In what ways do those two facets of life (religion and feminism) affect the sound of your music?
In a fun twist, my work does not at all engage with any schools of feminist thought or critical theory. This is intentional, as I am trying to approach the topic of survival in a way that is arresting and unconventional. Almost everything I do is informed by misogynist, male-dominated, and patriarchal models. I’m just reframing and re-contextualizing. So I work a lot with sound and imagery palettes inspired by the ideologies surrounding extreme music.
For instance, the voice and image of Aileen Wuornos appear often in my work. But my arrival at Aileen wasn’t an organic feminist choice, it was based on a lot of noise, metal, etc. using samples of serial killers or an album with a serial killer theme, and so on. In my humble opinion, whatever may have been, at some point, controversial or interesting about using dark imagery is dead; we’re so accustomed to it that it just becomes a sort of ambient signifier loop for genre placement – like: “ok we’ve got a Jeffrey Dahmer sample in here just a heads up we’re an evil band we’re into evil stuff.”
Also, where else can music go to get heavy and dark? I feel like we tap out at true Harsh Noise Wall. That’s the end. It’s the heaviest sound world there is. You listen to 35 minutes of The Rita putting a mic’ed pointe shoe through four pedals, the sound source totally obliterated into nothingness with every frequency maxed out the entire time — that’s the end of heavy music. Goregrind/hategrind, NSBM, racist power electronics – none of it holds a candle to that absolute decimation and entropy, it’s staring into a void.
So I don’t find most of the graphic depictions of (forgive my language here) ‘sending this dumb slut back to hell hearing her final screams as my throbbing erection pounds her maggot-filled cunt’ upsetting to my feminine sensibilities, most of it isn’t even well-executed enough to be taken seriously, I just find that it occupies this weird space of being simultaneously very loaded and totally obsolete, especially when we consider that none of these guys are actually sodomizing female corpses in their free time. So my thoughts were to flip this whole paradigm and to try to make it meaningful, to reframe extreme imagery for survivors of violence, upon whom very dark shit has actually been visited, and who may have been confronted with the possibility of committing homicide in self-defense to survive an attack. Aileen’s story is brutal and complex, it’s a lesson in how deeply flawed the system is for sex workers, sexual assault survivors, people with mental illness, everyone who slips through the cracks. When Aileen is in my work, I try never to edit her or manipulate the sample to make her sound ‘scary and cool’ and try to never outdo her with my own voice – that’s why, in the song “Disease Of Men”, her voice runs throughout, loudly. I want to take backseat. I like to think that our voices are working in tandem. I want people to actually listen to what she has to say.
My relationship to religion is very complex, and the sound world of my work is very much influenced by liturgical music, whether that’s saccharine Christian Contemporary, or the sacred works of Haendel or William Byrd or even further back, Hildegard of Bingen. I’ve always had this really strong affinity for music, structures, and artworks built for God. I don’t know what I believe in at this point as I’ve been a hardline atheist since high school, but the concept of religion serves many purposes in my work: the vengeful God, the merciful God, God as the only place you can turn.
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