west's second album shows a maturation into herself as a music artist as she explores, with skillfully nuanced lyric and layer, complex topics such as the elusive aspects of gender, lustful longings, and how love might show itself in these embodied realms.
released January, 2016
west's inventive debut album in a category all its own; folk meets electronic dance with a steady through-line of rock. digital meets natural. dark lyrics entwine with child-sparkle guitar solos. with skillful low-fi layering and mantra-inspired repetition the listener is invited into a compelling, contradictory, transformative, signature world.
released August 15, 2015
west, an emerging music and visual artist, released her entirely self-produced debut album, "come out, come out" in summer 2015, and in the beginning of 2016 her second album, "without a map". on stage she's often solo, which evokes a folk-rock mood. she sings her heart out about flowers, rivers, family, fires, girls, boys, knifes, sex, death and ghosts.
west teamed up with filmmaker christopher birk to create the first of a two-part music video series. part one, 'boyhood,' explores the questions and feelings that can arise when we don't have a clear, categorized identity in a society that craves and demands certainty and definability within imagined social markers of sex and gender.
LISTEN to 'boyhood,' the single.
the girl you see is the exploratory piece following boyhood. In this fierce music video, west mixes bold images with subtlety to dig deep into the questions of who we are, underneath and within sex and gender, and acknowledging the losses involved with finding a home within embodiment.
LISTEN to 'the girl you see,' the single.
an evocative before-and-after photo documentation of west's journey of losing her breasts. broad-sweeping and intimate, kerry moore's images ask the viewer to engage with their own experiences of loss and transformation. here we have some of the many ways in which one woman's breasts fall.
released in march 2017, this single is a meditation on loss, and a call to arms through the process of mourning. how grieving is a necessary process to becoming fully alive.
samantha worked with artists sophie kahn and ebony fleur to create a 3d sculpture of her chest. this 'breastplate' is her choice in reconstruction after a double mastectomy, and a commentary on masculine and feminine lineage. when enough funds are raised, this 3d printed model will be cast in bronze.
