About Stellar
Music has been in me for as long as I can remember. I didn’t have the discipline for piano, but at ten my parents gifted me my first instrument: a clarinet that became my gateway to falling in love with sound. Over the last twenty years I’ve moved between many instruments. Somewhere along the way, I picked up a guitar and learned how to let my voice sing. Music is everywhere, all the time. I’m continually in love with learning how to hear it.
PC: Jacob Cunningham
It’s hard to say when my journey with community organizing began. I can trace its roots to childhood books humanizing people my culture didn’t, and hard questions my teachers asked in high school and college. In 2007, I lived and traveled in India, Nepal and Tibet for a semester, thoroughly shattering the white Californian suburban worldview I’d grown up with. Somewhere between Trayvon Martin’s murder and the Ferguson uprising, I learned how anti-blackness, genocide and land theft are three of the keystones of American society and culture. Now, as those forces rise ascendant in our country, I continue the work of uprooting them from myself and communities, doing everything I can to disrupt their destruction.
PC: Nicola Gell
PC: Nicola Gell
In 2015, I founded transcendental folk band The Seventh String, and released my solo debut RAINBOW SHADOWS in 2021. In 2022, I developed POTS from two bouts of COVID, and also moved from Austin, Texas to Richmond, Virginia. Right as The Seventh String was beginning an ancestral European music tour, our beloved bandmate Firefly Olivia Walter was hit by a tram in Bremen, Germany - an accident that would shatter her community’s world, and eventually take her life.
Since then, I’ve been rebuilding, figuring out how to do life and music as a disabled solo artist. I got my hands on a Nerdy Gurdy, and every month the Richmond Community Sing fills the library with our voices. And I’m working on Firefly’s last gift to me: European Ancestral Reclamation Songs (EARS), where European-descended white people learn the songs of our ancestors and train our bodies to confront white supremacy and fascism as they rise ascendant in our society.