.

What inspires your fashion? Where do you look when you need aesthetic ideas?

Our fashion draws its inspiration from the blessing that is performing as mirrored fatality. As mirrored fatality we are able to travel to different parts of the world and experience varying punk shows, raves, theater performances, dance festivals, film screenings, and break bread with other QTBIPOC artists + freedom fighters. The underground queer and trans of color scenes we are in allow us to continue to imagine new heights of inspiration and genre boundlessness. Through our travels we are inspired by the people we love along with the costumes + films we absorb. Lately, we’ve really been inspired by our friends who create clothes (who we commission for costumes to wear on tour!) and tv shows/films geared towards a reality of cyberfuturism_transhumanism. Our tours especially in the United Kingdom impacted our fashion inspiration—our friends Cat Lauigan from the Bay Area in California, Klank, Lynn, and Wes who share a studio space in Hackney Wick, Fran of You Are The Next Generation, Fantastic Toilies, Puer Deorum, Yiling Zhao, Queer Rave Soundsystem, Conqueer Event’s Fashion Show we modeled in, and Riposte London.

How do you see music and fashion working together? Do you think of them together or separately?

Music and fashion for mirrored fatality are important cogs of our machinic dimension. Our physical presentation is an important part of our performance because we are embodying laman haywan / labuad meklooq’s (flesh beasts / earth creatures): posthuman freak, cyborg, animal creatures who are channeling the ceremony we are creating. Our props symbolize our armor, our guitar cables we have used across the world to disseminate Indigenous genocide (We invite you to support Stand with Kashmir and Liyang Network) and human rights violations community knowledge, chains we liberated to free tree trunks from deforestation, and masks we must now use in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, chem trails, and tear gas and bombs at protests.

We mimic the movements of machines that are malfunctioning through rapid glitching choreography to envision that all technological weapons of surveillance can and will be demolished. Whenever our equipment or car breaks down, we repurpose them into fashion. We’ve taken old quarter inches, car headlights, radios, and TVS, and have incorporated them into our costumes and performance.

How do you see fashion as political? Do we have a responsibility to buy better - or maybe not at all? How do you think can we be and do better?

mf: We recently watched Shu Lea Cheang’s ECO CYBER NOIA film, Fresh Kill. Cheang says ECO SCYBER NOIA is “massive intrusions of networking technology into people's lives,” and what she foresaw as “a future where multinational media empires clash with hackers.” The film did a beautiful job of showing unnecessary waste impacting all of us globally. The ways in which we can consume fashion through the shopping tab on instagram, Amazon, Aliexpress, and etc has hijacked our consumption rates. Fast fashion, clothing created from different parts of the world, and the waste we do not witness in this process is literally killing the Earth and its living beings.

As musicians and performers, we refrain from buying into the idea that we need new wardrobes/costumes constantly—we usually wear the same costumes we’ve accumulated the past 4 years and find ways to rewear them or repair them when they fall apart so we don’t consume unnecessary material.

We also aim to make fashion auctions where we donate pieces of clothing to mutual aid and transnational calls to action. For example, we did a COCOON WEBS exhibition at Cone Shape Top where we sold dresses and airbrushed shirts with proceeds supporting LGBTQIA+ communities in Kashmir under military occupation by India, environmental frontline defenders in Mindanao who are standing between extractive industries and vital old-growth rainforests, major river systems, and other life-giving ecosystems in Mindanao, Philippines, and landless elder migrant Filipino farmers in Orosi, California.

Where are your favorite places to look for clothing? How did you learn to make and design your own clothes? Any tips for folks who want to do the same?

We find a lot of clothes from loved ones passing them onto us (one time our queer elder Queen gave us their old leather bondage pants), thrift and vintage stores, flea markets, fabric stores, and buy pieces from designers who we are our friends or in collaboration with. We learned to design and make our own clothes using mood boards of artists, designers, and pictures from our favorite films, performances, and lookbooks and that inspired us and applying that to whatever fabric we had around us.

Neither of us have any training in fashion but we just began upcycling old clothes or finding clothes with textures or colors that interested us and then editing them. For the airbrushed shirts, our friend Parker did a skillshare of their airbrush machine and let us use their materials to make two shirts we then auctioned for Stand with Kashmir and Liyang Network. We both handsew everything so we started by just cutting up clothes, painting or spray painting on them and then sewing pieces together.

When we filmed the BLOOM Music video, we found white dresses that we cut, spray painted, and painted on to make the outfits we wore in the video. Also, for the Exo_system_Eco_skeleton Garments, we wanted to make new costumes and repurposed neon green bicycle long sleeves that we then dyed with found objects around the desert/residency space: vinegar, bleach, tea, rusted nails, herbs, and spraypainted abandoned homes on the mountain tops’ remnants: chains, a baby crib, wires, locks, old metal grids, and etc. We wanted the colors to mirror the landscape. A big tip is definitely get a sewing kit and work with whatever you have. If you are able to go to a thrift store or fabric store and pick up clothes, scraps of fabric, and other materials that you are interested in, do it! Our favorite fashion are clothes that are unique, one of a kind, and have lots of heart and intention put into it.

Want to listen? mirrored fatality has recently released a remastered version of their COCOON WEBS EP with Aklasan Records, two films—VALE (Get Better Records) and EARTHBODY(S)_BIOME(TRICS) (Tour de Moon)—and the singles “REINCARNAGE” and “VALE” (Get Better Records), and “BIOME(TRICS)” and “PRIMALDIAL MAGMA” (Cherub Dream Records). Their second EP: ECOCIDE 3URTH (Cherub Dream Records) can be purchased on digital streaming, and on cassette tape with a zine that comes with each purchase at mirroredfatality.bandcamp.com. Find them on Insta @mirroredfatality.