Tendencies by Middle Sattre

Preface by Carter St. Hogan:

We’re lucky, to be asked to hold the tender body that is Middle Sattre’s Tendencies. Here is a work of diary unlike any other: not a glimpse, but a sitting-with, as Hunter Prueger reenters the haunted rooms of their Mormon upbringing to pray in a queer, clear-eyed language they can live in at last. Each line of the album’s poem is long and dense, each melody an architecture built to last. There are birds here. An orchestra, the sounds of hands, voices that dance alongside one another and twin and spin out and fade away. An idea of an organ cuts off; a ghost choir emerges, then falls silent again. Guitar strings creak, uncertain, before bursting into lush and confident arrangements. A harmonica brings out the lonesome. Elliott Smith is here, and Sufjan Stevens, and Neko Case: fellow pilgrims who burn and burn with knowledge that weighs. The intimacy of each song hurts to look at, but Middle Sattre teaches us that to look is to become brave: a fight for queer survival, in spite of/because of; a demand for accountability, direct and unflinching; an answer to every question that once cut our tongues. Hunter is unambiguous, beautiful, beseeching: I have eaten from the tree / I now have feet and they’ll stumble over the garden wall. We’re lucky to hold this record to our own ears, let it tell us who we are afraid to be, let it forgive us, let it make us brave in turn. I took this shame and I / gave it all to you, Hunter confides, hushed, and we’ll hold it gratefully. And we’ll hold it. And what a gift it is, to hold it. Together.

Middle Sattre started as a solo recording project in Salt Lake City, UT and has since grown into a collective of at least eight people now.

middlesattre.com