Deluxe Limited Edition tinted acrylic 6LP box set

Featuring Sade, Jeff Tweedy, Julien Baker, Pharoah Sanders, André 3000, Fleet Foxes, Sam Smith, Sharon Van Etten & more : 46 Collaborative Songs from Over 100 Musicians

Storied activist and music production non-profit Red Hot presents its latest project, TRAИƧA. With production beginning in 2021, and over 100 artists contributing, TRAИƧA marks one of the most ambitious projects ever undertaken by Red Hot — a spiritual journey across 8 chapters and 46 songs, spotlighting the gifts of many of the most daring, imaginative trans and non-binary artists working today. It softens the edges of the world we know, and invokes powerful dreams of the futures that might one day thunder from its cracks.
This tinted acrylic 6LP box set contains the entire 46 track TRAИƧA narrative journey in 8 chapters.
TRAИƧA features artists from widely dispersed genres and generations, often working in collaboration on a mix of surprising covers and poignant original tracks. Dust Reid, who led production on Red Hot’s 2014 tribute to Arthur Russell, and Massima Bell, an artist and activist based in Los Angeles, worked from the dreams of the trans artists they invited to participate, pairing many of them with their heroes and inspirations. Trans and cis voices weave together throughout the record. Bill Callahan and Hand Habits harmonize on an acoustic cover of Kate Bush’s prescient 1989 track about falling in love with the internet, “Deeper Understanding,” while Claire Rousay teams with Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy to set a William Blake poem to music on “How Sweet I Roamed.” For “Pink Ponies,” electronic artist Yaeji joins singer-songwriter Teddy Geiger in a delicate reverie of a pop song, their voices intertwining among shuffling drums and twinkling keys. Moses Sumney grounds a cover of SOPHIE’s life-affirming composition “Is It Cold in the Water?” in a jazz setting, sending his falsetto arcing over gently strummed guitar chords and shivering cymbals. On one of the record’s most notable contributions, Sade performs an original song dedicated to her trans son, Izaak — a gesture of unconditional acceptance and love without boundary.
Certain artists knew immediately how they wanted to participate in the project. Reid and Bell pitched Devendra Banhart on a cover of “You Don’t Know Me,” the 1972 song Caetano Veloso wrote while in forced exile, as a subversive queer artist, from Brazil’s military dictatorship; Banhart picked up a guitar and started singing them the song right there and then on the call. Others carefully researched their contributions, sifting through archives, stitching together sounds of past and future. For her track “People Are Small/Rapture,” which begins with a cover of an ANOHNI song from the early ’90s, L’Rain sampled voices from the Trans Oral History project. She invites the listener to bear witness to painful memories of decimated communities, suspending those recollections in washes of healing sound.
TRAИƧA flows between structured pop songs and effusive ambient tracks, many of which are centered around original poetry written and read by Eileen Myles. André 3000 contributed the project’s longest song, a pulsing, 26-minute instrumental composition whose title is a poem in itself: “Something Is Happening And I May Not Fully Understand But I’m Happy To Stand For The Understanding.” Laraaji, Mary Lattimore, Green-House, Cole Pulice, and Helado Negro all offer pieces that signal transitions between the record’s chapters. These moments give the listener space to pause, reflect, and absorb the prismatic narrative as it unfolds — a radical restructuring of attention in an on-demand media ecosystem.
The compilation honors the legacies of those trans and gender non-conforming artists who carved spaces of possibility before awareness of trans identity permeated mainstream consciousness. Moses Sumney, Sam Smith, and Lyra Pramuk pay moving tribute to the late disco icon Sylvester with a cover of his most indelible single, “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real).” Over pastures of guitar, harp, and violin, Beverly Glenn-Copeland and Sam Smith duet on a stunning new recording of Glenn-Copeland’s song “Ever New,” originally released as the opening track to his seminal 1986 album Keyboard Fantasies. Jayne County, a pillar of New York punk, teams with Laura Jane Grace of Against Me!, Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth, Kathi Wilcox of Bikini Kill, and Jay Dee Daugherty of the Patti Smith Group for a new recording of her raucous trans anthem “Surrender Your Gender.” Together with Wendy and Lisa of the Revolution, London-based singer Lauren Auder covers Prince’s iconic track “I Would Die 4 U,” a monument to gender transcendence.
TRAИƧA takes its title from Caetano Veloso’s 1972 album of the same name, which opens with “You Don’t Know Me.” “In the hook, Caetano sings, ‘Show me from behind the wall,'” notes Reid. “For the purposes of this project, that’s the wall of one’s own inner world and connection to consciousness, but also the wall of politics and patriotism.” Red Hot’s TRAИƧA sequences Banhart’s cover of “You Don’t Know Me” early in the track list, closing the song with a welcome message from Beverly Glenn-Copeland. “We’ve taken this word, ‘Transa,’ and we’ve defined it to mean ‘love with no limitations on gender expression,'” says Reid. “‘Transa’ means you are more than you know.”