Nuda, SINE and Curse Mackey
Divine Creatures Tour
Nuda is the solo darkwave and industrial project of Seattle's Kaylie Cortez, who came up as the guitarist in Possessed Tranquility and the live keyboardist for DK-Zero before going solo in 2019. Intimate Senses landed that year, then Mindful Tragedies in 2020, which ReGen put in their top 50 albums of the year and which pulled in collaborators from DK-Zero, Possessed Tranquility, and Jaymie Valentine of CINDERGARDEN.
SINE is Rona Rougeheart, the Austin drummer, vocalist, and producer who built the project so she could work on her own terms. She grew up in a musical family, came to production through Depeche Mode and Ableton, and kept the rhythm-first instincts of a drummer at the center of everything. She's shared stages and studios with a long list of the scene's heavyweights, including Clan of Xymox, PIG, and Nitzer Ebb, and this past May she released La Mordre on Metropolis Records, a ten-track record.
Curse Mackey has been in Pigface, fronted Evil Mothers, worked with My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult, and just closed out a solo trilogy with Imaginary Enemies on Negative Gain, following Instant Exorcism and Immoral Emporium.
Curse recently put out The Sound Philosophy: An Artist's Survival Guide is 268 pages of hardcover field manual for independent artists, 100 short chapters pulled from his journals, road stories, and studio work, covering the stuff nobody tells you: resistance, procrastination, protecting your creative time, finishing things, staying healthy, and actually making a living at this long enough to have a career. He narrates the audiobook himself. It's a fitting thing to have just published right before spending ten days in a van watching two other artists live out every chapter of it. Getting the guy who reads the room every night in the same conversation as the two artists playing it is a rare setup for a tour postmortem.
Whether you caught one of the eight nights, danced through a Curse Mackey set at the end of one, or you're just curious what it really looks like to put a tour like this together and survive it, this is the version of the story you only get a week after it ends, before anybody's had a chance to smooth out the details.
One more thing: if you're out there planning a run of your own, check out Tourouter, the app we (yes, Tash, Scott and the rest of AL1CE) built to make touring life a little less chaotic. Routing, day sheets, schedules, guarantees, lodging, guest list, all in one place instead of scattered across six apps and four group chats. Free to plan your tour, and it's on iOS, Android, and the web.
What they get into
- The money, the driving, the sleep, and the honest version of what a run like this takes
- What everyone's doing next now that the van's unpacked
- Eight shows in ten days from Seattle to Phoenix, and which rooms surprised them
- Taking La Mordre out on the road for the first time and what changed once the songs were live
- Curse's view from the booth: reading a crowd from the decks versus playing to one from the stage
- Curse co-producing La Mordre and then DJing the tour supporting it, and how that dual role played out night to night
- The Sound Philosophy, Curse's new book, and what twenty-plus years of doing this actually taught him about surviving as an independent artist