Kendra Smith and the Sixth Way of Disappearing
In 1995, Kendra Smith released Five Ways of Disappearing on 4AD and then did something that seemed quaint even then: she vanished. Not into rehab or a comeback tour postponed indefinitely, but into a Northern California cabin with chickens, a donkey, and no phone line. When Rolling Stone's Gina Arnold made the pilgrimage to document this hermitage, she found an artist who had already answered the question most musicians spend their careers avoiding—what happens when you mean it?
Smith's disappearance carried a different weight than the canonized male vanishings of rock mythology. When Syd Barrett retreated, the culture built monuments to his absence. When Mark Hollis went silent, his refusal became its own aesthetic statement, endlessly analyzed and revered. Smith simply left, and the industry forgot to notice. No vigils, no where is she now? retrospectives for decades. The silence around her silence revealed an asymmetry: when women leave, they're not mysterious—they're dismissed.
But that erasure may have preserved something essential. Unlike the carefully curated exits of her male counterparts, Smith's withdrawal wasn't a performance. The solar panels weren't aesthetic props; they were how she powered her life. Five Ways of Disappearing wasn't a farewell gesture meant to echo through time—it was a record made by someone who had already stepped outside the frame. Where Opal had offered desert-mirage psychedelia, this album presented something starker: cyclical structures, ritualistic repetitions, her voice flattened and half-absent, as if she were already fading from her own recordings.
The album arrived at an odd moment for 4AD, when the label's once-coherent cathedral reverb aesthetic had fractured into diverging evolutionary paths—Lush pivoting toward Britpop hooks, Mojave 3 softening Slowdive's shoegaze into acoustic haze, Tarnation gesturing toward alt-country before the genre calcified. Smith's record fit none of these emerging patterns. It sounded premodern, hermetic, patient. While her labelmates were rebranding for a post-grunge landscape, she was recording music that seemed to come from outside linear time entirely.
The hermetic utterance of Five Ways strikes an even starker contrast when placed against the grand statements being made elsewhere in 1995. Radiohead's The Bends was already mapping technological alienation through increasingly layered production. Björk's Post treated the studio as a laboratory, pushing sonic boundaries outward in every direction. Alanis Morissette's Jagged Little Pill weaponized confession, scaling intimacy to arena proportions. Even Mazzy Star's Among My Swan—released the same year and sharing Smith's dream-folk lineage—operated within the genre she'd helped establish, but treated it as something to perfect rather than abandon. These were albums designed to explode outward, to make claims on the listener's attention through volume, innovation, or emotional intensity.
Smith's record did none of this. It didn't showcase production as innovation, didn't build songs toward climactic release, didn't use her voice to demand or seduce. Where her contemporaries were asking "how much can we say?" or "how far can we push this?", Five Ways seemed to ask a different question entirely: "how little do I need to say for this to be complete?" The album's modesty wasn't strategic understatement—it was structural refusal. In a year of outward explosions, Smith offered a deliberate implosion: everything collapsing inward to a single sustainable point, a work complete at a scale requiring no amplification to justify its existence.
Three decades later, from the vantage point of 2025, Smith's choices read less as eccentricity and more as prophecy. She withdrew at the precise moment when the grid was becoming inescapable—1995, when AOL discs flooded mailboxes and email began colonizing daily life. Her refusal wasn't nostalgic but structural: an understanding that every connection carries a cost in attention, noise, dilution. In an era when artists are expected to function as content nodes, constantly signaling and updating, her gesture of selective permeability looks like foresight.
What Smith modeled was creative sufficiency—work scaled to human dimensions, self-sustaining and locally powered. The harmonium drones and earthbound percussion of Five Ways of Disappearing weren't ornamental but functional, tools for tending a psychic garden. This stands in stark opposition to the extractive logic of infinite reproducibility that defines contemporary creative labor. She made something enough, then stopped.
Her earlier work, The Guild of Temporal Adventurers EP from 1992, had still gestured outward—backward guitars, tape loops, time travel as metaphor. Five Ways flipped the telescope. The temporal excursion became a withdrawal rather than exploration. If Opal was about drifting through mirages, this final album documented the place where mirages no longer appear.
After Five Ways, Smith disappeared so thoroughly that her 2017 homecoming appearance on The Dream Syndicate's How Did I Find Myself Here? felt like a transmission from another dimension—her voice reappearing like a radio signal that had been traveling through space for decades. That spectral cameo only emphasized how complete her withdrawal had been, and how little the culture had missed her.
But this raises a question: what form could Smith's disappearance take in 2025, when withdrawal has become nearly impossible? When the grid is wireless and internal, when algorithms track even our absences?
Perhaps there's a sixth way of disappearing that she never recorded—not withdrawal into literal remoteness, but the cultivation of opacity within visibility. This wouldn't mean going offline (an increasingly futile gesture) or producing less (everything multiplies automatically now). Instead, it would mean withholding legibility. Resisting translation into formats that convert every gesture into consumable content. Making work that insists on context, locality, incompleteness—that refuses the compression required for algorithmic distribution.
The sixth way isn't about absence. It's about remaining present without surrendering to comprehension. It's the harmonium drone that can't be reduced to a TikTok snippet, the essay without SEO optimization, the art that demands physical presence and offers no digital substitute. It's the practice of being seen while refusing to be known on terms other than your own.
Smith's five ways belonged to a moment when physical disconnection was still possible. The sixth way belongs to our haunted, hyperconnected present—not deleting yourself, but ghosting the system by becoming unreadable to it. Not fleeing visibility, but declining to perform legibility.
In a culture that conflates attention with meaning and exposure with existence, this may be the most radical gesture available: to demonstrate that it's still possible to disappear without being lost. To create deliberately at an unprofitable tempo. To tend small ecologies of sound and meaning that operate outside extractive circuits. To understand that sufficiency—not scale, not reach, not influence—might be the most sustainable form of artistic practice.
Kendra Smith went to her cabin with her chickens and solar panels thirty years ago. She made her record, stepped away, and the culture forgot to mythologize her. That lack of mythology may be her most valuable legacy. She showed that disappearance doesn't require drama or redemption arcs. Sometimes it just means deciding that your creative peak doesn't require continued visibility. Sometimes it means building something modest and complete, then moving on to the next necessary thing.
The sixth way of disappearing, then, isn't a solution but a strategy—one among many with specific payoffs and costs. To exist within perception without being consumed by it. To make work that matters without mattering in ways the system can monetize. To practice opacity as an art form, knowing that even opacity can be reappropriated.
Smith's withdrawal preserved her work but ensured her erasure. Barbara Manning's decades of sustained practice—releasing albums, playing shows, continuing regardless of reception—represents visibility without escalation, presence without performing availability. Liz Harris's Grouper cultivates radical illegibility through near-darkness and submerged vocals, yet even that carefully constructed mystique becomes another surface for projection, the enigmatic woman reimagined as shrine. These aren't isolated choices but a spectrum of refusals: Kim Deal returning with solo work at 63, Kristin Hersh sustaining herself through constant gigging, Liz Fraser appearing only when and how she chooses, Heidi Berry leaving music entirely for teaching. Different covers, different costs, all refusing the same erasure.
These strategies don't escape the structural problem: that women who refuse to perform desirability face erasure whether they disappear or remain, that the male gaze finds ways to metabolize even the most deliberate refusals. Men who vanish become myths; women who vanish are forgotten. Men who stay obscure become artists' artists. Women who do the same play to small rooms while fanboys turn opacity into shrine-keeping.
But strategies matter even when they're not sufficient. They create different possibilities, preserve different things, open space for work that operates outside circuits of infinite replication. Smith's silence preserved autonomy. Manning's persistence enabled decades of uncompromised work. Harris's illegibility protects her music from easy commodification. Different refusals, different costs, different forms of partial freedom.
In 2025, as artists drown in demands for constant content and perpetual self-documentation, Smith's example offers no clean escape—only the demonstration that refusal itself remains available as a practice. That it's still possible to choose which terms to refuse and what you're willing to sacrifice. That opacity, even when it can't fully protect you, can preserve something: not innocence, not invisibility, but the modest integrity of work made at a human scale, for reasons the algorithm can't parse and the market can't monetize.
Seen but not captured, heard but not translated, known but never fully consumed.