Eileen Myles and Cole Pulice on Their Serendipitous ‘Transa’ Collaboration With Hunter Schafer

Across 46 songs and more than 100 artists, the expansive benefit compilation Transa was made to support trans rights—a cause that is more urgent than ever. But it is not a polemic as much as a meditation and a reinforcement of simple humanity. The album carefully guides listeners through stages of gender exploration and acceptance. Created by the longrunning activist music nonprofit Red Hot, Transa is broken up into eight chapters, including “Survival,” “Awakening,” and “Reinvention.” “Under the Shadow of Another Moon” opens the “Dark Night” section; amid nearly four hours of music, it is the project’s undeniable emotional centerpiece.

The track is a collaboration between the electroacoustic saxophonist and composer Cole Pulice, the literary heavyweight Eileen Myles, and the actress Hunter Schafer. Pulice’s layers of sax set the contemplative mood; Myles’ words gesture at an immense yearning, perhaps a chasm between two people, or between what was and what is; Schafer recites those words as if she’s reading an intensely private diary entry, on the verge of tears, her voice soft and wobbly. The three elements of the piece are powerful on their own, but together the effect is staggering. Almost too much to bear. It’s the single most heartrending piece of music I’ve heard this year.

“Working on the piece was a very personal process of searching and listening for something internal, quiet, and wise, and letting it unfold how it wanted, and that felt like it resonated with my experience of transness,” says Pulice, whose work is marked by a generous fluidity between genres like jazz, ambient, and new age. Talking about how the piece relates to Transa’s overarching concept, Myles says, “When I think about the frame of transness, I want to run right through it: It’s creating an arch, and inside that arch we can all do whatever we want.”

As Pulice and Myles discuss the making of “Under the Shadow of Another Moon” on a video call, it becomes clear that the song is the result of a rarified cosmic serendipity. They had never met or spoken to each other before our interview. And when I ask if either of them has had any contact with Schafer, they both laugh a little and shake their heads no. Though so many remote musical collaborations can feel transactional—just a bunch of emails and files being passed around—this one is anything but. Instead, the lack of face-to-face interaction highlights a transcendent artistic commonality. “There were no back-and-forth revisions or edits between Hunter, Eileen, and myself,” explains Pulice, who also produced the song. “I felt more like I was just putting the puzzle pieces where they needed to go.”

It all began when Transa producers Massima Bell and Dust Reid asked Pulice if they would want to write a piece that could potentially feature spoken word poetry. Pulice, who cites previous Red Hot compilations celebrating Arthur Russell and Fela Kuti as personal touchstones, was intrigued—in part because they had never worked on a composition with vocals. As it happens, Pulice was also listening to a lot of music from the storied avant-garde label Lovely Music at the time, including the electroacoustic artist Paul DeMarinis, who often used voices in his work. So when Bell and Reid reached out, Pulice already had a framework of a piece on their hard drive that left space for other voices to complete.

Then Myles’ name came up. Pulice was already a fan, having recently read their 2010 novel Inferno, and was excited by the prospect. Myles, whose favorite instrument is the saxophone, hadn’t yet heard Pulice’s music, but was immediately struck by the instrumental: a sax chorale where each part seems to move separately and together at the same time. “It’s very ancient-feeling, in terms of scale, like this strange monolith,” Myles says. “I felt awe in that.”

The 74-year-old Myles contributed a total of three poems to the Transa project, a testament to their status as a living legend—though one gets the sense they would shrug off such honorifics. Myles is known for their matter-of-fact cool, a literary rock star who fully lives up to that title: They gave their first reading at the New York punk hole CBGBs in 1974, and have recited their work while backed by musicians here and there ever since. Myles most famous book, 1994’s Chelsea Girls, is firmly embedded into the queer literary canon, filled with brash musings that beg to be cited at length. Such as:

I must fuck Robin. That was my job. She had the largest... cunt, vagina I have never stuck my fingers in. It was big red and needy. I stuck two three fingers in and fucked her and fucked her. I’ve always received complaints that I was rough but I felt like I could have been shoving a stick up this woman, a branch.

Myles’ more recent work is still bold, funny, and unapologetic. It can also be somber, with ghosts floating by and memories adding up. A passage like the following one, from their 2020 poem “March 3,” feels like it took a lifetime to write:

When I was
young
I liked the
emptiness
of my home &
now like
it or not
here is
this sweet
accumulation.

This is the mode Myles tapped into for “Under the Shadow of Another Moon,” as they riffed on Pulice’s music with their words. “I wanted to just get in there and feel it, like, What would that sound say if it was speaking?” Myles explains. “The only thing I knew is that it should be short and wide—a lot of language was going to fuck it up.” The result is devastating, with images of brokenness as big as a planet alongside messages in the sand and echoes of sound lost to time.

By design, the poem is pretty open-ended. Schafer’s delivery helps to give it blood and breath. Sometimes literally: Pulice decided to leave in some of the actress’ inhales and mouth sounds as a way to draw the listener in even closer. At one point in the song, Schafer says, “You played it/For me,” the lines trailed by a high, aching sax melody, as if she conjured it. “There was this intuition in the way she was reading it, and the relationship between the words and the music,” Pulice says. “I didn’t have to move things around very much.”

Even now, Pulice and Myles don’t fully understand why, or how, the piece came to be. “I remember working on it, but when I hear it, I don’t know how it all happened,” Pulice offers. They both talk about it like a dream, a fantasy, a myth. They just know it’s right. “It feels like we got a cool invitation,” Myles says, “and we came.”