Number 23: Sex Is Something (You’ll Never Forget)

In one of my other blogs, The Naked Old Man, I’ve been exploring the why of my art, the reasons I seem to have been obsessed with sex for so many years (well, I touch on the subject, as I do here in some of these posts such as “Art” and “The Naming”). In that essay I explored art as the debris of thought, working on the idea that for some of us the making of art is really just how we think. This obviously applies to my graphic and literary stuff.

I don’t know how the sounds of “Sex Is Something (You’ll Never Forget)” can be  passed off as a residue of thought but the verbal content is an excellent example of what was going through my head the first few decades of my adult life, in which I point out some of the crazy obsessions and idiocies we have. Of course, as the biologists and Christians never tire of telling us, we’re just the propagators of DNA or God’s commandment. I’m not going to argue about ultimate purposes or first principals but I will point out that neither view fits our experience (as the absorption of nutrients does not fit our experience of a meal). As a species we have made sex into a means of communication and part of our social life. And as such, it is something we neither tire of nor forget.

Sex Is Something (You’ll Never Forget), draft 1, May 23, 1997:

 

For me 1997 was the year of the sampler. I had so much fun wandering around our house and yard recording little snippets of sound for use in my recordings. It’s something I hardly ever do any more, I think, because the recording devices I now use allow me to record as long as I want to—and who has time to process hours of sound into useable pieces of one shots and loops. On the Roland MS-1 I had 28 seconds to play with. Limitation is sometimes a gift, as so many in ‘puterland are discovering (now our limitations become an act of will rather than technical).

The elephant-like hooting sound is from a rain gutter. I wish I had gotten a photo of the squirrel guard on that old bird feeder (something we tore down shortly after I captured these sounds). It was like a crinoline of sheet metal just below the feeder box that I use in place of a cymbal.

My reference document for the samples captured for “Sex Is Something”. It shows the assigned pad, MIDI note, and I forget what else in the little boxes down the left side. In the larger column is a description of each sound.

 

Half a set of Remo Sportstix drumming practice sticks. I bought these in 1996. I keep talking about them so I’d better show you. They were my primary percussion tool because the attack was minimized (you won’t hear the strike as much as the resonance of the object struck). It’s been impossible to find any photos online, which makes me think Remo no longer makes them.

Each Sportstix had a padded head in the shape of a ball (I’ve seen basketball and soccer ball). Now, of course, I know that you can get practice sticks but at the time this is all I was familiar with.

I bought a couple sets of Remo Sportstix from the self-professed MIDIots at B-Sharp Music on Central Avenue in Northeast Minneapolis. They were all about playing your instruments. Not my type.

 

The whole thing is relentlessly in 15/8 time at 140 BPM. The bass part was composed and notated, recorded to MIDI sequencer in both real time (performed) and step time (programmed). The synth parts were arbitrary, performed and played back on a Roland XP-10. The repetitive rhythm patterns were constructed with a grid in the sequencer while the other samples were triggered with the XP-10 as a performance. Considering that I have handwritten text it seems likely it was written as I put the sounds together (but, who knows, it might have been something written a couple years earlier that I then stumbled across and tossed it in the folder with the composition).

A page of the handwritten text, probably jotted down as I pieced together the audio in May, 1997.

 

Just for the hell of it I’ll throw in an instrumental version of the thing that I recorded to stereo cassette to test the arrangement before deleting the sync track as I added vocal (draft 1 was recorded to 4-track cassette).

 

In 2010 I did a draft 2 in ACID Pro, on my computer, but have no record of it except in some notes I’d made. It might just have been the individual tracks of the 4-track cassette copied and mixed. In 2011 (February 20th) I mixed draft 3. That was reconstructed in part as an upload of the MIDI data (using Battery as a playback sampler) for the samples. I think the synth parts are new performances rather than just new sound sources for the old performances. Except for the bass they are all presets from Native Instruments’ Reaktor 2-Osc.

Here are some notes made nearer the time of the ACID drafts: “Draft 2, which has been in progress most of the summer, reuses the MIDI tracks from draft 1 but entirely different sound modules. The samples were set up as a kit in Battery 3, where I had all kinds of possibilities for tweaking the sounds. The MIDI data for the samples was severely trimmed. The bass was a composite of three basses, edited in Kore 2 (one is from Massive, one from Reaktor (Carbon?), and, I think, the third is from FM8). All four synth tracks are now presets from Reaktor’s 2-Osc. Synth.

The text was revised, not so much with coherence in mind but to eradicate some of the more embarrassing parts of the original, and the vocal parts were re-recorded using the tube in a Presonus Bluetube, then further processed with Guitar Rig 4.

Draft 3 is just a rerecording of the vocal 2/19/2011. On draft 2 my voice was too squeaky because of post nasal drip. This time recorded directly into the Focusrite Saffire without a preamp.”…(The Saffire was a firewire audio interface that gave me nothing but trouble since the day I bought it, yet I didn’t realize just how much trouble until I replaced it with a USB interface. Suddenly my computer stopped crashing. I replaced it with an M-Audio Fast-Track Pro that got lost in limbo when Avid spun M-Audio. No one had a Windows 8 driver for it as of July 2013 when I bought a new computer. So, even though it was only a year old and I bought it so it would be compatible with a new computer, I had to replace it. Almost exactly the same device: M-Audio M-Track Plus.)

Sex Is Something (You’ll Never Forget), draft 3, February 20, 2011 (mastered September 23, 2012):

 

Sex is something you’ll never forget

Sex is the explosion that can kill and maim, the uncontrollable blast slamming us into each other. Broken off from the fullness of human experience, a disgusting little fragment of biological shrapnel invisible until it strikes out in a terrorist assault shredding the social façade.

Sex is little more than animal panting and thumping, a genetic residue grunting toward a tiny moment of release. At its worst, sex is the random destruction of nihilism unredeemed by any form of creation. It’s an act of violence that begins and ends in self desecration.

Sex is an instant of oblivion, a cheap respite from thought and feeling, all considerations of personality and history disposed of, a fleeting reprieve from the inner eye of judgment.

Sex is something you’ll never forget

Sex is the embarrassment of science, a titillation misunderstood by researchers and theorists, both stimulant to and distraction from their penetrating work. Human sexuality is not for reproduction. Sex is for communication, a social bridge between contemporaries—only incidentally bridging generations. Perhaps like insects—though I’ve never experienced arthropod coitus, and we can only guess at their motives—an insane few humans copulate for the express purpose of reproduction. Why does this mythological legacy exert such paradigmatic force that even scientists still speak of reproduction and sex in the same breath.

Sexual dimorphism is not sexual dichotomy. Such prejudice restricts our ability to communicate. The insistence on moral and reproductive dichotomy, the eternal truth of male and female, the obsession with polarizing the universe is pervasive censorship internalized and applied to our own behavior. It is mental slavery. It is denial of our complexity. Religion and philosophy are little thoughts compared to the greatness of the real world. We conform to very small thoughts.

Sex is something you’ll never forget

Sex is the gruesome periodical in religious publication, the steamy tabloid slipped into the utilitarian grocery bag. Let’s cheapen it let’s cheapen it let’s cheapen it. Let’s take grandeur and reduce it to sin. Then cheapen the enigmatic powerhouse of sin into a dirty little habit, a source of gossip and moral superiority. Then we can have a trite sermon on Sunday to pretend we’re at peace with God. Let’s deal with it the way we deal with all things, let’s make it seem necessary but insignificant so we’ll cease to see the power to create or destroy.

Sex is the financial bonanza of the century. We’ve had the sexual revolution! Yes, we’ve had a revolution, the sexual revolution in marketing. Sex for sale! Sex for sale! Give us a dollar! Sex for sale! As long as it’s not real, as long as it’s ultimately cerebral—if only we could restrict the masturbation—sex for sale! If it’s indirect, easy to package, electronically feasible, locally zoneable— sell it. Sex for sale!

Sex is something you’ll never forget

Sex is a deep root running up the center of your being. The tendrils spread and twist their way until they reach every cell in symbiotic collusion. Your brain is a sexual organ. Your skin is a sexual organ. Your muscles and bones, your sense of space and place and embrace make a sexual organ. There should be no part of you free of complicity.

Sex is real. Sex is so goddamned real that it has us tearing up the world to get away from that reality. When are we going to stop compartmentalizing our lives? When are we going to follow one of our major social roots, recognize and feel our way through our own bodies, acknowledge that our emotions are imbued with sex, accept that our thoughts are not really on business and never have been? When are we going to love the fact that nothing about ourselves is pure? When are we going to relax enough to touch one another? When are we going to stop believing the lies of every institution ever known? When are we going to break the faith of our ancestors? When are we going to create an new world order, a truly new world order?

Sex without sensuality is violence, pounding, bodies pounding on each other. Sex and sensuality without love is delightful, beautiful, delicious but ungratifying, like a great meal with the wrong ambience. I hope never to condemn casual encounters—the merely pleasant—but I want to say there’s so much more. Love and trust will open your senses beyond anything opened by technique and scenario and accoutrements. The things you really need cannot be sold or packaged—it’s so much more than trivial fantasy. What you open with love and trust is self-acceptance. You become tolerant of human imperfection and you begin to let another person in. You begin to feel you deserve what someone else has to give. What you give is no longer a means of staying in control, it’s no longer about power. This is where the connections begin. This is about losing yourself and gaining yourself. This is about subtlety and intimacy. This is something no one can sell you or teach you. This is something you’ll find with another person. This is something you’ll never forget.

Sex is something you’ll never forget