aynoS Records
My name is Roshaun Stephenson, and I'm developing aynoS Records, a community-centered archival project focused on women and children impacted by incarceration. The project centers personal writing and creative storytelling from participants—including my mother, who is currently incarcerated—as primary sources. Rather than positioning incarcerated people as subjects, I'm working to establish them as co-authors whose lived experience challenges how carceral systems reduce lives to documentation. Through sound, archives, installation, and collaborative record-making, aynoS Records examines how memory, authorship, and lived experience can exist outside institutional control.
Scented Fingerprints
The first album introduces my mother and establishes my approach. The title examines how surveillance transforms intimacy. Something as personal as scent or touch becomes data.
Depth Perception
This album expands the archive through collaboration with my younger siblings. We experienced our mother’s absence differently. Different ages. Different memories. Different relationships to sustain.
Lillie's Greatest Hits
This album honors my grandmother, Lillie, the family's original archivist. Her 1976 driver’s license places her in an almost invisible demographic: a Black woman truck driver at a time when women made up less than 5% of the industry.
North Carolina
This album contains photographs from my grandmother's archive — her and my uncle as children in North Carolina, standing in front of their father's car. Inside is a roadmap with Anson and Raleigh marked, along with the parts of North Carolina where my mother is currently incarcerated. Alongside the map is a newspaper clipping — an essay contest about mothers, published May 9, 1993. I wrote that essay as a child. What I remember now is that I was writing about my mother and my grandmother at the same time. I couldn't separate them. Even then, I understood that you couldn't tell one story without the other — that the woman who left and the woman who stayed were part of the same truth.
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