STEFA* – Born With An Extra Rib

STEFA* announces their long-awaited debut album, Born With An Extra Rib, set to release on June 28 with Figure & Ground, and presents the lead single “3COSAS!”

Written over the course of nine years, the album explores all the different versions of stefa marin alarcón, the self-proclaimed “genderless” and “genreless” vocalist, composer, educator, and multimedia performance artist. At the heart of the album, STEFA* poses a central question: “What myths do we inherit that keep us away from ourselves?” Born and raised in Queens to Colombian immigrants, STEFA* takes on this question through their unique amalgamation of punk, classical maximalism, and experimental pop, to reconsider their own origin stories “because so many of those were lost along the way of colonization,” STEFA* explains. “Born With An Extra Rib is me creating a story of myself and of my own becoming.”

After its sold-out premiere, “Born With An Extra Rib: The Film” went on to win the Queer|Art|Prize for Recent Work and a Jury Award at TRANSlations Seattle Film Festival. In the process of crafting the ambitious multimedia project, the film and the album mutually shaped one another.

“The questions that I was asking myself were coming from a place of rage and I wanted it to feel that way,” describes stefa. “I wanted it to feel very grand and was thinking about scale. I was thinking about my songs as a film and what it would look like on screen, and that then went back to what it was going to sound like. I was thinking about the voice and taking up space and also using my voice in a different way, thinking about opera and these bigger vocal pieces.

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