PRECIOUS CHILD

Precious Child is a multifaceted and controversial artist based in Los Angeles. They are known for creating genre-defying music, lurid and surreal video, and their activism for trans rights and racial justice. Their work is informed by their experience and thoroughly avoids speculative, philosophical, or purely aesthetic approaches. They find topical honesty in places of internal solitude as well as the broadest parts of themselves; outrage at the tyranny, dominion, and bigotry that are worshipped in the United States. A key part of their practice, Precious focuses on listening both to themselves and others. To them, listening means comprehensive attention as well as an extended process of imagining what experiences are like to others. Many of their projects and statements are long term work, with multiple songs, stories, and visual work taking multiple decades of iterative contemplation and labor before being completed and released to the public. Precious believes that art is sharper than the sword, more psychedelically potent than any drug, more self-actualizing than any shrink, and is as priceless as the sunset and rain. In art they found supreme and delicate human language, a means to create themselves and to be a voice for others to hear themselves through.

Reared in an unconventional and free-spirited manner, their parents who were children of the 60s encouraged Precious to develop their curiosity and creativity. This approach led 8 year old Precious to make their first public work: a reed-organ dominant musical score for an independent monster movie short. As a child, writing horror stories and poetry was a passion, evolving into them being a regular contributor to both their high school’s anarchist newspaper as well as the city’s non-anarchistic newspaper.

A bitter student of others and ultimately completely self educated, Precious failed out of both conventional high school and university art school. Having taught themselves programming and computer engineering, they provided for themselves working on supercomputers in the datacenters of national labs and government facilities. In this time, they independently studied music, audio production, film production, narrative writing, and film production.

In 2013, they formed the band Precious Child, writing and recording their initial album “Bloody Knees” in 2014. Coinciding with the rise of DSLR video cameras, they directed and filmed their first music video for their song “I Fall”. Enamored with video production, they quickly followed up with a video for “Coming Down”. On October 31st, 2015 they closed the door on the computer world and moved to Los Angeles and began working full time as a solo artist.

In love with the synth sounds of the 70s as well as genre blending nu-metal of the 00s, in LA they forged their own wide ranging compositional style. Echos of industrial, black metal, synth pop, and electronica abound across their 6 albums and 78 released tracks. A touring artist, they’ve played hundreds of shows around the country to the underground goth, punk, and queer anarchist scenes. Sonic collaborators include Ulrich Wild, legendary Deftones producer and the film composer Rani Sharone. Precious Child currently has distribution via Sony and are published by Schubert USA.

In Los Angeles, they collaborated with numerous visual artists, musicians, and filmmakers. In 2016 they scored the film “Dream Dangerously”, about writer Neil Gaiman as well as music for the film “Cosplay Universe”. Additionally, they wrote the music for the shorts “Das Ding” and “This Role” directed by a Venice Biennale award winner which have been screened worldwide. Notable Precious Child LA performances have included Superchief Gallery, Coaxial Gallery, The Trocadero, Honeytrap Gallery, Queerpocalypse. Additional work included a sound/video multimedia installation at 2019 Art Basel.

Delving into music video work, finding a joy in lighting, the lens, as well as VFX, they have directed over 30 videos for artists around the country. Themes of their video work often focus on the mystery of identity and the contradictions of existence. Numerous videos feature unsettling imagery body horror and surreal physical transformations with a visual style inspired by Derik Vanlint and Darius Khondji.

In the George Floyd uprising of 2020, they were first compelled to join protestors in the streets as a voyeur.  Listening to Black voices, Precious came to understand that as a mixed race individual, the human rights that Black people fought for were their own rights as well. After getting tear gassed and rubber bulleted while merely being a camera-holding bystander at a rally at Pan Pacific Park on May 30th, they perceived the grotesque misallocation of social power to the police. Outraged, Precious Child became a full time activist in the racial justice movement.

Live streaming protest video from the streets, Precious Child contextualized and explained the circumstances that brought angry people together to march for social change. Their footage and interviews with victims of police violence have been featured on CNN, MSNBC, with millions of accompanying views on social media. Their visibility as a trans activist caused them to being specifically targeted with a hate campaign in 2021 for the Wi Spa Controversy. This controversy concerned an alleged transgender individual being in the woman’s area of a nude spa. Although this would be allowed under California non-discrimination law, a bigoted outrage reaction video made by an actor attending the spa went viral. It became such an issue that it was covered for a week straight by Tucker Carlson and all national news outlets.

Although she had never been to Wi spa, because of her activist notoriety, Precious Child was baselessly named as the individual in the spa. This controversy became a rallying point for both LGBTQ activists as well as anti-LGBTQ activists, culminating in two days of riots and street carnage on July 3rd and July 17th. Precious responded to these accusations with a collaborative music video directed by LA artist Frances Orr titled “TEAR UP” which both parodied the voices of hate they were subjected to as well as venerated supporters of LGBTQ rights.

Transformed as an artist and as individual by this experience, viewed as a resilient and grim trans icon, Precious began making even more political work including the full length album “AR-15s for Transgender Teens”. This album and accompanying videos explored the intimacy with both antagonists and friends that they found through their Wi Spa experience. The track and music video “VILENCE”, released for 2023 Pride specifically addresses the looming shadow of fascism in the USA and accompanying peril of LGBTQ people.

Today, Precious Child continues to play concerts around the USA and make motion picture work. Major upcoming projects include a feature film and a new full length album. Please subscribe to their mailing list for updates on screenings, concerts, and events.