Snowflakes & Dog Whistles: Best Electroacoustic Ambient & Sexpanic, 1995-2017
TERRE THAEMLITZ
Snowflakes & Dog Whistles: Best Electroacoustic Ambient & Sexpanic, 1995-2017
Boomkat Product Review:
Blessed with some of the best ears and minds in the game, Terre Thaemlitz returns with an incomprehensible 29 track, 2hr 39min 2CD that picks up where the ‘Tranquilizer’ reissue left off with an expansive selection of electroacoustic ambient and computer music produced between 1995 and 2017 - the majority of which have been physically out of print for decades, including many special edits only available on this release. It makes for a peerless deep dive into the kind of psychoacoustic fantasy exemplary of an ingenious mind at work, with often shocking, always engrossing results.
Since formative experiments fucking with their father’s tape player in the 1970s, Thaemlitz has toyed with the fundamentals of sound organisation, of which club music (and her work as DJ Sprinkles) is just one constant strand of pursuit among many interwoven themes relating to, in their own words, “non-spiritualism, constructivism, historical materialism, social organizing, the AIDS crisis, sexual perversity, and gender deviance.” Oh aye, it’s a lot. But Thaemlitz mines many richly rewarding seams of interest in ways that make avant garde and marginalised lines of thought digestible, whilst illuminating fascinating angles of the pop cultural sphere in relief of deeply personal politics.
‘Snowflakes', the softly-spoken first disc, sweeps together some of Terre’s most delicate material. There's a layer of unease provided by psychoacoustic frequencies and spasmodic edits, providing balance to Thaemlitz's pliable pads and dying tech blips. It's "conventionally ambient", as Thaemlitz puts it, in a sense, given that many of the hallmarks of the genre are present, but the music never vanishes into the background. "Uninterrupted playback of this track for more than four hours may result in nausea, nervousness and/or mild disorientation," Thaemlitz stated in the liner notes at the time.
The key tracks from this album's second and third acts are shuffled between edits and originals as a clear picture emerges of Thaemlitz's motivations behind her most self-consciously "pretty" material. The tracks from 'Interstices' - cheekily billed as the 14th album in Mille Plateaux's non-existent Queer Media Series - are digitally eroded memories of familiar classical motifs, that "arise like the sound of stubble peaking through my concealer,". While on a 17-minute alternate version of 'Canto I: Rosary Novena for Gender Transitioning', originally the intro to the "world's longest album in history", she plays dreamy Satie-like piano phrases over tape damaged loops of Catholic rites and church bells, offsetting tranquility with foreboding tension. Even a short edit of 'The Dream Will Carry Me' - a plunderphonic soft rock heartburn - takes on a different character when sandwiched between these long-form meditations. By using the structure of ambient music as a metaphor, Thaemlitz peels back the decorative wallpaper covering American culture at large, revealing the irregular foundations that most of us choose to ignore.
On 'Dog Whistles', Thaemlitz's political ideas are made more explicit. Here, she assembles a sequence of concrète experiments, often turning interviews, debates and dialogs about gender and sexuality into surreal collages. "Sadly, what was primarily absurdist dialogue back in its day can indeed pass as commonplace rhetoric within the algorithms of today's gender and sexual discourses,". Set to a laptop-skewed loop of Donny and Marie Osmond's 'Morning Side of the Mountain', she splices together fragments of an early interview about sex change surgery on the 'Interstices' highlight 'There Was a Girl/There Was a Boy.INTERSEX', and 'What is Between is Missing' chews up now well-worn gender talking points as sub bass tones ooze and rumble in the lower registers. Even when the music is relatively placid, Thaemlitz's splintered treatment provides the same provocative dissonance as the brain-altering frequencies did on the first disc. It's ambient only to a point, and at its best, might as well be described as noise. One of the most resonant tracks is the opener from 1999's 'Love for Sale: Taking Stock in Our Pride', that deconstructs the neoliberal hijacking of queer culture and imagery by juxtaposing various ad interludes and news clips. Thaemlitz's radical non-essentialist message is clear, prescient and still - in an era of rampant "pinkwashing" that goes hand-in-hand with the removal of protections for queer people - sharply relevant.
“Most of the questions posed over the years in these tracks remain in tension with contemporary mainstream views, including those coming from the LGBT establishment. In this way, one might say a thread running through my projects is that they remain "unlistenable" to most. Any potential critical use value of these tracks emerges from understanding how they are utterly symptomatic of a particular social system - even in their dissonance. Or, to be more precise, because of their dissonance.”
please remember that we support Terre and Comatonse Recordings' efforts to keep projects offline, minor, and acting queerly. When purchasing this item, we ask you to refrain from uploading and indiscriminate sharing in any form. <3
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Housed in custom packaging hand assembled by Terre herself, including two double-sided insert cards, phonograph style anti-static inner sleeves, and two 4x4 panel poster insert printed on newsprint (472mm x 472mm) including a 9000 word essay.
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Boomkat Product Review:
Blessed with some of the best ears and minds in the game, Terre Thaemlitz returns with an incomprehensible 29 track, 2hr 39min 2CD that picks up where the ‘Tranquilizer’ reissue left off with an expansive selection of electroacoustic ambient and computer music produced between 1995 and 2017 - the majority of which have been physically out of print for decades, including many special edits only available on this release. It makes for a peerless deep dive into the kind of psychoacoustic fantasy exemplary of an ingenious mind at work, with often shocking, always engrossing results.
Since formative experiments fucking with their father’s tape player in the 1970s, Thaemlitz has toyed with the fundamentals of sound organisation, of which club music (and her work as DJ Sprinkles) is just one constant strand of pursuit among many interwoven themes relating to, in their own words, “non-spiritualism, constructivism, historical materialism, social organizing, the AIDS crisis, sexual perversity, and gender deviance.” Oh aye, it’s a lot. But Thaemlitz mines many richly rewarding seams of interest in ways that make avant garde and marginalised lines of thought digestible, whilst illuminating fascinating angles of the pop cultural sphere in relief of deeply personal politics.
‘Snowflakes', the softly-spoken first disc, sweeps together some of Terre’s most delicate material. There's a layer of unease provided by psychoacoustic frequencies and spasmodic edits, providing balance to Thaemlitz's pliable pads and dying tech blips. It's "conventionally ambient", as Thaemlitz puts it, in a sense, given that many of the hallmarks of the genre are present, but the music never vanishes into the background. "Uninterrupted playback of this track for more than four hours may result in nausea, nervousness and/or mild disorientation," Thaemlitz stated in the liner notes at the time.
The key tracks from this album's second and third acts are shuffled between edits and originals as a clear picture emerges of Thaemlitz's motivations behind her most self-consciously "pretty" material. The tracks from 'Interstices' - cheekily billed as the 14th album in Mille Plateaux's non-existent Queer Media Series - are digitally eroded memories of familiar classical motifs, that "arise like the sound of stubble peaking through my concealer,". While on a 17-minute alternate version of 'Canto I: Rosary Novena for Gender Transitioning', originally the intro to the "world's longest album in history", she plays dreamy Satie-like piano phrases over tape damaged loops of Catholic rites and church bells, offsetting tranquility with foreboding tension. Even a short edit of 'The Dream Will Carry Me' - a plunderphonic soft rock heartburn - takes on a different character when sandwiched between these long-form meditations. By using the structure of ambient music as a metaphor, Thaemlitz peels back the decorative wallpaper covering American culture at large, revealing the irregular foundations that most of us choose to ignore.
On 'Dog Whistles', Thaemlitz's political ideas are made more explicit. Here, she assembles a sequence of concrète experiments, often turning interviews, debates and dialogs about gender and sexuality into surreal collages. "Sadly, what was primarily absurdist dialogue back in its day can indeed pass as commonplace rhetoric within the algorithms of today's gender and sexual discourses,". Set to a laptop-skewed loop of Donny and Marie Osmond's 'Morning Side of the Mountain', she splices together fragments of an early interview about sex change surgery on the 'Interstices' highlight 'There Was a Girl/There Was a Boy.INTERSEX', and 'What is Between is Missing' chews up now well-worn gender talking points as sub bass tones ooze and rumble in the lower registers. Even when the music is relatively placid, Thaemlitz's splintered treatment provides the same provocative dissonance as the brain-altering frequencies did on the first disc. It's ambient only to a point, and at its best, might as well be described as noise. One of the most resonant tracks is the opener from 1999's 'Love for Sale: Taking Stock in Our Pride', that deconstructs the neoliberal hijacking of queer culture and imagery by juxtaposing various ad interludes and news clips. Thaemlitz's radical non-essentialist message is clear, prescient and still - in an era of rampant "pinkwashing" that goes hand-in-hand with the removal of protections for queer people - sharply relevant.
“Most of the questions posed over the years in these tracks remain in tension with contemporary mainstream views, including those coming from the LGBT establishment. In this way, one might say a thread running through my projects is that they remain "unlistenable" to most. Any potential critical use value of these tracks emerges from understanding how they are utterly symptomatic of a particular social system - even in their dissonance. Or, to be more precise, because of their dissonance.”
please remember that we support Terre and Comatonse Recordings' efforts to keep projects offline, minor, and acting queerly. When purchasing this item, we ask you to refrain from uploading and indiscriminate sharing in any form. <3
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TERRE THAEMLITZ Tranquilizer EP’s 1 - 3 (Set) Comatonse Recordings Electronic- 3 x 12" Set
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TERRE THAEMLITZ Tranquilizer EP’s 1 - 3 (Set) Comatonse Recordings Electronic
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