Abby Castillo (she/her) is a transgender Mexican-American multidisciplinary artist working primarily in music, literature, visual and video art. She currently lives and works in Portland, OR, and she grew up at the US-Mexico border between San Diego and Tijuana.
As abbymachines, she produces and performs experimental pop music. She has opened for Guerilla Toss, Car Seat Headrest, David Liebe Hart, and Spoonboy. Her most recent musical release is The Meatmachine, a post-punk album of anti-capitalist songs. (2018), which is available at twinchicken.bandcamp.com. Her music can also be found at soundcloud.com/abbymachines.
As a writer she creates fictions, chronicles, and machine-generated poetry, which she publishes as zines and novellas. These texts trace the surreal contours of daily life during the collapse of late capitalist society. In 2020 she was awarded a Regional Arts & Culture Council (RACC) Catalyst grant to finish writing her novella A diet of worms. , as well as an artist-in-residence at the Independent Publishing Resource Center (IPRC), writing, illustrating, and publishing the zine series realgirl1994. These zines include reflections from her time as a labor organizer with the Burgerville Workers Union, essays about the political and ideological nature of the fast food industry, notes on audio/visual production and sound design, and reflections on gender transition.
Currently she is hard at work on her upcoming album Anarchy A and producing more issues of realgirl1994, both funded in part by a 2021 RACC Make/Learn/Build grant.