I have never sat down and “put on” Plague Mass. It is not that kind of media, for me. I find no pleasure there. That is, consequently, its power. Similarly, I have played through the handheld analog footage one time only, with good headphones and a resolve not to pause, break or interrupt. It’s a work that commands attention. It takes from you. It puts you through the ringer because Galás holds the gut of that moment in those gore-soaked hands. The rage, the pain, the terror, the zealotry. Her voices rise up into a banshee wail billowing through the expansive cathedral architecture and the vibration that the sound makes bears the pain of experience. She offers her body, she offers her throat. The emotion touches you, even if the heft of that embodied space shrinks to tinny vibrations when heard through headphones. You can still feel it, but it takes some imaginative filling-in. The extremes to which Galás goes apes an approximation, an individual’s translation of that horror.

I look to Plague Mass. My respect and my reverence invite it inside me, like a bad possession movie. I didn’t see its original performance – I was alive, but I wasn’t old enough to be there or to fathom its magnitude. My inability to view and comprehend the full composition has resonance with my relation to the crisis for which it serves as a historical marker. If media, for Peters, are clouds, can a similarly nebulous memory be a form of media, with its demand for resolution and preservation? Do Galás’ shrieks cut that pain into me precisely because I was not there? There are no more tickets to the funeral.⁶ Though I am aware of what went down, does this Frankensteining fasten my experience into bearing witness?

For others, I know this pain to be catharsis. The same year that Mute released Plague Mass, theatre visionary Reza Abdoh mounted his magnum opus, Bogeyman. The set was a three-floor structure, each level a separate stage split into at least three scenarios, one of which was upside-down, with performers delivering their lines while fastened to the ceiling. Stairs flanked both sides and bodies ran up and down as they manically delivered Abdoh’s vitriolic text. Juliana Francis was dressed like the Bride of Frankenstein, Cliff Diller, impresario of the zeitgeisty S&M bar, Club Fuck, was a cast member, as was Sandy Crisp/the Goddess Bunny, the disabled trans woman who tap-danced her way into the world’s first viral video. The father character, played by Tom Fitzpatrick, wore syphilis sores on his face⁷. Frenzy was the ingredient and bombardment the methodology, with singing, dancing, stripping, screaming, projected video and performing multiple scenarios in different sets simultaneously. 

Abdoh would die of HIV/AIDS-related complications three years later at the age of 32. He left instructions that his plays should not be staged after his death, so all that remains are documentation videos shot by Adam Soch. This places me in a similar situation to experiencing Plague Mass, although Galás is still with us and Reza is not. I click the small blue Vimeo play button on my 14” laptop and another painful analog past spools into digital life. I squint to make out details. The work’s medium is assault. How do you see linearity inside a storm? Nevertheless, I’m not overcome, exactly. I don’t glower in a darkened room, dwarfed by the daunting edifice before me, stressing about which scene to hone in on. I don’t smell it.⁸ It’s another Frankenstein, a ghost I can conjure only a glimpse of. The maximalism of this vulgarity, the rancour, is a flipside to Galás stark staging. Despite my distance, what palpably remains is the urgency that courses through both texts, and this calls to mind Douglas Crimp’s seminal essay, Mourning and Militancy, wherein he writes, “[u]nconscious conflict can mean that we may make decisions—or fail to make them—whose results may be deadly, too.” Hopefully, “we may also be able to recognize—along with our rage—our terror, our guilt, and our profound sadness. Militancy, of course, then, but mourning too.”⁹

I use my imagination to bring Bogeyman back to a mediated kind of life. But why do I even try? Why endure the pain stitched into that performance? It’s because instinct tells me that Bogeyman, or Reza, rather, is my kin, as are those who sought the work out. He and Galás could be easily situated within the Industrial movement, which flourished in that era. Coined by Monte Cazazza, “Industrial Music for Industrial People,” the key source text on the Industrial movement was edited by V. Vale, whose RE/Search publication series sprang out of the success of his punk tabloid, Search & Destroy. The Industrial Handbook (RE/Search issues #6/7) fulfilled the pre-internet task of assembling a roster, identifying and defining a nascent genre: this was a body of work born of capitalism’s decay, the mangled form of man in post-Industrial Revolution societies. “[G]rounded in a post-Holocaust mortality,” Vale writes in his introduction, “all things gross, atrocious, horrific, demented and unjust are examined with black-humor eyes.”¹⁰ The autonomy of Vale’s DIY imprint, combined with his innovative and confrontational black-and-white print design, proved a perfect foil for its subjects, who sent their messages out through shock tactics, after having established themselves in close-knit, regional scenes. 

As those scenes grew, they blossomed into my procession. Not that this crowd was massive. We were deeply subcultural, still, but being there, each one of us was, in our way, making a statement and acquiescing. We didn’t belong anywhere but there. Dick Hebdige writes, “[t]he communication of a significant difference then (and the parallel communication of a group identity), is the ‘point’ behind the style of all spectacular subcultures.”¹¹ It soothed me to belong, but it also primed me towards the night of Galás communiqué. Within a community I feel indoctrinated; I’m predisposed to engage actively with congregational media. “The brain becomes an input-output machine, with which, if one knows both the input and processing rules, the outcome can be predicted.”¹² I could have faced that gust of Galás’s first note and been jarred, nauseous, ejected myself from the space—the sound is truly that vexing. But I stayed with my band of outsiders and I basked. I trusted this space and did so quietly, seated. I internalized the utterances that spewed out of our vocalist and I held the feelings that they provoked for as long as they could swim about in me. That we sat quietly enraptured is a consequence of certain cultural signifiers organized through the staging and presentation of the evening. However outré, Abdoh, and like him, Galás, won their exceptional status by proving merit within rigorous cultural sectors. The bones are avant-garde theatre and opera, but the guts are queer, punk, mythic and primordial. Reading the room, we sit respectfully, quietly, and take it all in. One of ours made it up there. That is how our reverence is expressed, through our acknowledgement of admission. We want to stay amongst our kin, so we gussy up and go to church.

But what if we wanted to dance? Rise like a trancer and express the spirit?

Well, then we rave.

For the past two years I have lived in Santa Cruz, California, population 61,950. There’s no queer bar, and the confluence of social factors means that daily dress leans towards the outdoor, hippie, tech bro or mountaineer. So, when Christeene, the genderfuck drag queen to whom I handed over my former Brooklyn apartment, texted that she would be opening for the queer Swedish performer Fever Ray (Karin Dreijer, one half of the avant-pop duo, The Knife) at the Fox Theater in San Francisco, I leapt at the opportunity of a ticket. I play the self-titled Fever Ray LP often, though subsequent releases have left me cold. Still, I go with an Oakland-based art and music journalist because we’d talked about writing something about listening to Coil on ketamine, but nothing had yet come of it.

The crowd is thick—I guess I hadn’t thought this through, but the happy happenstance of my attendance means that I join in the convergence of all the anarcho and electronic music queers in the Bay Area, who all seemed to be under one roof this evening.  I relax, once more with kin. 

In line, I’m immediately grabbed from behind by a punky barback from the Los Angeles leather bar, The Eagle. “What are you doing here?” I ask. “I could say the same,” he shoots back. And then I clock that he’s with a mutual friend, who used to run events at The Stud, a San Francisco queer bar that lost its long-standing home in the South of Market neighborhood at the start of the pandemic. Inside, I grab some more hands and squeeze. I see Bus Station John, club promoter and DJ for the weekly Tubesteak at the Tenderloin dive, Aunt Charlie’s. I wave across the crowd. He’s dyed his grey beard jet black. The lights go down. My drag queen serves on stage. I get a drink. It costs a small fortune. We stand on the floor in the Theater’s middle tier, surveying the crowd, which is giving me life. I quietly take the mass in, beaming, feeling a tingle as I realize just how much I needed this, and then Fever Ray comes on with a five-piece, all-femme-presenting band, and they sound good. 

Halfway through their set, they start to play the fifth single from the album that they’re touring, Radical Romantics. ‘Even It Out,’ it’s called, and something unexpected occurs. “This is for Zacharias / Who bullied my kid in high school / There's no room for you / And we know where you live.” Dreijer, who reinvents a different abject stage veneer for each record, sings into the mic on its stand with their cropped blonde hair combed into a cowlick, smeared make-up on their eyes and an oversize white business suit. Like a monochromatic Beetlejuice, they’re equal parts clown and ghoul. “One day, we might come after you / Taking back what's ours.” The style of singing that Dreijer carried over from The Knife is multi-tracked, so the two backup performers that appear alongside them all sing together in unison to achieve that choral effect live. But when they move into the song’s chorus of sorts, a roar erupts across the venue, “and then we cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut.” I spin around and watch most of the queers in this 2,800 person capacity space, raise their fist and scream along, “Cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut / Cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut / Cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut” 

“The world treats us as wrong,” writes McKenzie Wark, in her new book, Raving. She celebrates the “temporary, artificial environment made by [combined] labors… that confronts ravers with a set of constraints and possibilities.” For Wark, losing oneself to dance music in a mass of bodies is a nexus for dissociative healing. She elaborates this in ways that echo the complex directionality of communication and listening surveyed above, quoting Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s concept of the surround: “We ask and we tell and we cast the spell that we are under, which tells us what to do and how we shall be moved, here, where we dance the war of apposition. We’re in a trance that’s under and around us.”¹³ Dreijer, as Fever Ray, makes many aesthetic choices to steer us towards classifying this project as Industrial music: shock tactics, violent subject matters, grisly humor, hell—plus, the track was co-produced by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross of Nine Inch Nails. But I look around at the crowd, as it weaves in the moment. The beat and its attendance, which is to say drive, is really that of dance culture. This is a zone of pleasure. The cover of the prior Fever Ray record, Plunge, similarly utilized the aesthetics of Black Metal, while perpetuating a techno-euphoria in sound. The queers who pump their fists about me, my community, respond in a way that draws me towards rave, rather than an Industrial underground or the worlds of theatre and opera. This is a whole other bouquet of precepts. This is an indie pop space. This is a single. People pop this track into Spotify playlists. This is a story about anti-bullying, kind of, because the bully is destroyed through (the threat of?) perpetuated violence. But, goddamn. The queer faces glow in that crowd as they roar that word over and over, together, “cut.”¹⁴

“Does ‘cut’ have an onomatopoeic quality? Do we acoustically/haptically experience the sharp-edged tool slice, sever, nick, slash?” Ironically, Eva Hayward leans into the queer enunciation of the word cut, in her “phenomenological enmeshment” of the ANOHNI and the Johnsons’ track, “The Cripple and the Starfish.”  This brilliant interpretation inverts the crux of the matter, however, because ANOHNI’s cutting is an invitation: it runs inward, is masochistic. But perhaps there is some prefigural resonance in Hayward’s analysis for this room of minoritarian bodies. “I am not interested in how the cut in the song is an absence (as in castration) but rather in how cutting is a generative enactment of ‘[growing] back’ or healing.”¹⁵ Another Frankenstein.

As a face in the crowd, I’ll risk speaking for my present subculture and say that few in that room want to enact bodily harm upon another person. Exploring the narratology of the song grants us leeway into how it might be instinctually performed in unison and inhabited. The threat of violence in this song was never direct to begin with. Dreijer is singing about their narrative child, in past tense. Harm done to the child results in a mothering impulse to threaten with violence. The child, of course, is a mordantly steeped semiological tool, so I’d rather grant Dreijer the benefit of the doubt, and interpret their use of the child as a means of speaking to the social order, pop song as this is.¹⁶

I have witnessed the joy and palpable release in a room filled with queer people crying out together in a song-play of revenge porn. This narrative child is vague enough to stand in for the traumatic childhood memory of nearly every queer in that room (and it isn’t a small room). This is pop music (and multi-tracked) so the authenticity of Galás’s cries and the offering of her own body is supplanted by something else. It’s convex. Through all these masks, we know nothing of Dreijer, but maybe that’s useful. Maybe here in a body of peers, we share in the knowledge of this pain. In a moment of jubilant dissociation we can even it out, embodying the militant mother, too. And, within ourselves for that glorious moment, be all we need for our care. We can take these words in and do what we need with them, and this is what we release: Cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut. 

___

[1] Judith O. Becker, Deep Listeners: Music, Emotion, and Trancing (Indiana University Press, c2004).
[2] John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
[3] John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (Chicago, United States: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 15.
[4] Diamánda Galás, Plague Mass: (1984--End of the Epidemic) (London: Mute, 1991), 15.
[5] Plague Mass, video, 1991, https://vimeo.com/563229549.
[6] Diamánda Galás, The Shit of God, Serpent’s Tail High Risk (New York ; Serpent’s Tail, 1996), 41.
[7] PS 1 Contemporary Art Center et al., Reza Abdoh (Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2021), 246.
[8] Following a screening of Adam Soch’s documentary Reza Abdoh: Theatre Visionary, I joined some core members of the troupe and a gripe was tossed out, “yeah well you didn’t have to carry Sandy up and down those steps every night! God she smelled!” This nugget sticks with me not as gossip but a threshold where media’s approximation eludes the sensate.
[9] Douglas Crimp, “Mourning and Militancy,” October 51 (1989): 17–18.
[10] V. Vale, Industrial Culture Handbook., RE/Search 6 (San Francisco, CA: RE/Search Publications, 1988), 2.
[11] Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style, New Accents (London: Methuen, 1979), 106, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203139943
[12] Becker, Ebook of Deep Listeners, 7.
[13] McKenzie Wark, Raving, Practices (Durham: Duke University Press, 2023), 8–9.
[14] Speaking to a colleague, it was brought to my attention the dubious similarities here to the campaign chants “lock her up! Lock her up!”
[15] Eva Hayward, “More Lessons from a Starfish: Prefixial Flesh and Transspeciated Selves,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 36, no. 3/4 (2008): 71.
[16] Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Series Q (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 6.

previous / next