Emerging form: The open loop

In the Sun Infusion video above, the open loop starts at minute 1 and builds until close to the end. The simple open loop is a great metaphor. It follows the breath - in - to the lungs - out, extending the self into the environment beyond the meatsack wrapped in skin. The repetition of the loop as a sonic event is a renewal, a refreshing of cells in the body, a shift, sometimes an addition to what is already there, each breath a stimulating difference. A qualitatively similar repetition, always changing as small shifts happen with each new breath. You don’t enter the open loop, you find yourself there, drawn back to the site of its formation as the pleasure of stimulation makes itself known. Going back for more, curiously gulping for another iteration, endlessly curious, drawing satisfaction, pleasure, fulfilling desire. To stay is to rest in difference, to value stimulation, to stand up for it. 

When the loop comes back on itself, it returns not just to melody but to vocal textures and to the frictions in the body. The resulting tensions from the physical pressure I am exerting as I am pushing myself into the floor feed this excess sensation. This building on top of itself, repeating, regenerating with each breath, breath that is viscerally audible, hyper, gasped, moves the pleasuring sensations out into the open air, drawing them out and drawing one in. The unpredictable yet repetitive movements send out signals of risk that focus in the attention on this potential danger: what will happen next? Where will I go? Can I be trusted? Am I on the edge? When it all ends it’s as if the spell breaks, I physically moved out of the trance, reaching a verticality that is too angular to contain all the madness. Residues linger in the form of movement and an erratic crazy smile wraps it all up in the last 30 seconds, a final stench of uncontainable chaos.

 I like fucking with people like this - it is entirely intentional and pleasures me even more: to take something so seriously that I’m going loopy with excitement to consume it and then dropping it to embrace something so fake and exaggerated like a crazy smile, that confuses with its superficiality and lightness. Here is the erratic in action, moving between extremes at the speed of my erotic pleasure. To believe in this power to shift in unexpected, radical ways is to believe in the ability of contradictions to coexist and potentiate each other. This leans into the power of inconsistency which liberates my body to first and foremost be motivated by its desire, pleasure and sensation of itself and then to look out for any forms that it might define through repetition.  

What I am giving you when I sing is the excess of selfhood, I’m bursting, bringing you closer to that boundary, to that vibrating membrane, feeling as if it’s you experiencing it, as if you are me, as if but not really. You can’t ever really experience from within me, but you can get close, very close. (Remember Elisabeth in the Hague?) You put your ear close to my skin to where you can feel my radiating heat as I sound all over you. But it’s not just sound. Something this raw, this intimate, this exposed. I’m bare and my sweat is dripping all over you. If you don’t wanna get wet, you better leave because there’s no other way. It’s beyond pleasure and pain, its in the excess, the vibrational excess. I’m giving you this sensual gift - through my body, my skin and tits and breath you remember your own body, its pleasures and desires, its pains and sorrows. You forget, for a moment, to think sound, you feel it. And you feel it in your guts and on your skin, in your own lungs and at the tip of your toes. We travel there together, needing each other. Grasping, holding and sharing it all. 

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It’s no wonder that the first time I sang like this, really sang like this in front of people I did it in a duet with my husband. Having him there reassured my sensual self that this kind of expression is safe to share, because it’s held within the framework of our love. I didn’t chase it, I didn’t even name it as sensual or erotic until a lot later, it just came out like that. The leaking excess of self. The bodily pleasure rising from the pelvis, travelling through me. Female excess felt in all cells at once. Voice dragging through the body like a rake. The tense body that has kept voice hidden, that has kept sensation at bay, is having voice touch all of its cells and cilia on the inside, tickling and scratching on its way out. I’m turned inside out for you constantly inside out, over and over with each breath. This is beyond pain and pleasure, this is jouissance. 

“Néstor Braunstein, elaborating and clarifying Lacan’s versions of jouissance, describes it as ‘positivity, it is a ‘something’ lived by a body when pleasure stops being pleasure. It is a plus, a sensation that is beyond pleasure.’ Jouissance, then, can be understood as excess sensation.” (Musser, 2018, p.13)

" Caress as signal and reassurance was as essential to them as it is to mother and child or to lover and lover; but its significance was social, not only maternal and sexual. It was part of their language, it was therefore patterned, codified, yet infinitely modifiable. “They’re always pawing each other,” some of the colonists sneered, unable to see in these touch-exchanges anything but their own eroticism which, forced to concentrate itself exclusively on sex and then repressed and frustrated, invades and poisons every sensual pleasure, every humane response: the victory of a blinded, furtive Cupid over the great brooding mother of all the seas and stars, all the leaves of trees, all the gestures of men, Venus Genetrix. " 

Ursula K. Le Guin - The Word for World Is Forest (1981)

0.s through the other 

humans. bodies in rooms next to mine. fear they will crush me. fear they will destroy me. feeling the fear, sounding the fear. tight throat, with love. retreating into space and things for comfort. muscle memory of becoming object, used by others, no power in me. reaching for shared risk to even up the game. entering into shared uncertainty. i as a subject but not the only subject. pouring selfhoods into each other to find the new blend.