Ethel Cains new EP invokes tienne-Louis Boulles sublime by trading storytelling for space making
PervertsEthel CainDaughters of CainReleased January 8An hour and fifteen minutes into a long winding video tour of her art books on YouTube, Hayden Anhedniabetter known by her stage name Ethel Cainlifts up Etienne-Louis Boulle. 1728-1799. Theoretician of Revolutionary Architecture for the camera. She flips through pages of works by the French Neoclassicist before pausing on Cenotaph to Newton and holding the page to the screen. The familiar sectionincidentally the first building that will appear on slides to my modern history students this spring semesteris shown to the viewers. The massive, implied sphere of the drawing is flattened into a dark ring on the page: a directionless gyre, a black pit that pulls in the eye, and what seems to be a diagram for Cains new EP, Perverts. The follow-up to her hit album, Preachers Daughter, Perverts trades storytelling for spacemaking. Layering instrumental loops and often-lyricless vocals over pink noise and found-sound recordings from southwestern Pennsylvania and the eastern Great Lakes, each track on Perverts feels expansive, nearing on the sublime. The EPs scale and affect is so jarringly different from the emotional intimacy of her debut that the EP might be read as a way to shed fans for a more hardcore audiencea goal that some of the few legible lyrics on Perverts seem to confirm: if you love me, keep it to yourself she repeats on Vacillator, and Such is the consequence of audience, I will claw my way back to the Great Dark and we will not speak of this place again she reads on Pulldrone.Ethel Cain discussing tienne-Louis Boulle (Via Youtube)But rather than an outright rejection of audience, the EP and Cains recent writings on her Tumblr seem more to be rejecting the constant exegesis of contemporary fandom, the seemingly inherent need to say something about everything one experiences. As Anhednia says in the Youtube video reflecting on Boulles work: I dont really care about reasons, I care about does it feel good, does it feel true, does it invigorate, does it inspire, does it captivate, does it enrapture? Sometimes reading the explanations for certain things makes me like it less.The Stars are as Beams Shining through the WheelAttempting to review an album like Perverts that asks so plainly not to be interpreted feels like an imposition on the work. Its clear that Cains intent is to clear space for experience rather than produce content to be read. The expansive scale of the tracks leaves room for personal interpretation and claiming specific meaning feels like a betrayal of the projects desires, like the pin-pricked spherical void of Boulles Cenotaphwhere the stars are as beams shining through the wheelPerverts also leaves the listener to feel their way through the dark. Where Preachers Daughters narrative was analyzed and over analyzed to the point of exhaustion by fans tracking down every reference, Perverts rejects content for pure affect, offering a night and day inversion of the earlier work reminiscent of the interior effect of Boulles Cenotaph. But, the shift from a dark Americana road trip to a noise project pulled from the remains of Pittsburghs rotting industry doesnt seem to play a part in this apparent rejection. It seems more like a shift in priorities, an adjustment toward the undertones of Preachers Daughter that doesnt allow for the cathartic release of analysis or ironic meme-making, and a genuine request for an increasingly rare earnest engagement with art.Perverts album art (Marlee Kula)The ambient turn of Perverts reveals a side of Anhednia that has been running in parallel to her work as Ethel Cain through her side project Ashmedai. Indeed, some of the tracks on Perverts feel directly in line with the full ambient work of Ashmedai (Perverts, HousofPsychoticWomn, and Pulldrone), while others take a more drone/doom sound (Onanist and Thatorchia), or walk between the sounds of this EP and her other work at Ethel Cain (Punish, Vacillator, and Amber Waves). The seventh track, Etienne, named for Boulle, fully erases the boundaries between Anhednias production as Ethel Cain and her other projects by directly sampling Ashmedais track 006, tying the two projects together like a self-cannibalizing ouroboros. So, rather than try to peel apart the few legible lyrics (though the typical richness of Cains writing on the spoken word monologue on Pulldrone begs for interpretation), it feels most appropriate to bring the album into relation with other work on meditation, personal subjectivity, and even death. For an EP that is built both figuratively (via Boulle) and literally (through field recordings) on architecture, it feels most appropriate to search for some other architectural perverts.PervertsBy resurrecting Boulle and invoking a negative sublime via the death rattle hums of southwestern Pennsylvanias industrial behemoths, Cain delivers a project very much in line with the technoclassical aesthetic of Douglas Dardens Condemned Buildings from 1993. These ten buildings explored the possibilities of an architectural anti-canon by cutting into the soft underbelly of the foundational myths of a discipline that Darden perceived as built on falsehoods. Architecture objectifiesdesire, he writes to frame his Sex Shop project that distends the bodies of Adam and Eve through an architecture that works more like a sadomasochistic voyeurs fantasy than a building.Like Dardens allegorical constructions, some explicitly reflecting on his ultimately fatal battle with leukemia, each track on Perverts operates as a meditation on the edges of life and death: religious, emotional, industrial. And like Dardens concept of the underbelly, Cain turns fully away from any mistaken optimism for a full look at the sublime and obscene. There are even times where Cains Pulldrone manifesto seems to be speaking in tandem with Dardens Condemned aphorisms:I. Architecture is the meditation on finitude and failure. (Douglas Darden, Condemned Buildings)Ten, degradation. Nature chews on me. (Ethel Cain, Pulldrone)III. Architecture is the execution of exquisite barriers. (Darden, Condemned Buildings)Three, curiosity. I have always possessed the insatiable need to see what happens inside the room. (Cain, Pulldrone)In her attempt to produce a musical project as a space to host a personally inflected meditation for each listener, Cains work intentionally fades into setting. Resting over ambient noise, the drawn out instrumental loops slowly became background themselves. Cains compositional prowess is on full display here as the hour and a half EP, and multiple 10-minute plus songs are both eminently relistenable and never seem to drag. Tying the work to another spatial pervert, her conceptual intent mirrors that of the Japanese architect Hiromis Fujiis Existential Architecture, best exemplified in the built Todoroki House or his religiously named 1989 exhibition Nave of Signs. Like Cain, Fujiis relentless nesting grids attempted to produce space without content in order to shock the inhabitant into a metaphysical experience of the self. In 1987, Fujii wrote, Thus, the self which drifts about in the hollow interior of the object because of the loss of its perceptual identity will eventuallyfind itself pinned in mid-air, creating a poetic image for architecture that always reminded me of free floating in the Cenotaphs void.Section through Cnotaphe Newton circa 1784 (Etienne-Louis Boulle/Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain)The list of perverts could go on: the mute critique of Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkins late-Soviet illustrations; the othered, fleshy allo-gore-y of Jennifer Bloomers Tabbles of Bower; or even the literary tunnels of Kafkas The Burrow all come to mind. Cains EP finds good company in spatial precedent.On its own, the EP creates a vision for art that stands apart from cultural context without being disconnected. It rejects the easy didacticism of the content mill, and works to expand the aesthetic repertoire of Cains more-mainstream audience. Where Boulles century-late tombs day/night inversion hints toward the sublime horror of Modernitys supersession of Nature, Perverts invites its listener to look at the mounting horrors of the many intersecting crises and to genuinely experience the emotional landscapes they engender. It cuts through the noise of easy answers to edge nearer to a kind of abject myth-making that crafts an aesthetic politics sorely needed.Adrienne Economos-Miller is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee where she researches ruins, trans femininity, and other obscene matters.
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