Editor’s Note: Grief, gore, piercing, blood, mentions of the death of a partner, PTSD, mentions of cannibalism as part of performance, descriptions of blood and gore as part of performance
When I am creating noise, I feel as though I have found the thing that I have been searching for my whole life. I have always been a person that will have a hobby or fixation I love for a year to a few years and then move on, like a pirate scavenging from place to place, picking up tools to add to the ever-growing compass but never feeling a sense of belonging. I do have a pretty hefty survival kit at this point, though. Noise is something that has embedded itself in me and is the closest I have ever felt to the deepest parts of everything inside me. While I was making the score for the cannibalism needle play porn I shot, and as my hands were moving at lightning speed across the synth, I had a moment where I was watching myself from above and realized that this is the most natural extension of who I am. Surrounded by wires and machines, I weave an intricate spell. When I am making noise, I am entering a state of full embodied channeling. I start to hear and create things that become their own form and trance.
As I was watching the bodies of my boyfriend and I covered in guts and blood, writhing and devouring each other and getting stitched together with needles and licking each others blood, I could hear the sounds that were meant to accompany each motion, and I could translate through my fingers exactly what I wanted to pinpoint. When scenes got heavier, I toggled and glitched sounds to match. When points of climax were reaching, I mimicked the feeling through synths and distorting levels. Noise is the ultimate catharsis; it is choosing to translate the unexplainable into sonic sound that can be ear splitting and shattering. I love when all of my sound is clipping and hitting the point right before the speakers will explode and to live in that state. It is a place that has allowed me to traverse realms, go into the underworld, to other planes of existence and return, able to survive another day. Without noise, I would not still be alive. Noise brought me back from the fractured and unbearable things that I have continued to survive and gave me a way through. It allowed me to put the jagged and untouchable shards inside me into a space where I could be understood. Noise connects me to life, death, and the beyond. It allows me to communicate with my life partner and bandmate who passed away, and also to envision different realities.
When I am creating noise, I feel as though I have found the thing that I have been searching for my whole life.
My partner who passed will speak to me through the music I am making. At a performance festival in Philly, I did a set where my needle top collaborator pierced me with 8 needles–4 on each side–and attached guitar strings across and connected a latex contact mic implement to pick up the sounds of the strings being played through my body. I went into the audience and let people play my body as an instrument and then bled over a picture of my partner who passed. Before my set, the festival organizer gave a speech about them and their impact on the world. After the speech, I rushed to start my set but my software kept crashing and wouldn’t play. I restarted it at least 3 times. I heard them tell me, ‘take a second and listen to what was just said about me’. After I did that, I opened the project again and it played completely fine.
Another time, I was playing a black and brown punk festival in the bay and did a set where I covered myself in holy ash and choked on it until I was throwing it up, then stapled and tied myself to a body, dragging it across the stage. This performance was an attempt for me to close the PTSD loop I was experiencing after doing the mortuary and cremation process for them after they passed. I kept attempting to start the set and it would glitch out as soon as I played the intro. I heard them say, ‘skip the intro. I don't like it.’ When I skipped the intro I made, the track played completely fine. I spoke to a friend about how flashback loops happen when a gate is open and there is space for the memory to travel back and forth with free will.
With grief performances, I am attempting to close these gates, even if it's just for a moment. It allows me to have a reprieve from the neverending chokehold of grief. I was once part of this traveling performance troupe that did site specific performances in the desert of the Salton Sea. We did a performance in a train tunnel where my friend tattooed their name on my head. I read a zine I had made for our one-year anniversary where I talked about how one of the first times we met it was during a Slab City trip for my 21st birthday. We were walking next to each other in a parallel line in the vast expanse of the desert and I hoped to always be walking next to them for the rest of my life after. The day of the performance, there were volatile desert winds for the entire day and as soon as I finished my set, the wind stopped.
With grief performances, I am attempting to close these gates, even if it's just for a moment.
Another performance I did for them was in response to the torturous heart pain that started after their death, where I sat in front of an installation I had made for them using automobile parts and punched a pig heart against my chest until it was pulp. To me, these performances are a way for me to not have to live with this grief alone. To have my agony witnessed and for it to resonate with others is something that has helped me feel like I do not have to carry the weight of this burden alone.
I recently finished a noise play with 3 collaborators where we had multiple scenes including being birthed out of a giant beast puppet and writhing in goop from inside the beast in a euphoric frenzy of bodies. One of the lyrics I wrote is, “with your guidance, I will forge a new way.” I feel that in how I continue to expand my creative muscle, not letting myself be inhibited by fear and trusting what I am conjuring. I just finished an EP called Corpse Bride that I made in honor of them and spent 4 days in the squat basement of a haunted textile factory, communing with them and pouring out things that have been living inside of me for the past 6 months since they passed. They speak to me often or send me signs but some of the most clear ones I receive are through music, because that is what we did together for 6 years. To me, performing and creating music is not just an activity I do for fun, it is a way that I make this sinister and unrelenting world a place that I can exist in.
Everything that I do translates into my music and performance, whether it’s sex work or farming, or even banging a rusted chain against a wall and recording the sound. I see noise as an extension of my body, as a way for me to breathe and maintain homeostasis. When I am dysregulated, triggered, or crashing out, I turn to making art so that I can get myself levelled enough to stay sane. To me, when I sweat, scream, and sound, I am exorcising and moving energy out. It allows things not to get trapped inside and drown me. Ideas will come to me like flowing electric currents and will shoot through me and out. I allow myself to be a vessel for what needs to be expressed, and it always moves me when people come up to me after and let me know that it made them cry or feel. The gift of making someone else feel through my creations is something that I never take for granted. When I think of all the times art has moved me, it truly means so much that I can do it. The web of beloved heathens I have cultivated through art is a community that has gifted me the ability to live my most authentic life and learn what it means to have each other through times where we are meant to be destroyed. To me, noise is resistance; it is taking things meant to be rigid and making them into forms that cannot be reproduced or packaged. Even AI is unable to make noise music.
Sometimes when I am having heavy PTSD symptoms, I take a bath and hold my head underwater and feel the water completely envelop me. I let myself stay in that state until I feel like I may explode from holding my breath and then I rise up for air. That first breath of relief reminds me that I am here.
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