I wasn’t questioning what I thought was happening though. I also thought I knew the extent of it: the voice. Thought that the ghost might on some days be something that attached itself physically like a node on my vocal chords, or was vocal chords, the extra thick ones I’d need to produce that sound, like in films about puberty you get shown in science classes in school.

Roy Orbison in Ruins stages an imagined correspondence between a young hospitality worker on a road trip, and the musician David Berman. Unfolding over a series of four unanswered letters and karaoke interludes, we learn that our narrator has been possessed by the voice of Roy Orbison. Accompanied by her chorus of Roys, she slowly transforms into his image as she writes about dreaming, leisure time, haunting and ventriloquism from the rest stops, bars and motels of Florida.

TGIGITFFY—035(RR) / June 2024

raspberry raspberry is a series of pamphlets publishing performance texts and texts on performance by artists working at—and with—the intersections of sound, music and the voice.