Painkiller: Annacetaminophen finds cathatric relief on her self-titled debut

The music Anna Yarmamedova makes as Annacetaminophen is automatic and of distant means. Feverish and desolate, the project’s self-titled debut plays out like a horror movie set in a hospital, words and production processed through generative patches Yarmamedova developed on MaxMSP. 

While alien bleeps call out as if through featureless hallways and click tracks build tension like leadened IV drips, the words Yarmamedova invokes through detatched gasps of electronic processing land like echoes from visits with doctors and social workers: “rejection,” “panic,” “light-headed,” “dysphoria.” 

“I just wrote down a bunch of words that I felt were relevant to me and what was going on at the time, and then I recorded them and cut them up and [the patch] would say them randomly.”

A former art student, Yarmamedova relates her music practice to the automatic drawings she would create when she lived in North York and would commute downtown when she was attending OCAD. 

“Most of the time I would be panicking the entire time, so I just started drawing lines, and I wasn’t paying attention when I was drawing, because the whole point of it was to calm me down and then I’d look at it later and I’d be like, ‘Yo, this is cool,” Yarmamedova explains. She says the detached nature of the drawings allowed her to articulate ideas she had been otherwise unable to express.

“I think my music practice stems a lot from that.” 

By distancing her conscious influence from the finished product of her music, only intervening to master and touch up compression and EQ, Yarmamedova created a platform that simultaneously functioned as a surrogate for her own self-expression and a built-in advocate for her mental health, unburdening herself of the formal barriers of articulation through abstraction. She traces that impulse to a personal desire to create a domain where the world has to meet her on her own terms, unfiltered.

“Because a lot of my life revolves around mental health and mental illness, I’m figuring out how to survive and navigate the world while accepting those things,” she says. “I’m not gonna go off and try to pretend I’m an able person. I’m gonna make the world around me work to my needs or my disability.”

The name Annacetaminophen is a clever portmanteau invoking the generic over-the-counter pain relief drug, acetaminophen. By adopting it as a title, Yarmamedova establishes her project within a context of self medication, but the drug also belongs to another set of associations; acetaminophen is notoriously deployed by doctors dismissing the concerns of their marginalized patients — suggesting this is a situation Yarmamedova is reluctantly consigned to, rather than empowered by.

The Annacetaminophen project also functions as a vehicle of critique, allowing Yarmamedova to address the gatekeeping and gaslighting she’s encountered navigating the mental healthcare system as a disabled trans woman. It’s front and centre on “Doctor Says I’m Being Silly But I Can’t Breathe,” a track pumped full of vaporous, itch-inducing atmosphere, increasingly stirred into overwhelming dissonance while Yarmamedova’s vocalizations come through unintelligible like hellish takes on the authority figures in Peanuts cartoons. Meanwhile, track titles like “Clawing at the Skin Never Works But It Feels Fine” and “What’s the English Word for Failure?” read like diaristic cries for help while at once declaring their futility. The further you get into it, the more Annacetaminophen feels like being abandoned in some byzantine institution of neglect. It speaks volumes that the most assertive title in the lot is “Trans Girls Should Be Allowed To Carry Knives.”

Prompted a year after she started transitioning, Yarmamedova says she started working on the album closely after leaving her parents’ place in North York (“Suburbia’s like a waiting room,” she says) and moving downtown, establishing herself within a community of queer and trans folx. She says the album’s finale, “Thank You,” is addressed to that chosen family and the voice she rediscovered with it.

“I went from being a very isolated dude who was uncomfortable with himself at all times to having a community of largely queer trans folk. And it’s like, ‘Oh. I have a space and a community who understands what I’m talking about and what I’m going through.’” 

As the track brings the record to a close, the anxious rhythmic drama of the album is replaced by a lengthy, glowing tone, the way the picture gets washed out when a camera transitions from filming an interior scene to an exterior one in a fluid motion; the slate wiped clean for a moment, the world keeps going, and the protagonist steps into it with a fresh pair of eyes.

Annacetaminophen performs at Long Winter Nov. 22 at the Tranzac, 292 Brunswick Ave.