Star Matriarch - Red Ship

Protest music often trades in broad stroke messaging born of group consensus. Red Ship, the new full length from Star Matriarch, is deeply personal protest music born of Carol Bui’s lived experience as an AuDHD mother of color and (former) sex worker under Imperialist capitalism. Melding syncopated world rhythms with abrasive post-punk instrumental explorations, the album seethes with a palpable, raw humanity. A modernist, global link in the riot grrl chain, on Red Ship Star Matriarch has alchemized pain into potent, revolutionary, empowering art.

Multi-disciplinary artist Carol Bui traversed the indie rock landscape of the 2000s under her real name. After a decade long hiatus, Bui returns as the beautifully terrifying Star Matriarch, weaving her femme-punk roots with the immediate experiences of colonized femme-hood, and a delicate balance of raw power and vulnerability. A natural-born musician (her mom says she sang before she could walk), teenage rebellion aligned with the birth of the grunge movement and her hometown of Washington, D.C.’s punk scene. Her high school years were spent as a member of local all-female DIY band Princessed. Post-graduation, Bui relented to her parents’ urging to do the good Asian daughter thing and get a degree in information technology. “That’s how you can pay for your hobby”, her father insisted. Freshly graduated and newly empowered, Bui released the LPs This Is How I Recover in 2004 and Everyone Wore White – produced by T.J. Lipple (Aloha) and Chad Clark (Beauty Pill) – in 2007.

While her work as a software engineer paid the bills, she quickly approached autistic/adhd burnout. “Doing the model minority thing and the DIYing music thing with so much heavy masking was too much” she explains. “Going into sex work where you can make more money in less time, make your own schedule, have clear boundaries and direction was how I accommodated my brain without having known of my invisible disabilities.” The burnout also turned her off from the indie music scene she had been trying to navigate, and a passion for Arabic music emerged. “I started studying ‘bellydance’, which is colonizer language for dance from the Southwest Asian-North African region” explains Bui. “When you study this dance, you also study the music, geopolitical history, the humanity.”

Bui began work on Red Ship while teaching herself drums. Inspired by Arabic rhythm and feel, Bui’s AuDHD sensory seeking is reflected in the rhythm-centric approach to her writing. Over the next decade Bui poured herself into that world, traveling to Egypt multiple times to study. “Outside of Western civilization, music is a very physical experience” she explains. “In parts of Africa, you’re not considered a composer until you also learn the dance.”

Weaving her punk roots with the immediate experiences of colonized femme-hood, expertly executed with a delicate balance of raw power and vulnerability, Red Ship is an empowering rock catharsis that rejects the shame prescribed for those asserting their agency. “The one thing that has always been missing for me personally from a lot of punk is feeling a personal connection to the stories” Bui explains. “I’m going to tell my truth. This was my truth. There’s this relentless message I hear that being Asian American, being a woman, that I’m supposed to be stoic and hard working. Not allowed to show big expressions of joy or of despair. This record is my answer to that, born of painful lived experience and the complexity of modern reality.” (continue reading full bio on DISCO)