“I’ve been talking to myself a lot, then I started talking to deepfakes,” the artist ricky sallay zoker, who also performs music as YATTA, half-joked during Palm Wine, their performance at REDCAT in Los Angeles this March. They stood, alone, behind a textile-draped folding table, wearing a white suit and manipulating a MacBook, a microphone, and a mixer. A blue-purple light encircled them. At one point, a deepfake of David Attenborough’s voice announced itself over the auditorium’s speakers: “I have myself a wandering ricky. They’ve broken away from the Bon Iver and the Fleet Foxes. They seem to be seeking an authentic relationship with the earth; when they can’t find a place to sit and swim, they make belonging through sound. They make a home in jazz.”

I still can’t believe that Angelique Kidjo and Ezra Koening work together. (They collaborated even through the pandemic.) I still can’t believe that Vampire Weekend has a song called “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa.”

Kwassa Kwassa is the name of a dance that was popularized by Soukous music videos in the 1970s.

A meditation on the psychic and societal ruptures created by oppressive environments. [20:50]

A romantic dark comedy about the precarity of an intimate relationship between two neuroatypical people. The film explores the intersection of transness and disability. [20:29]

An Episode: Ricky’s Room is a journey through music, dance, poetry, and video. How does one reconstruct a self time and time again?

An Episode: Ricky’s Room explores the connection between psychosis and spirituality, as well as the psychological schisms created by forced migration, oppression, and societal dissonance.

This hour-long multimedia performance was scored by poetry album WAHALA.