Meemo Comma has created an eclectic electric soundtrack for an expanding universe

Close your eyes and try to quell your swirling thoughts for a moment through a simple meditation. Imagine a future where gender is very different than it is today—expansive and esoteric, grandiose and exhilarating. Maybe a bit magical, or if you find that word slightly cheesy, fantastical. What do you hear when you conjure this future? Terse silence that swells with possibility, free-flowing brass that enthusiastically trumpets an arrival? What about an emotive electronic score inflected with influences from Japanese anime and Jewish mysticism? 

For Brighton-based non-binary musician Lara Rix-Martin, it’s the latter. Under the moniker Meemo Comma, they released the album Neon Genesis: Soul Into Matter2 earlier this year. Inspired in equal parts by electronic dance music, trans culture, kabbalah and ’90s cyberpunk anime, Rix-Martin crafts a soundtrack to a film that doesn’t exist. Oscillating between punchy, hypnotic dance tracks and ethereal, reflective ambience, the U.K. artist uses the album to construct a world where we have more space to experiment with gender. 

Rix-Martin started creating music as Meemo Comma back around 2015. Prior to that, they were making music with their husband and musical collaborator, Mike Paradinas, under the name Heterotic. Around that time, Rix-Martin also started their music label Objects Limited. They founded it as a space where women and non-binary people could put their own music into the world. It’s in this space that Neon Genesis: Soul Into Matter was introduced to the world. 

Rix-Martin spoke to Xtra from their home in Brighton about their new album, being a non-binary artist in the current climate of TERFism and remaining realistically optimistic in a world without inherent meaning. 

What’s behind the name Meemo Comma?

The name came from my daughter. She decided that we had a ghost in our last house that lived by the stairs. She had night terrors, and always used to say, “There’s a ghost that lives there, and it’s called Meemo Comma.” She’s good at making up really odd names, she likes wordplay and all that stuff.

Whatever happened to the ghost? Did you ever have any weird spectral encounters? 

No. We did have a time where there was a ghost called Evil that used to whisper. We’ve moved houses now, so I don’t know what’s happening with those guys. I hope they’re doing well and flourishing in their environment.

I hope so as well. How old are your children?

I have a seven-year-old and a five-year-old. They’re fun, they really enjoy music. But it’s funny because we’ve never really said to them, “Oh, you have to like this kind of music.” We leave it up to them. I listen to music when I cook, but Mike doesn’t really listen to music much outside of work, so the children have the things they’re into. My daughter’s really into J-pop, she just adores it; she really likes Kyary Pamyu Pamyu and wants to see her live. That’s like, the only thing she wants to do in life. And my son says he likes jazz. I don’t know if he knows what jazz is, but he said that he likes smooth jazz. We played him smooth jazz and he was like “Yeah, okay, this is all right.”

What sort of music do you listen to generally? I’m sure all kinds. 

I’ll be honest—I’m so bad—I probably listen to the same five records. And it’s like, The Knife and Austra… gay pop, gay synth pop, soft lesbian synth pop. 

How do you find that kind of music has inspired your own music creation? 

I don’t think it has, to be honest. When I listen to music outside of work, it’s a different sort of emotional attachment, more like fun and escapism. There is an element of escapism in a lot of the music that I release, but I love it in a different sort of way, like how you love a friend in a different way than family. I think I’m more influenced by the people I put on my label than by the music that I listen to for fun.

What’s your process like when you’re creating music?

I play around on Logic, but I tend not to be able to finish a track until I come up with a concept or an idea, and that can take months. The steps towards this album were: I knew I wanted to do something that was to do with my Jewish heritage, and that idea was stewing for a little bit. How would I do that? I knew I wanted to do an interview with my rabbi. We were thinking of maybe recording that, but I didn’t want to be ambient. Then I decided I wanted to do a dance EP, and have a bit of fun with ’90s dance music. Then the two ideas merged. I was watching a lot of anime during the first lockdown and I thought about doing a soundtrack that could have Jewish elements in it, and I just took it from there. 

My ideas come out with a little spark, and then they build and build and build. When I actually write music, it probably only takes me about a month. I tend to write three tracks at the same time, and I don’t know if I’ve got ADHD or something, but I can’t focus on one track for more than half an hour, it just really stresses me out. Sometimes I think a song’s not working anymore so I cut those bites out and move them around—it’s a bit chaotic and would probably make grown men who play with modular synths cry. 

Are you a very religious person? 

The thing with the Jewish faith is that religion has a different focus. I think that the Western Christian view of religion is very much that you have to believe in God, and that God is this thing that is not just all-powerful, but always kind and always right. And that’s not what Jews believe. We have the Torah, which is the written text that Jews believe, and then we have the Talmud, which is what Jews argue about. Basically they argue with God, and then even God argues with demons and stuff. And there’s all these stories about arguing and there isn’t always a particular right answer. I think that what’s kind of sad about Christianity is that Christians lose a lot of what faith actually is, the humanity of it; the idea that you can’t argue and change things is sad. For Judaism, it’s a constantly evolving thing. But going back to the original point, am I religious? I guess, but in a different way to what people might imagine. 

Were you very plugged in to the whole debate around Christianity and Lil Nas X’s music video for “Montero (Call Me By Your Name),” where a bunch of Christians were offended that he played with imagery of heaven and hell in a campy way? 

The thing is Jews do have a hell, but you’re only there for 12 months. So it’s not like that. It wouldn’t offend Jews. There is that kind of a devil in the Jewish religion, but it’s more complicated than that. It’s kind of a diversity rather than a specific kind of person or thing. It’s kind of complex. In terms of Lil Nas X, obviously it’s an amazing song. It’s very American that people got so upset about it, because in the U.K., we’re just like, “Whatever, he’s trying to shock people, that’s funny.” We’ve got a very different kind of religious people over here. I think we’re a quite secular kind of country. I think people are more superstitious—and I mean superstitious in terms of disgust. There’s a lot of disgust in the U.K., but it’s not really religious disgust. People are just bigots and idiots. 

What is it like to create this kind of music that conceptually engages with gender in a very creative way during a time when the current political climate in the U.K. is filled with TERFism? 

The U.K. is just really backwards. We find it quite icky, there’s a lot of bigotry that’s very much a disgust-based thing. And the thing is that trans people have always been here, they will always be here. The “T” was always there; what were they thinking the “T” in LGBT stood for? I think a lot of people in the U.K. thought it was just men in dresses that like to do that on a Saturday morning when they go out. They didn’t realize that it was an identity so much as a kind of sexual preference. I feel like that’s part of the issue in the U.K., they were led to believe that it was a weird sexual preference that people didn’t talk about, but that was done for kicks. It’s the same elsewhere, where people think that it’s men dressing up because they fancy themselves. I don’t even understand how you’d get to that point of thinking that. 

“I think the trans community is really good at reaching out to each other through various platforms; ultimately that love and support will last longer, and the TERFs will just die out.”

I live in Brighton, which is very liberal and sort of LGBTQ+ friendly. We have a really big Pride here, so I’m quite lucky. Transphobia isn’t something I’ve had to immediately deal with. But I’m only outwardly non-binary to friends and some of my family. Some of my family won’t talk about it, they’ll still call me “she,” which is fine, I just kind of deal with it. It would be hard for my parents to deal with that, but they don’t mean to hurt me, and I’m not gonna push them on it. And at work, I just go with she/her because I’m in a very different environment, an estate agency. I don’t think it would work to be out in that environment. The visibility is hard, but things will get easier as we go on. 

What is interesting actually, as a parent—I don’t know if you’ve heard of Mumsnet [the infamous U.K. parenting forum that’s turned into a hotbed for TERF discourse and organizing]. When I first had my daughter, I went on Mumsnet because I was really ill and wanted to find other people who also had extreme morning sickness. Funnily enough, we didn’t all stay on Mumsnet, we scattered across Facebook and are still all really good friends. Some of them are now really open about how they hate Mumsnet, which has become really right-wing. It’s interesting to have met some lovely people on what’s become a hotbed of conservative, middle England, “we don’t like the different folk” activity.

Have you ever had concerns about being an out non-binary artist, or have you experienced any backlash because of your identity?

I did a BBC Radio 6 interview where I said the words “underrepresented genders.” And I got hate mail just from saying those words. They looked up my Bandcamp [page] just to send me messages about there only being two genders. If people have energy to have a go at me and be mean to me, that’s fine, because I’ve got infinite amounts of energy and will happily argue because I think that arguing is really silly and fun. I’m really good at posting silly memes back. 

The thing is, if you have that sort of bile in you all the time, it’s just going to wear you down. I think the trans community is really good at reaching out to each other through various platforms; ultimately that love and support will last longer, and the TERFs will just die out. It’s medically unhealthy to be shitty all the time.

That sort of ties into the last thing I wanted to ask you: Would you say this album takes an optimistic view of the future? 

I’ve never considered myself an absolute optimist. I think I’ve always had an optimism based in realism. I don’t think there is meaning in the world, but I don’t care if there’s meaning or not, it’s just nice to be a part of something bigger than yourself and work towards something for the people who come after us, and honouring those who were before us. And we are getting stronger and getting better. I’m not into this accelerationism stuff (the idea that society is reaching a climax at an ever-accelerating rate), but it is all happening a lot quicker. In some ways, we may be moving too fast, and it is a bit of a challenge. But we have to remember, we are such a microcosm when you think of the world in space. There are still so many people in the world that are still just doing their own thing, having different genders in their own communities and speaking about them differently. That’s something we need to integrate better in the West, the trans fight isn’t some Western thing. Even in the Torah, there’s six different genders. This isn’t new, and we can get back to an understanding of gender that’s more exciting and spectrum-like.