El Hardwick - Process of Elimination

Format: LP
Catalogue No.: WHYT75LP
Barcode: 4062548097191
Release Date: 17 Jan 2025
Genre: Alternative

TRACKLIST:
1. The Queer Art of Slowness
2. Dual
3. Quantology
4. How Do I Know What I Want When Everybody Is Telling Me I Should Want What I Don’t Have
5. Laying On The Floor Staring Up At Dust In the Air
6. Breathing Room
7. Language Couldn’t Say
8. Pataphysical
9. Wildest Imagination 

Process of Elimination, El Hardwick’s sophomore’s album, explores sickness as a teacher for anti-capitalist modes of being; a rewilding of the self. Out via AD 93 on the 27th September, the record is the product of an attempt to be indestructible; this sickness has an unknown diagnosis. The only route to determine the indeterminable is via a process of elimination. Eliminate the noise so it may quieten and make space for listening to what whispers underneath, allowing a return to the present moment. Slowness and queerness as technologies, questions as answers and mysticism as a path to healing when science alone does not suffice.
The album’s announce on the 1st of August is joined with the release of single ‘Dual’: a track with choral-esq, ethereal ballads and quivering flutes that merge with spoken word ruminations on disability, sickness and the connection between mind and body. The track oscillates tempos, building an epic momentum that harkens to Hardwick's past influences as a club DJ.

El Hardwick’s album follows their experience of becoming chronically ill after years of treating their body like a machine. El explains: “After failing to receive a diagnosis, which is only given via a lengthy process of elimination, I instead turned to autonomous modes of healing rooted in mysticism and herbalism; putting aside the need to be defined. My journey towards accepting my disability is told in parallel to my coming-out as trans. I also see my non-binary identity as a process of elimination: I am neither gender, both, in-between. It is through rewilding myself from capitalism and gender normativity
  
that I learn how to connect to my body and the earth; no longer allowing either’s energy to be extracted from. The less I sought answers, language, metrics and analysis, the more peace I found.” Silvia Federici’s Caliban And The Witch influenced the album in telling how dissident women & gender nonconforming people have been historically labelled as hysterical and heretical when questioning the cartesian dualist mindset that laid the groundwork of capitalism. Donna J Haraway’s Staying With The Trouble and Jenny Odell’s How To Do Nothing were further inspirations in how humans can rebuild relationships with the earth.