Adrienne Teicher

Tag: queer

  • Pain Can Be A Place

    Pain Can Be A Place

    with Aérea Negrot

    Presentations

    2nd June 2024IT’S LOVER, LOVE – Wake for Lost Ones, Xposed Film Festival, Aquarium, Berlin

    In 2022, director Yony Leyser asked HYENAZ to develop a sound design for his film The Fourth Generation, which starred and was loosely based/not based on the life-force that is Aérea Negrot—singer, producer, DJ, and performer. One morning, Aérea joined us in our studio to help create an auditory mood for the film’s peak, where the protagonist places a cartoonish ticking time-bomb at the feet of Germany’s newly elected dictator.

    Image by Xposed Queer Film Festival

    Aérea took to the microphone and, over twenty or thirty minutes, unleashed a torrent of sounds, tones, voices—an overflow, a rupture that was beautiful, stirring, and at times unsettling. We took only what served the film and parked the rest in our deep memories.

    In 2023, Aérea died.

    For the 2024 edition of the Xposed Film Festival, a memorial for Aérea was arranged by Shu Lea Chang, Jürgen Brüning, and Alex Demitriou, who worked with Aérea on a number of Shu Lea’s films. Seeing the call for contributions, we returned to the material from the film and presented it at the wake.

    Kate remembered that there was more, a great deal more, than what we had used in the film. We opened the project in our DAW and stretched out the audio track, discovering an extended crescendo in which the text “Pain can be a place of future transformation” emerged.

    At times, the words sound like a prayer, at others a demand.

    We arranged Aérea’s voice in layers interspersed with drones formed by stretching out her syllables. Finally, with gentle chords and a melody, Aérea asks the listener to chant the mantra with her into infinity.

  • Audibility

    Audibility

    Featuring Donato Laborante

    Listen: https://listen.music-hub.com/tXVO4g
    Buy: https://hyenazhyenaz.bandcamp.com/track/audibility

    In their audiovisual artwork Audibility, HYENAZ delve into the politics of sound, inviting viewers to reconsider their relationship to the audible and inaudible, to silence and silencing. Filmed in an ancient man-made cave in the Murgia region of southern Italy, poet Donato Laborante delivers a poetic exploration of different forms of silence(s), holding in his hands the stalk of the Ferula Ferrita plant, an emblem of the Murgia’s unique ecology. The plant’s presence becomes an integral part of the artwork, questioning its animacy and whether it can consent to being part of an artwork.

    HYENAZ suggest that audibility is deeply political and involves the willingness of the listener to hear differently; that this process is a mutual co-practice of speaking and listening and challenges the entire sonic environment to relate otherwise. Intertwined with embodied, somatic experiences, this requires a shift in our listening practices. Audibility invites us to engage with silence not as a void, but as a dynamic and multifaceted presence.

  • The Circlusion of Fancy

    The Circlusion of Fancy

    The German version of this text on the italodisco artist Fancy was first published in Siegessäule for their regular column “Drehmoment”, in which musicians describe an album that is of key importance to them. Here is the text in English.

    The word “circlusion” is penetration’s other. It describes a sexual act in which one thing, normally an orifice, encloses another thing inside itself, for instance when an anus circludes a cock or a vagina circludes a dildo. Whereas this “being penetrated” is normally considered passive in heteronormative and even homonormative discourses, the circluding orifice can be both active and passive; even transcend this binary altogether.

    Popular music, for the most part, reproduces masculinist tropes of phallus-worship. Take a song like Closer by Nine Inch Nails. When Trent Reznor sings “I want to fuck you like an animal,” do you imagine that he is penetrating, or do you envision that Reznor is circluding you, with his anus, his mouth or his cunt? Our society valorises penetration and there is a direct line between the libidnal worship of frontmen on the one hand and fascist dictators on the other.

    Enter Munich-born italo-disco star Fancy, who I read as an out and proud circluder. Take the single Slice Me Nice. Atop Moroder-esque synths and drum machines, Fancy reveals to us that he is “like a cake that wants to be baked,” adding “It’s time for action baby, cut me in two”. Its a simple perhaps crude image, yet it makes the pleasure of making one’s body a host for another active.

    In L.A.D.Y. O, Fancy explicitly recasts the masochistic protagonist of the novel Story of O as a sadistic dominatrix. Whereas in the novel, the penetration of O’s orifices by members of a secret society is intrinsically linked to her submissiveness, in Fancy’s retelling, he becomes the submissive and begs her to “Tie me up, give me pain”. He goes on: “Chain me, I can’t stand no more” while assuring her that he is “gonna like it for sure.” O, in both the novel and in the song, could very well stand for orifice. But in Fancy’s hands O can no longer stand for object, for it is she who has the active role in his fantasy.

    This ingeniously closes the circle between active and passive, penetration and circlusion. Again and again, Fancy shows us that sex need not be a dyad, but a vast ocean of sensations, organs and ways of relating to one another.