Genuinely excited to leave the house for an evening amongst friends at Collision warehouse in sunny Pittsburgh.
I will be playing leftfield selections in the ambient room throughout the night, punctuated by live performances and accented by live visual manipulations.
The main room will feature high-caliber experimental electronic live acts as well as DJ sets from Machine Girl and Spednar.
Guests are encouraged to wear masks, and only attend if vaccinated and/or presently testing negative for Covid-19.
Come join an experiment in temporary autonomy and free association for an evening – the grinding hell of daily life will resume promptly in the morning.
Myself (left) and Dungeon Acid (right) taking the Good Room “stairs photo” taken by Kellam Matthews.
This post has been a bit overdue, but reassimilation into the workforce and contending with various sickness (physical and mental) has put it on the back burner. The Kangraven // Drommusik tour with Dungeon Acid was a success and I want to extend my gratitude to all the promoters, artists, friends and attendees who supported us. We happily took a risk in forgoing the conventional status quo of “Touring DJ Culture” by handling a weeklong tour entirely by ourselves using a network of DIY underground and experimental promoters who showed us nothing but kindness and care. Extra thanks goes to Tomek who helped us with design for the tape and tour posters, Outlandish Press for their risograph printing, Stephanie Tsong for helping us print T-shirts mid-tour on short notice, the promoters in Chicago who supported us despite the show being shut down (more on this later), and to my Subaru who held out for the week-long loop through New England, Appalachia and out to Chicago and Nashville – she deserves another oil change and me figuring out how to swap out my brake pads and rotors before the winter.
Our tour was made up of gigs that (with the exception of New York- an excellent evening of programming at Good Room as part of the Interzone Festival) occurred in spaces largely outside the “industry standards” of the Club DJ Industry. The spaces ranged from the basement of an ancient drag bar (Boston) to community supported spaces for DIY art and music (Providence, Nashville), repurposed industrial spaces (Pittsburgh, Chicago) and small bars that were important spots for local music community across genres (Huntington, Columbus). This drove home again and again the importance of communities (and artists within them) establishing and maintaining space in an age of hyper capitalist gentrification. As the monoculture of tech-and-finance capitalism spreads through cities, communities who fall outside the margins of a rich, white and professional class are deprioritized, de-resourced and eventually forced out of spaces and regions where they were able to establish themselves. Although under-40 white people with art degrees are in some ways affected by this phenomenon, a cursory amount of self-awareness would acknowledge that this group often (though not always) has seemingly more mobility within this matrix of urban development winners and losers, more access to resources, and more privilege within the violent enforcement of capital by police, and an ease assimilating into the transitional phases of “urban renewal”. At the same time, the true adversary that displaces people from working class neighborhoods (be they service industry laborers, retirees, people of color, artists, queer people, and any amalgamation of these identities) is the shared class interest of real estate owners, development financiers, city officials and business owners whose material interest lies with attracting money from outside the communities within which they exist. All of these people’s class interest is dependent on forcing others out, and swallowing up resources to prolong their wealth. In a thin sliver of experience, one can see how electronic music would fall on the side of an authentic creation that amalgamates the qualities of life in the working class from various experiences or angles – and that it’s poignancy for decades resonated within the experiences of these communities. Despite it’s cooptation and accessibility for a professional and bourgeois ruling class – largely a function of monetization, nightclub-alcohol industry and luxury commodity in a sanitized environment that the Club DJ Industry willingly participates in – a humble established DIY space (or a repurposed space for the liminal zone of illegal music) is a form of resisting the grinding homogenization of development in similarly vital ways that a tenant union, a community meal kitchen or workshop, art and craft space or harm reduction resource site can embody. Our experience in Boston – a 70 year old gay bar nestled precariously in the heart of a corporate office high rise district – was a liminal thrill which saw promoters Sysex Club (dogged by the high turnover of DIY venues) utilizing the basement of the bar for a night of off-center dance music and live visual art while an upscale clientele (a sea of bachelorettes) enjoyed a raucous drag diva revue. Nashville saw us ending our tour in a packed crowd of high school ravers, for whom the all-ages DIY space DRKMTTR Collective has become an outlet for subcultural exploration.
One notable moment of tour – perhaps in some ways a climax? – came from our gig in Chicago – which was busted by the landlord and police about an hour into the party (Is this the “rave nostalgia” that everyone keeps talking about?). The promoters for the evening had taken special care to curate an excellent underground party, and were unfortunately and sadly hamstrung not only by the interruption of capital into space, but by negligent warehouse tenants for whom the safety of attendees and quality of the evening was less of a priority than their cash-only bar and rented ATM with $7 service fees. To see our friends who worked hard on setting up the evening be used as fodder for a v-necked rentmaking cash-grab was infuriating, and the fact that the show was shut down – despite it being a financial setback for the promoters and a let-down for attendees – hopefully has kept the warehouse tenants from being able to continue leeching off the network of artists and promoters just trying to find a space where real estate is at a premium. Again, huge thanks go out to Glenna, Lexi and Jeremy and their crew for their hard work, dedication and friendship.
One of the greatest opportunities of tour was being able to travel by car with Jean Louis, and for us to soak up various regional Americana along the highways and mountain roads of the Eastern US soundtracked by around 70 different albums. We had a fairly strict “No Techno” rule in the car which allowed us to decompress a bit between evenings of dance music. Highlights include the 45-minute edit of Cabaret Voltaire’s “Yashar” which we enjoyed while seeking out a certain color of Dickies canvas work pants in the Pittsburgh suburbs, a roadside encounter with a peacock at the Hare Krishna intentional community New Vrindaban while blasting Amensia Scanner, listening to John Giorno’s manic recitation set to 1970s proto-post-punk as we passed the “Hell Is Real” billboard, an hour of sparse and shattered IDM by Markant whilst driving through a seemingly endless plane of identical windmills, a fraught storm-laden pitch-black run into the mountains reaching Nashville set to the dub-funk vignettes of Holger Hiller, and stopping at the Mothman Statue in Point Pleasant, WV, at sunset while listening to The Specials at max volume. I have assembled a Youtube playlist consisting of one track each from about 65 albums we enjoyed and embedded it below for people’s curiosity:
Despite tricking my brain into a largely lizard-stimulus state after so many nights of music, sleep deprivation, vegan food and mindless driving, depression and dysphoria still have a way of creeping in. Battling with feelings of not wanting to be inside a body, with feelings of absolutely hating ones appearance and spending days avoiding mirrors at the rest stop so you won’t trigger some state of alienation isn’t easy – carrying those feelings on the road is an absolute curse. Feeling absolutely alone in a room full of people is a hollow way to spend an evening – I am deeply thankful for the friends that kept me somewhat grounded into reality. Tangentially, I realize upon writing this that it’s been roughly two years since I undertook being medically recognized as transgender – something which has allowed me access to hormone therapy and the medical debt that comes with it. Ironically, the past two years have also seen me stop identifying with social constructions of “femininity” as an indicator of womanhood – something which has often caused me to have to defend my reasons for being on HRT to medical professionals, while having to defend my hesitance / ambivalence / depression-and-debt-induced aversion to taking my hormones to people in my personal life. Although I am currently working a day job (as well as existing in the music scene) as an out-transgender woman, the validity of my identity feels up for debate constantly by strangers and acquaintances (although it may just be paranoid narcissism to assume anyone is actively debating anything about me).
Weirdly, I feel as though the medicalization of my identity has made me more and more hesitant to put all of my chips into the pathways for being considered “a woman” that conventional understanding of transgender narrative dictates. Yes, it is true that I consider myself nonbinary, though I wonder how much space I can hold without being second-guessed as a butch woman / masculine transgender lesbian within the cultural signifiers of non-binary existence. As such, it’s become an increasingly unusable identifier for my own existence. Perhaps understanding myself as an agender transwoman or the hopelessly pretentious, conceitedly academic and pedantically unfuckable “post-gender” would be close – though all of these seem still contingent on the existence of gender for validation in their “lack thereof” or “beyond” posture. My own views lie closer to gender nihilism / abolition – something which I feel speaks to the longing of destruction of gender from which I wish to remove myself (and everyone ideally, or at least the people I care about). I don’t know if I’m ready to amend my “transgender woman” status with the ideologically-heavy “gender abolitionist” qualifier outside the confines of the handful of people who read this here. But that level of annoying ideological contrarianism can only be contained for so long, so I’m sure I’ll be pissing people off with it somewhere soon.
I am happy to finally announce that I will be touring under the Mx. Silkman format this October with good friend and better artist Dungeon Acid from Copenhagen. Our tour consists of the following dates:
All dates feature myself DJing and Dungeon Acid playing live. We chose to work specifically with DIY promoters and in many cases autonomous DIY spaces in the planning of this tour. Our hope is to push the limits of our medium in ways both musical as well as infrastructural by challenging the narratives that exist for the possibility of art.
Our tour posters and tour tapes (the first release of the Seith Communiti imprint) were designed by Tomek of the band Grave Infestation and printed by Outlandish Press in Cleveland. Tapes were mastered by Alex Michalski, dubbed at home and sold only on the road for some extra gas money. The Dungeon Acid side (a live take of all original material) will be available for streaming and purchase online soon via the artist. My side is an abridged version of a mix of leftfield and experimental records that will be dropping online in the coming weeks.
We can’t wait to visit your cities, sleep on your couches and drink your cold-brewed coffees.
Cover art for the upcoming “Tute Bianche” EP on Tram Planet, designed by C. Parks Perdue.
i. Intro
Before we begin, please allow me to make a brief mention that Tram Planet label is currently taking preorders for my first vinyl release under the Auton alias. “Tute Bianche” is slated for release on 20.9.19 as an extremely limited 10″ lathe cut record + 3 color risograph cover designed by C. Parks Perdue + risographed 17×11 poster designed by myself and Matthew Goik . For the non-fetish-object-oriented, there is an infinite-edition losseless digital format available on 20.9.19 from the above link. Thank you for supporting independent, critical and DIY media in an age where few things in techno seem independent of / critical of / done outside of the leviathan.
I. Relocation
By now, most people who are probably reading this know that I have moved from Cleveland, Ohio, to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which is a good deal of why updates to this have been seemingly so sparse. It has taken nearly a month to get my feet back under me and – rest assured – I have achieved a level of working poverty, alienation and precarity similar to that which I had grown accustomed to in Cleveland, but I now have a small house in a wooded neighborhood with my partner, our three cats and (finally) my own home studio setup. I am spending most days very viscerally negotiating my desire to have groceries in the fridge with my desire to have a job that affords the weekends off to take on gigs out of town at the moment, and fear that – unless the situation changes – I may be largely unable to travel out of Pittsburgh for gigs until January 2020. However – I have secured time off enough to embark on a ten-day tour around the East coast and Midwest with dear friend Dungeon Acid from Copenhagen from Friday 19.10.19 to Saturday, 26.10.19. More info (tour flyer, full event listings, special tour media including posters and cassettes) will follow as soon as the final gigs are confirmed.
II. Delocation
Delocation is a term that has come about recently as millenials have found themselves (like the many urban residents they displaced before them) forced out of metropolitan centers by the housing crisis, by underemployment in cities and the atomization of the labor market into deepeningly-precarious gig economy bidding that makes the rosy dream of the metropolitan elite lifestyle a fantasy of those striving toward bourgeois existence without the generational wealth to actualize it. This condition of reality is no doubt wrought by the oligarchy of landowners, tech corporations, neighborhood development organizations and the capitalist class who have found within millenials yet another class of people who must act against their own interests to avoid falling behind in the cycle of artificially-manufactured precarity. Moving from Cleveland (which is rife with exploitation, alienation and subjugation of the working class to a frightening yet traditional and quotidian degree) to the tech-accelerationist capitalist playground of Pittsburgh has cast into relief the degree to which technocratic neoliberalism has failed the working class, deepened exploitation of workers and atomized communities out of existence. Despite the all-enveloping bubble it has been inflating – the technocratic robber barons and their class-conspirators will eventually leave the working class to reckon with the consequences of hyper-exploiting all of the resources and capital available to them.
How does this (or must this?) relate to techno?? Without assigning unneeded gravity to the concerns of the 300 or so DJs striving to earn a stable income off gigs over the rest of the global working class, I believe delocation is something we will begin to see as the structures of the “dance music industry” begin to contract inward as the conditions of capitalist accelerationism comes into increasingly sharper relief. We have already seen many precursors to this impending collapse – media outlets solidifying their position as organs of both industry tastemaking while also skimming off an integral infrastructure platform or selling a lifestyle brand that curates or facilitates nightlife, the recoiling of corporate patronage-sponsored alternative media as capitalism bares its teeth and removes the facade of serving the dissemination of a space for sonic and cultural progressivism, real-estate-magnate owned nightclubs having to choose between the low returns of their curatorial authencity or profit-seeking behavior as their crowds demand a more sanitized and bourgeois luxury nightclub experience, etc. All of these signal a point at which the bubble will burst – and so I ask, what infrastructure will you have to rely on in that hyper-oligarchic subcultural era?
III. Obfuscation
I am challenging myself to embrace a withdrawal from mainstream ideals, from casual accessibility, from easy categorization and brand-narrative synergy in favor of something enigmatic – something that ignites a feeling of excitement when discovered rather than the same paste fed to you by the algorithm. I am aiming create an infrastructure of skills, resources and networks that I can rely on as an independent artist now – while the seams are still holding together – before the bubble bursts. I am prioritizing DIY space, attitude and ingenuity in my artistic and community values in a way that is less sensitive to the ebb and flow of resource mobilization by the dance music mainstream. I am forcing myself to learn things or do things again that I haven’t done since my punk and noise days – booking extended driveable tours (rather than one-off weekend gigs), making merch by hand, dubbing and producing media, etc – things that the industry has often sought to delegitimize as not “proper” so as to sustain their own existence performing these functions for artists. I am challenging myself to start small and have goals that lie outside of the familiar path of all the right social media branding, mix podcast appearances, Boiler Room sessions, etc that plays into the perpetuation of an unsustainable artistic model. Finally, I am conditioning myself to understand that “success” in this artistic medium is something entirely bought and sold within that industry construct, and that by letting that definition of success define my own art I am robbing myself of a potential richness that exists outside of the usual “who played what, who gigged where, who released what” morass of competitive DJ culture. While none of this is meant for anyone else but myself, perhaps what I’ve said resonates to that nagging feeling of loss you have in the quiet moments of your pursuit of your DJ industry success story. Perhaps, then, it’s time to attempt to gain an understanding of exactly who you are and what you do – and more importantly, exactly who they are and what they want from you – and how those things are either going to be compatible yet unsustainable, or a happier and perhaps more fulfilling opposite.
In addition to a feeling of wanting to reclaim intentional space for myself to own discussions of my own art, a large part of my decision to remove myself from social media relates directly to the ways in which my peers (as opposed to “friends”) rely on exterior performance of gender and overt indicators of homosexuality to determine one’s authenticity within the loose aesthetic subcultural brand of being “queer”.
First, I feel that discussion of queer must account for the ambiguity of the term – which escapes easy definition across time and historic context. My own definition of “queerness” is that it is a divergent strain of subculutural beliefs, aesthetics and behavior that can be exhibited by members of the greater LGBTQIA mainstream. Among these beliefs for me personally are:
the recognition of gender and sex as indistinct socially-enforced categories that perpetuate a white supremacist patriarchy
the recognition of gendered intersecting oppression, the perpetuation of the family as the core social unit and reproductive futurism as inherently capitalistic organization existing within society
the opposition to authoritarian forms that enforce these institutions (be they of the state or socially-enforced)
the aspiration toward nothingness, genderlessness (via the aboliton of gender and / or destruction of modern gender signifiers by any or no means necessary) and uselessness to the reproductive function of a capitalist apparatus
Face down, ass up, death-driven – that’s the way we like to uselessly fuck.
Obviously, not everyone shares this definition – which is fine. My own experiences as a transgender butch lesbian places me within a context where I have arrived at these conclusions of what I hold in my mind as “queer”, and I don’t claim to be an authority on this definition for anyone but myself – especially not for people for whom queerness operates in more direct conflict with racialized bodily autonomy, colonial patriarchal constructs and other intersecting forms that I don’t endure as a white person.
The aesthetics of queerness – particularly that of white queer people – is often the most easily recognizable and co-optable by the mainstream LGBTQIA culture, from where it can enter into the market of buying and selling subcultural aesthetics as a brand. This isn’t new territory for queer-identified people, who are often intimately aware of their outward aesthetic of queerness being mined by capitalism for edgy subcultural dollars and how this defangs the anti-capitalist meanings of these aesthetic symbols. This in many ways has watered down the anti-capitalist and anti-patriarchal definition of “queer” into something more amorphous, with less rigidly defined subcultural boundaries that (maybe?) at one point signified a lifestyle of willing uselessness to the state and the future in the auspecies of actualizing desire – frequently, guiltlessly, publicly, and explicitly.
Signs posted outside popular NYC and San Francisco venues that warns community gatekeepers of people looking for DJ gigs.
HOWEVER, I don’t believe that the grinding perpetuity of capitalism is something that warrants subjecting newly-out, non-transitioning or not-visibly (for whatever reason) queer-identified people to authoritarian peer-surveillance (a fancy way to say “weirdly acceptable and often-transmisogynist suspicion”) to determine the authenticity of their identity. This has been a weirdly triggering line of discourse for me – as someone who fails to perform femininity by choice, as well as someone for whom my outward presentation has been weaponized by others to cast suspicion on my desire to access the identity of “womanhood” in my own (IRL) community.
Ultimately, the misdirected suspicion of queer individuals (rather than articulating a challenge to the way capitalism strips things of meaning) is both a violence done in loud voices and quiet whispers from a number of people who have supposedly figured out what determines the status of an “authentic” queer person – as opposed to supposedly-existing interlopers that are identifying as queer cynically because of its brand-potential. It is impossible to reconcile this projection of “fake queer” invaders contrasted with the concept of an “authentic” queer person with anything other than the definition of aesthetics found most marketable by queer-coopted capitalism. The belief of a “gold standard” being of queerness is an assimilationist fantasy that envisions the trans person as nothing more than a pity object that exists to aspire to a feminine or masculine ideal, to be patronized, sexualized and then discarded in their fruitless and pathetic quest to be granted the ability to be accepted as someone trying to appease the rigidity of socially-defined gender presentation.
Those dedicating their energy to scrutinizing the queer DJ community (clearly the most worthy targets for scrutiny in a morass of of a music industry that facilitates real physical and subcultural gentrification, drug-and-alcohol-sale-assisted predatory rape culture, wealth disparity as a function of the industry that prioritizes ascendant quick-money of DJ rockstar culture, the building of an industry to facilitate a luxury commodity economy for wealthy yuppies that scours away the revolutionary mutual-aid potential and black anti-establishment roots of the genre, etc) are operating their suspicion predicated upon a capitalist half-truth, and a deeply cynical understanding of queer individuals and their motivations for identifying as such. It’s nobody’s fault to be an alienated subject of neoliberal hell, but to reify the idea that queerness looks or can be determined as authentic by anything other than formless negation and possibility outside of societal institutions is a deeply anti-queer assertion of authoritarianism, and a pursuit to establish oneself as the loudest voice to be nothing more than an arbiter of a bootlicking hyper-capitalist fantasy that enforces and punishes queer people for existing outside the socially-acceptable images that makes them a potential product to be bought and sold.
Be the change you want to see in the world.
Ultimately, queer people deserve autonomy and I refuse to stop advocating for that. Half-measures that don’t allow for a wide expression of queerness – from those for whom the destruction of their coerced gender identity by transitioning, to those who seek no outward change to their appearance as they deprogram their understanding of potential and presentation to their value as queer person, to those who fall at odds with either/any accepted gender and aspire toward nothingness – flatten the experience of queerness down to the most easily-marketed, sexualized and monolithic forms that emerge fully fledged from the aether as a ready and willing market to be sold a repackaged and toothless idea of being queer. I refuse to make space in my life for those who reduce queer people down to merely a brand, an identity to be cynically sold or marketed, or an object worthy of suspicion until they appease the fantasy of an easily-ignored queer identity.
Yours in sterility and negation,
AE
(Manipulated images repurposed from “educational comic artist” and homophobe Dick Hafer’s “Homosexuality: Legitimate Alternate Deathstyle” from 1986. Read it from a third-party who thinks he was an asshole here.)
Thank you for venturing off the well-worn path of social media platforms and seeking (or stumbling upon) Seith-Communiti. This is a space for updates, links and longform elaboration on the ideas, themes and critical thought related to the music I produce, text that I publish, mixes I curate and public DJ performances. This includes not only my DJing under the name Mx. Silkman, but also updates pertaining to the autonomous queer DJ collective IN TRAINING, my “techno” and text production as Auton and the (forthcoming) work done under the production alias Funeral Parade Of Roses.
This site is a continuation in some senses of my long-running blog (on the Tumblr platform) that served as a more personal (yet impersonal) moodboard / reposted sources of inspiration / curated aesthetics. However, a great deal of the last five years or so of that blog discussed queerness and sexuality in explicit terms and images – something that the SESTA / FOSTA legislation of 2018 drove off the platform, transforming it into a far more sanitized and censored imageboard platform. Although I have little desire to explore sexuality so publicly (explicit sexuality anyhow) on this platform, my decision to create this site using the Noblogs platform will ensure a greater degree of intellectual freedom and privacy from surveillance-state than the alternatives (Tumblr, Blogger, WordPress, etc). While not perfect, I feel that it’s an important step in my agency as a writer and artist to aspire to hosting my content and discussion of it on a platform that is not sustained by selling user data to algorithms, the surveillance machine or other dystopian machinations of the state. Additionally, it allows me to be able to make my writing, links to written material and recorded music available to people who care without the additional static added by platforms like twitter, facebook and instagram. This will include (for the time being) not allowing comments. I have little desire to engage in public discussion with passers-by, and prefer this resource as a transmission from myself to potentially nobody. If you are curious for greater explanation, clarification or discussion on a post (or general questions), my e-mail will be available and regularly checked at AERIN_ERCOLEA(AT)PROTONMAIL(DOT)COM.
For the time being I’ll no doubt be available on other platforms, but would greatly prefer to retain my own ramblings within my own space rather than subject them to networks that prioritize confrontation and the flattening of discourse for wider algorithmic appeal to audiences.
“Seith-Communiti” as a concept was 1) a convenient name I have used online for some time in similar contexts 2) something that I would hope to pursue in the future as a multimedia imprint of text, video and sound by myself and likeminded others and 3) a name that sounded cool as shit. The first part comes from the neo-pagan concept of “seith”, a magickal introspective practice traditionally associated with the liminal spaces of femininity / failed and deviant masculinity in society. While the concept of neo-pagan ritualism is something I’ve felt less of a connection to in the last few years – largely out of disgust with the reactionary / fascist co-optation and entryism into it – the concept of seith as a queer ritualistic way of confronting the dehumanization and alienation of capitalist / modernist reality is something that serves as a pathway into deconstructing authoritarian understandings of the modern age. These ritualisms – oracle, soothsaying, entheogenesis, alchemy, science, mathematics, dialectics – have allowed us to define the machinations of our reality and push towards its greater understanding (or subversion of it’s material existence). “Communiti” is simply a stylization (something that looks cool in print) of the idea that gatherings of people that hold an understanding of these rituals are central to our existence as social animals (for better or worse). I choose to operate on the belief that the gathering of actors into spaces – actors who un/consciously embrace seith-practice can act according to strategy and possibility within the bounds of the space understood as the real. From this, we can have an insurrectionary rupture that can create a space to alter the bounds of the real, and temper chaos into a different (hopefully strategically better) form.
Again, at its core it’s a name I think looks cool. The previous is just justification of why I think that.
I will be updating / building this space out in free moments of my time in a bid to have a healthy, creative and productive outlet that isn’t as deeply rooted in the “hot take economy” of social media participation. Links will be posted on the sidebar to DJ mixes, Bandcamp uploads to stream or buy physical and digital media, upcoming gigs and PDFs of readable and printable (front and back 11×8.5 page) zines. With regards to PDF files for the printable zines, I ask kindly that reproduction be for one’s own use / to be left in radical spaces and autonomous gatherings / distributed for free at infoshops,raves/record shops/etc. Select infoshops and record shops will receive original print runs of these works that they may sell – these will be hand numbered with color printing, higher quality paper, risograph printed etc. DIY editions printed in black and white on standard printer paper are ideal for free reproduction.
