This piece is dedicated to the memory of David Lynch. Thank you for making me dream again.
It's so unchic to start this way, but we have a *lot* to get to, so I will try to plow through this intro with as little navel-gazing as possible. I often think about the post arguing that “most writers have three—MAYBE four or five, at most—good personal essays in them” and while I could quibble with the specific number, I think rationing them out is a good rule of thumb to follow.
Unfortunately, in this case, there’s no way to properly set this all up without the whole “you’re probably wondering how I got here” freeze-frame flashback. So, let me explain:
Roughly 2 two years and 8 months ago - after reading positive reviews and reactions from friends whose taste I trust - I threw on Preacher’s Daughter in my car on the way to work, having never listened to Ethel Cain before. I got to track 3 - “House In Nebraska” - and had to turn it off to avoid crying off my makeup and / or crashing my car. A month later, unable to stop listening to or thinking about it, I wrote this long piece (read: manifesto) that outlined how I fell in love with that record and what it meant to me at the time. Barely a month after that first piece, out of the blue, I was asked to write a cover story on Ethel Cain. I interviewed Hayden Anhedonia, the one woman producer / singer / songwriter who brought the world of Ethel Cain to life. To yadda yadda that experience and the next few years of my life from there: overnight I gained credibility in this weird dying industry, and if you’re reading this, there’s a decent chance you started following me around then.
This fairy tale continued when I did the thing you’re not supposed to do as a “journalist”: I made friends with the rock stars. On the first night of a sold out Ethel Cain double header at the Fonda Theater, in the green room after the show, I met a girl named Angel Diaz. I assumed at first that she was still wearing her Halloween costume - a full length black dress and a set of subtle vampire fangs - despite the fact that it was November 4th. It turns out, this girl is just committed to the goth lifestyle on a level I had yet to encounter, and this was pretty standard attire for her year-round. She told me that she releases music as Vyva Melinkolya and that she had a collaborative album with Midwife on the way. Without needing to hear a note, I knew this music was going to be my shit. I was extremely correct.
The next night, Angel found me waiting in line for the show, and we became close friends practically on the spot. Before we made it to the front door of the venue we had already begun hatching schemes to work together. I understood her music implicitly - if you had asked me to draw up an ideal Jackie-core artist, I wouldn’t have been able to dream up a stew of influences, skills, and obsessions that Angel already possessed. It was like she had been dropped out of the sky for me specifically. While not being exactly the same, it was clear that Angel and I spoke a similar language of feeling and shared an appreciation for slow, sad music. That night, we gushed over our shared obsessions (Low, Grouper, Lana, etc) like we had been doing it our entire lives; sisters separated at birth.
I retell none of this to brag that me and Hayden are besties (we aren’t) or to sidestep accusations of cheerleading for my friends. I haven’t spoken to Hayden in a while, and although I no longer have a working relationship with this album’s contributors Angel and Matt Tomasi (I’m taking a probably-forever hiatus from doing PR, which is a long story for another day), I’m obviously not an unbiased party. This isn’t a review or something aiming for “objective” analysis, a style of writing I find boring anyway. You can think whatever you want about me choosing to go back to this well.
Why I bother with any of this is because I want you to know where I was – and who I have been – on the night I heard Perverts for the first time.
I have lived in Pasadena, California for a majority of my life, and that’s where I found myself on the release day of Ethel Cain’s new EP. Without doxxing myself, I live far enough away from the Eaton Canyon fire that I was never in immediate harm’s way, but close enough that our relative safety was fragile and could have changed at any second. I’m lucky to be able to say that the ongoing wildfires have largely avoided affecting me directly, but if you’re not from the area, it’s as devastating and surreal as you can imagine. The strange mix of gratitude and horror and ambient guilt that it happened to other people and not me. The helplessness of watching it all unfold.
My instagram feed is still littered with people posting the charred remains of their homes, videos of flames racing down neighborhoods and streets I’ve known for all my life. The people affected are friends I knew from high school and elementary school, people I have met through music, random acquaintances who I hadn’t thought about until I had to consider the idea of them fleeing their homes. Homes of old friends that feature in some of my fondest childhood memories have gone up in flames. Today, as I write this, the air quality was finally safe enough that I was able to go outside and clean the yard, and found myself morbidly wondering how much of that ash was people’s possessions.
Before you read the rest of this, please make a plan to volunteer or donate or fundraise for the victims of the wildfires. Do whatever you can to help the people affected. Keep them in your thoughts.
You should consider giving to Altadena Girls, YMCA of Los Angeles, LAFD foundation, Mutual Aid LA, Westside Food Bank, Pasadena Humane Society, and any other organizations you see fit. You should browse the databases of fundraisers for affected people in the music industry and the black community of Altadena, and support local businesses like Rancho. And for god’s sake let’s help Madlib get back on his feet.
I hesitated making this piece about myself, or bringing up the fires at all. The people who lost everything are a billion times more in need of your sympathy / support / attention, and I don’t want to reduce a historic, once in a generation natural disaster to #badvibes or scene-setting for my life being a movie FR. I have a lot I want to say about music and art that can feel trivial in the face of true suffering, but this backdrop is what was going on in my life on the release day of Perverts, so it’s pretty impossible to separate my initial impressions of this music from the fact that I listened to it while winds whipped outside my window and sirens blared in the near distance.
Why or how I would be able to pay attention to music in these circumstances is a hard question to answer, but in times of crisis it is already a natural instinct of mine to reach for art to help channel my negative feelings, or at least take my mind off of them. So on that Tuesday night, the idea of locking in to something with a 90+ minute runtime was suddenly quite appealing. In this moment especially, I was more than happy to give myself over a space of extreme slowness. Anything to take me somewhere else.
As someone with serious ADHD (another thing Angel and I share), slow music is one of the only things that truly centers me. It's a counterbalance to my natural state. When I need to calm down, few things make me feel more at ease than despondently sad slowcore bands like Codeine, Low, and Carrissa’s Wierd. Listening to this music is like applying the brakes to the wheels of my restlessly spinning mind; forcing me to reset to a less technology-addled state.
In November of 2023, I finally had a chance to see Codeine live in concert. One of the archetypal slowcore bands, Codeine are in the same camp as Duster in that they were mostly considered also-rans by indie rock critics in their time and now Gen-Z Millenial cuspers like myself who have re-discovered them think they’re the greatest thing since sliced bread. As Chris Richards documented, the younger fans like myself swarmed to the front of Numero Twenty’s venue as they were about to play, and we were so into the music that the world’s saddest, slowest band had teenagers “headbanging with deliberation and vigor”.
What I took away most from that concert was the moments of pause between notes, the sound ringing out as the whole crowd silently hung on the next chord. I have never seen the guitar played with such delicately small motions, and yet it felt so indescribably heavy. Drummer of Ekko Astral Miri Tyler introduced me to the idea that, in the same way that “there are infinities inside of finite numbers” that “a good repetitive groove has infinity inside it.” During Codiene’s set, especially when they played “Loss Leader”, I felt myself slip into that infinity between every patient strum.
What I like about ambient music and slowcore is that, if you let it, it can re-write the part of your brain that demands instant gratification; forcing you to submit to its terms. At its best, it demands to be paid attention to, melting the outside world away while still allowing space for your own thoughts inside its walls of sound. By contrast to the way pop music does everything possible to grab and keep your attention by force of will, this style of music will only resonate once you learn to meet it on its own terms and let it wash over you. You have to allow this music’s pacing to re-write your own expectations. If you do, you will be rewarded with a space to call your own.
Contrary to Brian Eno’s original vision of “ambient” as passively engaging music that should be heard at “comparatively low levels, even to the extent that it frequently falls below the threshold of audibility”, I prefer listening to music like Perverts loud as possible on nice headphones, until the sounds overwhelm the senses. The great irony of ambient music becoming the domain of passive, AI slop (Liz Pelly’s Mood Machine in stores now) is that ambient music actually requires the *most* immersion to hit as hard as possible, and is done a great disservice as turned into “background music”.
As David Lynch said it, before the release of Twin Peaks: the Return: “I recommend getting whatever screen you’re looking at as close to your eyes as you can get, and use headphones. Turn the lights down. And then you have a chance of getting into a new world.”
TLDR: I was genuinely not expecting to find myself writing about Ethel Cain again, especially at this length, especially in the midst of a lot of way more important shit. Yet here I am again, back on my bullshit.
So, without any further ado, let’s talk about Perverts.
The cautionary tale is the fool’s errand, and I am no fool.
Besides a stray Bones and All inspired loosie here and American Football cover there, Perverts is the first new music from Ethel Cain since her album Preacher’s Daughter, and thus it comes with a lot of big expectations. As nearly everyone who initially wrote about Perverts latched onto, part of the gambit of this project is how it wrongfoots whoever was expecting her to keep delivering “heartfelt and relatable yet traumatic lyrics”. A “hard left turn”, a “troll”, a “fuck you”, a “fame freak out”, an attempt to “weed out the normies” - however people were describing this record, it was near impossible to find someone that wasn’t writing about it as a next chess move in her career.
In those people’s defense, it would be naive to think that this album was made obliviously to how it will be received. Calling this 90 minute project an “EP” is more than just a way to sidestep the pressure of a canonical LP2 follow up (Wikipedia hilariously classifies Perverts as a “recording”). The designation of EP for a body of music even longer than Preacher’s Daughter reads to me as a clever joke; taking the “extended” in “extended play” quite literally and spooling out what could have easily been a more contained 30 minute EP or 45 minute LP into a true durational piece of art. Rather than a “troll” I think the best word for describing its goals of provocation is what Eli Enis landed on in his newsletter: a “dare”. As he put it:
I also know this work is in some part reactionary to her newfound fame because she’s explicitly said as much – first more directly in an now-deleted tumblr post about her frustrations with being a sincere artist whose work is often reduced to “you ate that like Isiah ate Ethel” memes in what she perceives as “an epidemic of irony”, and then again in a piece of more biblical prose called “the Consequence of Audience” that accompanied the album’s announcement. This piece, in a densely poetic way, details the pleasure of making art in the solitude of a path covered by a “long, long wood” and the consequent vulnerability of having that work exposed and examined. It’s metaphor is most easily parsed here:
“Yet came the day the trees broke, the corridor ended, and I was thrust upon the rocky expanse that was the Great Dark. There I saw first face and heard footstep, few and far between, but I was no longer alone. It was a shameful deed to carry these two naked hands as they clenched hotly, now in full display for all to see. I had never noticed them in the wood, for I was at ease.”
From there, the call of a bell leads the narrator through the Great Dark, arriving at a domed structure (this will be important later). “One could follow me to it but they could not follow me in.” She makes gestures at an encounter with an incomprehensible divinity/horror, but insists that whatever descriptions she may give are inadequate. And then she is cast out, with the reveal that this is not her first or last journey to this temple:
“I can-not contain the ache for sensation, just as I could not contain the grief as I fell, nor the agony as I crawled my way back to this rocky countryside, and lo! I am on my way there again now”
The process that “The Consequence of Audience” describes is that of signifier being turned into sign: an artist works on something personal meant to reflect an internal self; it is cast out to “belong” to its audience; its audience sees a million different versions of that sign and derives their own projected meanings to hurl back at its creator. The signifier is so bombarded by perverted refractions of their sign, such that they begin to lose confidence in their reality of self.
In the Satoshi Kon film Perfect Blue, this is dramatized as a popstar turned actress Mika being hunted by the imagined version of her popstar image that her stalker fans or managers want her to be. The projected false illusion of Mika convincing the real Mika that she is the döppleganger. The creator becoming the subject, a being of life replaced by an empty vessel. Caught in a never ending trauma cycle of making and consuming, seeing and being looked upon, being and unbecoming.
“There, in the wood, I was the watcher, but here I am nothing but displacing air.”
This is all relevant context, but I want to strongly caution anyone against reducing Perverts to merely an act of popstar protest, or some form of anti-entertainment aimed to play a prank on her most annoying fans. Kurt Cobain didn’t make In Utero solely because he was mad at everyone for loving “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, just like Thom Yorke didn’t make Kid A because he wanted specific people who liked “Creep” to hate it. These were artists interested in doing exactly what they wanted to do, saying what they thought needed to be said while their hands were still clasping the megaphone. The fact that doing so could hopefully reset fan expectations about who they were and who they weren’t was only downstream of the desire to be properly heard in the first place.
Miranda Reinert already nailed some very similar points in her blog about the weirdness of discourse around “intentionally dislikable” music, but allow me to make some incredibly broad, sweeping complaints of my own about the way that people talk and write about art:
- I hate the lack of creativity. I think that the famously clowned on Kid A pitchfork review is a pretty mediocre piece of writing that leans way too flowery or “purple”, but the pendulum swing away from big heart-on-sleeve swings like it has led to a lot of blah, impersonal writing that does nothing to make me want to actively engage with the work. Art and by extension writing about art should be generative, it should pull something out of you. There is value in a critic who can float above the fray and dissect form and function with a cool head, but in most cases, I’m way more interested in what something made you feel, man. What new ideas did it give you about the world or yourself?
- I hate people hedging their bets. Unwilling to be considered “wrong” or judged by some imagined future consensus, timid observers weigh pros and cons and come to a measured and even keeled middle “take” on artwork meant to evoke strong responses. Terrified to either have Not Gotten something they don’t connect to or be laughed at as a time capsule of yesterday’s hype. I know enough about Pitchfork to know that their review scores are a collective process that weighs the opinion of more than one staff member – and thus are never worth overreacting to – but I find the idea of giving an album as uncompromisingly “love it or hate it” as Perverts a middling “it’s pretty good but not great” 7.0 score to be profoundly silly. (The Sasha Geffen review itself is good, for the record).
- I hate the people who treat astroturfed trends like Tik Tok or AI as natural inevitabilities, who shrug their shoulders and blame “attention spans” or “the economy” as if those are forces entirely outside our control. I hate the word “content”. I hate people who treat sketchy data metrics as inexorable proof that most people want and crave slop, no matter how many times it is proven that these metrics are often fabricated. I hate Daniel Ek and the CEOs of every AI music company, people who know nothing about creativity. People tell you some bullshit that you “have” to do as an artist These Days and tell you “that’s just the way things are”.
- I’ve certainly been guilty of this one, but I hate the way we all talk like fucking executives. I hate backseat management / publicist / marketing brain; I hate that we all have surrendered to thinking of culture and creativity in terms of branding and trends. The way fans themselves talk like industry insiders, speaking in terms of “IP” and contracts and phases of corporate strategy. It’s really starting to make me feel nauseous to participate in.
- I hate the way that incurious people talk about long movies or albums or books like they’re being asked to wait in line at the DMV. I hate the way people talk about “challenging” art, including and especially the people who tend to like “challenging” art the most. Both ends of this horseshoe end up making art - a thing that is meant to be enriching for the soul - into some grueling sacrifice one must make in order to be considered “cultured”. A badge of honor for one’s own Seriousness. You should never say something is good because it’s hard to like, you should say “here’s why I love this thing that you might not”. I do not like art because it is “challenging”. I like finding art that pushes against my notions of what art should be, because that can open the door to new worlds and experiences I would not have known otherwise. You are not smarter or better for “getting it”.
- I hate the embarrassment that people in this country have around art. I hate the word “pretentious”, especially. I am not against skepticism, but that’s not what I’m talking about here. It’s one thing to criticise pretension when it serves to hide a lack of substance, but we have long since lost the plot about what the word “pretentious” even means. It has become a cudgel, a pernicious rejection of the idea that art should “mean” anything at all beyond entertainment. This kneejerk anti-intellectualism that manifests most often among the “let people enjoy things” crowd, who take gleeful pride in their ignorance and condescension towards any art that aims to broaden horizons or break rules. People who treat art like customer service, like an artist is a DJ you’ve hired for a wedding to only take requests.
- And lastly, I hate the word “self-indulgent” used as an insult. People who talk about creative choices as if they are the label or studio funding the project, as if it is a personal insult to you for an artist to dare to have a voice or perspective. Art can and should be whatever the person making it wants it to be. Whether I, the audience, personally enjoy that art, or whether I think its form suits its function, is an entirely separate question.
I have not yet seen The Brutalist (in part because, if I had, there would probably be another few thousand words here), and I look forward to digging into the writing from people who are earnestly engaging with the film itself – but the discourse *around* The Brutalist from people who have not seen it is exactly what I’m talking about here. The people rolling their eyes at the very idea of a movie that aspires to “greatness”, the people assuming that because something is long it must be a slow, boring “eat your vegetables” proposition. The people on the religiously pro-Brutalist side who bought into the marketing and began to think of it as a masterpiece before they’d seen a single frame, who are so starved for anything that takes itself seriously that they preemptively rush to defend its honor. Jacking themselves off because of how many vegetables they eat.
I like a lot of long, slow music and long, slow movies, but I do not like them because they require some level of commitment or focus that inflates my sense of ego. One of my favorite bands in the world (who have also opened for Ethel Cain) is a group from Texas called Teethe, who are a great example that something can be slow and succinct at the same time. Every Teethe song is short - in some cases under 3 or 2 minutes - but the pace at which those songs unfold creates a suspension of time and space unlike a snappy pop song. These vignettes of slowness end up feeling like their own contained universes, tiny and expansive all at the same time. Like little slowcore snow-globes that one can live inside forever.
To borrow a quote from Pauline Kael’s essay “Movies, The Desperate Art”: “One of the strongest terms of critical condemnation is that a film is slow. This is to mean dull, but what it may really indicate is complexity or subtlety. Renoir’s lovely comedy The Golden Coach was described as “slow” (and died at the box office), though after sitting through it twice I still have not had time to catch up with everything in it.”
Unlike The Brutalist, a thing that I actually did watch this year was Twin Peaks. For years and years of my life people would be so confused when I told them I hadn’t seen any of Twin Peaks. “But, the everything about you… surely you must have”?
Finally, this fall, I took the plunge, and within weeks I understood why people had assumed that I was already his biggest fan. I caught the David Lynch bug about as hard as I’ve ever fallen for anything, watching every second of Twin Peaks and binging the entirety of his filmography. Fire Walk With Me and The Return in particular rocked my fucking world.
As I was writing this, as I was editing this very section, David Lynch passed away today at the age of 78. I am grateful for the work he left us, but it is impossible to think of anyone capable of filling the void he now leaves behind. In the midst of a lot of existential dread, unsure what to do or make of my life, his work has been a beacon that called me back from the abyss and re-ignited my sense of purpose.
As my friend Lina put it, I finally feel ready to: “See the mark you want to leave on this fucked world full of bastards” and “Self. Fucking. Actualize”. If I ever make these dreams come true, I will be forever indebted to David Lynch for guiding me to them.
It is difficult to resist the urge to turn this whole thing into a long obituary for a newfound hero, or a diatribe on what his work means to me. About how my life will be likely divided into a dichotomy of Before and After Lynch. But I’m going to try to focus on what I see as relevant to Perverts:
When people talk about Twin Peaks, and The Return especially, it’s hard not to bring up how slow and unconventional its pacing is. Why it “had” to be that many episodes long. Perhaps most infamously, there is a scene that takes place at the Roadhouse where we watch a man sweep a floor for several minutes until finally a different man in the background picks up the phone to have one side of a conversation that is never addressed again. This sort of thing is what makes people either love or hate David Lynch: trying to decipher meaning from the mystery or growing angry at the idea that he might have made this scene with no clear motive or objective and thus “forced” us to sit through it.
I’ve found that a lot of people have an “annoying guy at the magic show trying to prove how smart he is” energy towards art in general, and especially the work of people like David Lynch. They either want to reject the idea of mystery altogether – insisting that they can see the man behind the curtain – or they want to believe that there are clues and the mystery can be solved. We cannot just let a thing be, we want answers. We want evidence that the artist either had some specific authorial intent that we can deem as acceptable, or we want evidence that the artist was a con man in order to prove that we were never fooled. Because heaven forbid the idea that we decide what it means for ourselves. That’s too vulnerable and uncomfortable.
David Lynch is famous for his reticence to tell people what a thing “means”, but what a lot of people misunderstand is that he was not denying us anything in keeping his mouth shut. He was giving us a GIFT, trying to preserve some sense of the unknowable in a world trying to eliminate uncertainty. By never spelling it out, he is allowing his works to mean whatever you want them to mean, including meanings that he could have never conceived of himself.
The point is not that the scene of floor sweeping does or does not have some secret meaning to be uncovered via video essay, it’s about creating a sense of unease and unpredictability as you watch. Denying you the comfort of typical rhythms, such that you start to feel that truly anything could happen at any moment. Or nothing could happen at all. This scene you’re watching right now could keep going forever or cut away without resolution. It takes you out of the mindset of predicting or expecting things to happen and you start experiencing them happening.
Perverts may feel like a shocking left turn if you only heard “American Teenager” and ignored or willfully misremembered the other 71 minutes of Preacher’s Daughter, but to anyone paying close attention, it was hardly a surprise. It should not shock anyone that the girl whose pre-show house playlist is almost entirely Grouper and William Basinski decided to make a body of work that can be described accurately as “horny Disintegration Loops”. In my cover story on Preacher’s Daughter, I noted how the liminal spaces between songs are really the key to understanding that record. Much like Untrue – which real Burial heads will tell you peaks not with “Archangel” but with its brief, haunting interludes like “In McDonalds” – the most magic moments on Preacher’s Daughter happen when nothing is “happening” at all. Like the few seconds of cicadas chirping at the start of “Hard Times” that ground you in a sense of place before a single guitar note is strummed. Perverts simply elongates those moments of stillness and moves them to the center of the frame, de-centering Hayden’s singing voice and the persona of Ethel Cain almost entirely. Gone are the character studies and tall tales. The lyrics and more typical songs on Perverts only offer fragments, vignettes, feelings, prayers — abstract and unresolved.
When asked by a fan on tumblr “how did you decide how long you wanted the songs to go on??”, Hayden answered:
“i just hit record, closed my eyes, and then played my hurdy gurdy until i felt the need to stop. perverts was a sandbox to really do whatever i wanted so i just did whatever felt good”.
“Onanist”, track five on Perverts, takes its name from a biblical term, from the story of Onan, son of Judah. When Onan had sex with Tamar, he withdrew before he ejaculated and "spilled his seed on the ground" thus committing “coitus interuptus”. Over time, in the hands of more repressive sects of Christianity and Catholicism, this ancient term for pulling out has been misinterpreted through religion’s game of telephone to mean masturbation. The waste of God's gift of life on nothing but your own pleasure.
Perverts – and by extension this essay about Perverts – is “self-indulgent”, it is “pretentious”, and yes, it is very literally masturbatory. And as Hayden herself says at the end of “Onanist”:
“it feels… good”
At the end of the day, this tumblr post is more than enough of an answer as to why this EP was made, why it’s 90 minutes long, and why it isn’t something else:
So, with all that throat-clearing and preamble out of the way. Let’s try to tackle a question my best friend Jael amusingly asked me the other day: “What is Perverts even about”?
We live in grim times indeed… the young are too world weary to believe in magic. - Fable 2
In that same Tumblr Q&A format on the official Ethel Cain tumblr, Hayden answers questions about Perverts enthusiastically. She shares influences and inspirations for the EP, including a warmly remembered story related to its hymnal opening. She reblogs visual art that her fans made, including some whom Hayden recruited to help create work specifically for Perverts. In particular, she shares the work of fans like Teetheater333 and Tammy Neurosis, who created a series of gothic sketches used in the album’s rollout that depict her as the nobody-girl, non-protagonist of this EP.
She tells fans about “paulstretching” – a technique used for slowing down audio samples in Audacity to speeds so infinitesimally slow that anything begins to sound gargantuan and abstract; a single chord change happening at the speed of literal glaciers. She’s been doing it since she was 15, making her own personal ambient mixes of electronic music she liked. As she describes it “you really just have to identify a sound you like, whether it's a single chord in a song that really grips you or the rumble of a highway, and decide how best to stretch it out over 20 minutes. you can turn anything into drone, which is the beauty of the genre for me.”
For this project, she paulstretched a field recording of rushing water from the Three Sisters Islands at Niagara Falls, elongating the audio until it became 90 minutes of continuous brown noise hum. A slow-motion tidal wave of audio that runs like an electrical current through the entire EP. If you turn Perverts up as loud as possible, especially on the title track, you will begin to hear this low rumble in the moments of eerie almost silence. A sound that initially presents as recorded room tone or feedback but is an intentionally placed bed of sound.
“I’d also like to thank the natural drone music that exists everywhere in this world, in transformer boxes and powerlines on the side of the highway, in the radio static of an empty AM frequency, in the fan of my computer as my Ableton project files overloaded the CPU, and in the distant roar of the interstate on the other side of my favorite field. I love you, sound, you have always been there for me.”
She lists her favorite drone artists, and cites the work of musician and experimental filmmaker Scott Barley as a huge inspiration – particularly Sleep Has Her House, a movie shot entirely on iPhone that features no actors or dialogue. The other night I purchased a digital copy of the film (which you can do from his cool website), and watched as instructed: “only in complete darkness, and with either headphones, or a quality sound system”. The images and sounds that followed cracked my brain open like an egg. Through nature photography, some paintings, a mix of field recordings and drone music, and a star performance from a horse; Barley creates a wholly unique and entrancing language of film. I was so lulled into its rhythms that by midway through, simple cuts between two static landscape shots began to feel like truly seismic shifts.
With no narration or voices, the only words are four simple lines of text on screen:
The shadows of screams climb beyond the hills.
It has happened before.
But this will be the last time.
The last few sense it, withdrawing deep into the forest.
They cry out into the black, as the shadows pass away, into the ground.
She answers people’s burning questions, like: “Is the feeling of perverts supposed to scare us?” (“not really, at least it wasn't my intention.”), “what weather pattern would perverts be?” (“fog”, obviously), and “vibrator in pulldrone? True?” ( “hurdy gurdy ♡”).
She reveals that “Childish Behavior” was an original working title before she landed on Perverts. She confirms that, as I’m sure you were all wondering, the track title “Etienne” is a reference to the architect Étienne-Louis Boullée. She even provides a reading list of literature that inspired Perverts upon request:
Jean Baudrillard - Simulacrum and Simulation
Harlan Ellison - I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream [pro tip: do not read right before bed]
John Bunyan - Pilgrim's Progress
Jean-Paul Sartre - Nausea
At this point, depending on how much of an artsy fartsy type you identify as, or how much you did or did not enjoy Philosophy in college, you are probably either locking TF in or rolling your eyes. As previously stated, I take art perhaps too seriously and thus find great frustration in the use of “pretentious”. However, if that’s a word you subscribe to, than allow me to warn you that this is about to get super fucking pretentious.
The moment I start talking about anything related to the meaning of Art, or God, I can feel some more cynical voice in my head mocking my own self-aggrandizement, but it’s not my fault that this framework of is so effective for tackling the age old question of What We’re All Doing Here.
As author and ball-knower Victoria Zeller said in a series of bluesky posts that took the words out of my own mouth:
“I would describe myself as agnostic (or just not religious) but unfortunately the concept of God goes extremely hard, artistically speaking. if you ever see me invoke God just know that i mean it in a The Awe-Inspiring Majesty Of The Universe Anthropomorphized way, not the catholic god way”
“i am unfortunately something much more annoying than a christian (an artist)”
“it is easier to just say God instead of The Universe/God/Nobody/Everybody every single time i am trying to evoke the intangible beauty all around us at every moment. christianity bores me but they nailed a shorthand way to refer to that”.
So just go with me here as we are thrust out of the woods and into the Great Dark:
I’m not going to give you a full book report on all of these additional reading materials (for example, Pilgrim’s Progress is over 100,000 words of devotional literature from the 17th Century and me trying to briefly summarize it for you would be a fool's errand of its own) but it’s worth discussing some of references to these other texts to help to illuminate what’s going on in the music. In particular, Simulacrum and Simulation — a French philosophical text that the Wachowski sisters famously required cast members to read before filming The Matrix — is important to unpack here.
Unlike Plato’s cave allegory, which identified a binary of manipulated false images meant to approximate the real and truthfully rendered representations of reality, Baudrillard identifies four distinct categories of mass produced images or things:
I. It is the reflection of a basic reality.
2. It masks and perverts a basic reality.
3. It masks the absence of a basic reality.
4. It bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum.
Perverts is about those additional two categories, especially that fourth category of pure simulacrum. An image or thing that is neither masked nor true, “Models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.” Sign signifying nothing.
Examples of these kinds of simulacrum are artificial modern spaces that make knowingly unreal reference to real places (think: New York, New York hotel in Las Vegas with its fake skyline and mini Statue of Liberty) or spaces that are unmasked in their representation of already unreal things. Disneyland is the specific example Baudrillard gives of a nakedly unreal category 4 pure simulacrum. The world of Disney cartoons that Disneyland is meant to stand in for is not a “real” place to begin with, thus Disneyland is an obviously artificial representation of something already unreal and constructed. A mountain facade and castle that we can see from the highway, a place that makes no attempt to appear “real” but we call the “magic kingdom” anyway.
Another subject of Baudrillard’s writing was the Centre Pompidou - an “insides-out” building in Paris that was the topic of revulsion and fascination for Baudrillard. As you can see below: it is a sprawling, multi-use building that has been designed with all structural, mechanical, and power systems nakedly presented on the outside. To put it in more modern terms: it is an ugly ass building so resolutely anti-vibes that it led Baudrillard to describe it as “an incinerator absorbing all the cultural energy and devouring it - a bit like the black monolith in 2001”. He also dubs it “a machine for making emptiness”, which would have been a BANGER title for this EP but is perhaps a bit too on the nose. Can’t believe Trent Reznor hasn’t used that one yet.
You can argue that Baudrillard is perhaps being a bit dramatic in his horrified reactions to the Centre Pompidou or Disneyland, but he clarifies what he finds so insidious about this incursion of empty hyperrealism:
“It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself; that is, an operation to deter every real process by its operational double, a programmatic, metastable, perfect descriptive machine which provides all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes. Never again will the real have the chance to produce itself.”
Or, as later said by Morpheus in cool sunglasses: “Welcome to the desert of the real”
The architecture of Étienne-Louis Boullée also ties back to this idea of simulacrum. A neoclassical 18th century French Architect, Boullée designed massive utopian structures that took classical geometric design elements (i.e. Greek Columns) and repeated them at a massive scale (you can see his style manifest in places like the DC subway). Besides smaller projects like the Hôtel Alexandre, most of his work was never completed in his lifetime, but the designs and sketches later became a massive influence on contemporary architecture.
Perhaps Boullée's most famous unbuilt design was the Cenotaph for Isaac Newton, a massive spherical structure that would have been taller than the pyramids of Giza. As part of its intended function as a funeral monument, the domed structure would create the effect of day and night to those inside: the night effect happening when a shaft of sunlight reached Newton’s golden sarcophagus, refracting upward onto the ceiling to create the illusion of the night sky, while the day effect would be provided by a glowing armillary sphere suspended in the space as a sort of False Sun. Rather than trying to accurately depict the natural world outside the dome, this design would have created a sense of surreal inversion to those inside it: appearing as day inside when it was night outside and vice versa. This never constructed temple to the unreal is something Hayden discusses as inspirational on her tumblr:
“i'd like to think bouleé was the first person to discover the great dark, the discoverer and pioneer of both a new world and a new way to see the old world. he was so overcome by what he found there that he designed temples to try and fit all of the heart inside it but it was never big enough, it was never enough in any way, but he still tried”
“ i imagine he must have felt so lonely, like noah building the ark. that song was my ode to him.”
The section of Simulacra & Simulation that Hayden shares on her tumblr account deals with how this concept of simulacrum intersects with ideas of God, specifically. I’ve abridged it slightly and underlined the same sentence that she underlined in her paperback copy:
“the question returns to religion and the simulacrum of divinity: ‘ I forbade that there be any simulacra in the temples because the divinity that animates nature can never be represented.’ Indeed it can be. But what becomes of the divinity when it reveals itself in icons, when it is multiplied in simulacra? … This is precisely because they predicted this omnipotence of simulacra, the faculty simulacra have of effacing God from the conscience of man, and the destructive, annihilating truth that they allow to appear - that deep down God never existed, that only the simulacrum ever existed, even that God himself was never anything but his own simulacrum - from this came their urge to destroy the images. If they could have believed that these images only obfuscated or masked the Platonic Idea of God, there would have been no reason to destroy them. One can live with the idea of distorted truth. But their metaphysical despair came from the idea that the image didn't conceal anything at all, and that these images were in essence not images, such as an original model would have made them, but perfect simulacra, forever radiant with their own fascination. Thus this death of the divine referential must be exorcised at all costs.”
Here is what she has to say about what the idea of simulacrum means to her, explaining it a little more plainly in her own words:
“the concept of simulacrum just gripped me immediately. because it merged into my already existing hatred of this rapidly developing cycle of life and reality as we know it flowing into the ether of the internet and back out again, the same but different somehow. i found myself unable to experience life as it comes because im filtering it through the media i’ve consumed and considering it wrong when it doesn’t match. all the while, i feel helpless to stop it. i do my drugs and i have my orgasms and i seek out my gods and i started wondering if i came back from it all different each time. i hate change but i need change, and all the while change happened and continued to happen completely apathetic to my feelings towards it because in the grand scheme of things, i am nothing. simulacrum became a spiritual vehicle for my own personal ouroboros.”
The reason I’m digging so deep into the referenced source material and giving you this lesson in philosophy and architecture is not to imply that you need to complete all this additional homework in order to “get it”. I didn’t have a copy of Simulacrum and Simulation or a laptop open to the mothercain tumblr page while I listened to Perverts for the first time, and you could certainly get a lot out of Perverts as experienced in a vacuum. I do not want the tone of this piece to be “I’m the Right Kind of listener, you have to be like ME to truly understand this work” - especially given my personal connection to the artists involved.
My goal is to give you a framework that I hope will be helpful towards understanding its intentions and connecting with its sentiment. I totally understand if you throw on Perverts and your initial reaction is “I have no idea how I’m supposed to engage with this”.
So in case you’re not already so drone-pilled that turning off all of the lights and listening to 90 minutes of erotic dark ambient music is your idea of a fun Saturday night, allow me to give you a metaphor of one way to approach this music. Think of it less like an explanation of “meaning” and more like a handrail that you can hold onto as we move into the dark:
Perverts is not an album, nor an EP. It is not a movie or a book or a play or poem or narrative of any traditional kind. There are no characters or story and there is no beginning or end.
Perverts is a building. A structure. It is a hall that you can enter, echoing walls you can walk inside. It is something you experience. It is the dome that the narrator of “Consequence of Audience” sees cresting above the hill. In Angel’s instagram post celebrating the EP’s release, she thanks Hayden for “trusting me enough to place stones on this great monolith of sound”.
Perverts is a hall of religion, or perhaps a tomb. It is a vast, cavernous space. Standing at its entrance, faint whispers can be heard, but it is too dark to see what lies within. Inside could be some great and powerful thing. The chance to know what only God knows. Or it could be the entrance to hell. Or it could be nothing at all. There is only one way to find out.
It is a temple of the simulacrum, a place for worshipping nothing. A song for an unborn sun, a snake eating its own tail. It is a machine for making emptiness.
Hayden Anhedonia’s Centre Pompidou is the defunct Bruce Mansfield plant in Shippingport, PA, a structure she encountered by chance on a late night drive along the Ohio river. Much like how Lynch’s Inland Empire began first as a series of black and white photographs he took of abandoned factories in Poland, this power plant is as influential to Perverts as any traditional work of art. Seen above in a picture she posted to the Ethel Cain instagram, she describes a much less antagonistic relationship with her own machine for making emptiness:
"I’ve always had a fascination with great brutalist structures, but something about the smokestacks, cooling towers, and other twisted entrails of the power plants of Pennsylvania truly changed the way I see the world and my place in it last year. I spent multiple nights a week parked on the side of the road outside that plant the entire 9 months I lived in Coraopolis; I’d drive up the river in the middle of the night and sit there for hours, admiring the sheer might of the towers and how beautiful and resolute they stood against the grey night sky. They became a beacon of religiosity, of sexual liberation and enjoyment, of contentedness. When I would drive home, I would masturbate in the dark and think about them and only them."
Long before I had words like “simulacrum” at my disposal, I have been obsessed with the idea of finding beauty and love within the realm of the unreal. Los Angeles, the place I call home, reflects this idea as vividly as any place I have ever been. It is a temple of simulacrum, a fake, false dream containing nothing… and yet it is the most beautiful place in the world. On Sean Fennessey’s podcast The Big Picture, in an episode dedicated to the films of David Lynch, he spoke of Lynch’s vision of LA and a conflicted feeling that I know all too well: “I like it, but I also hate myself.. so you, you know, imagine the contradiction there”.
People tend to assume that Lynch’s trio of LA films - Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, and Inland Empire - are a cautionary tale, a polemical screed against this city and the nightmarish machinations of power and fear that fuel our entertainment industry. But David Lynch loves LA, because to truly believe in a an all-corrupting evil, one must first believe in love’s absolute goodness. Blue Velvet is not an ironic satire of suburban idyll, it is a work made by someone who genuinely loved the suburban paradise he grew up in, grappling with the fact that this utopia could also contain such despair and pain.
As Lynch put it himself in his book, Catching the Big Fish:
"I love Los Angeles. I know a lot of people go there and they see just a huge sprawl of sameness. But when you’re there for a while, you realize that each section has its own mood. The golden age of cinema is still alive there, in the smell of jasmine at night and the beautiful weather. And the light is inspiring and energizing. Even with smog, there’s something about that light that’s not harsh, but bright and smooth. It fills me with the feeling that all possibilities are available. I don’t know why. It’s different from the light in other places. The light in Philadelphia, even in the summer, is not nearly as bright. It was the light that brought everybody to L.A. to make films in the early days. It’s still a beautiful place."
I love Los Angeles, too. I love the way the sky looks. The way the air smells. The light during magic hour. I’m getting misty right now just thinking about Randy Newman’s “I Love LA”. Much like the song, my own relationship LA began as detachment and contempt and has wrapped all the way back around to a pure love song.
I love the people of this city, the way we help rescue each other from the loneliness. It breaks my heart so deeply to see places and streets I took for granted to be reduced to nothing. To see how fragile and impermanent it all was, how puny we are in the face of nature’s wrath. But I still don’t want to leave. I want to be here to see it rebuilt.
Los Angeles is beautiful and cruel and magnificently vast. It is Disneyland and also god’s land. No-thing and Every-thing, hand in hand.
I have had three profound experiences with art in the last week.
The first was Perverts, and the third was Sleep Has Her House (by the way, both are the same length and would make a sick Dark Side of The Moon + Wizard of Oz type combo).
The middle link in this chain was The Beast, a film directed by Betrand Bonello. I looove Bonello’s French terrorism movie Nocturama (at the top of my “only recommend to cool people” list) and had long been meaning to dig into his other work, especially his most recent film The Beast. Little did I know that titular Beast and I have already met
La bête, as the film’s title card says, is a film adapted from the 1903 Henry James novella A Beast In The Jungle. Leaving the original story mostly as is, Bonello builds a galaxy brain sci-fi meta structure to the movie in which the experiences of the 1903 Paris characters are being re-lived in the future. In a plot mechanic that can be described as “Cloud Atlas but evil” or “if David Lynch was super into Asssassin’s Creed”: the film depicts a calm but desolate Paris 2044 in which AI have “saved” humanity from their shortcomings, and now humans must now purge themselves of all negative and self destructive feelings in order to be trusted with jobs in which they can apply themselves. These imperfect souls, who cannot stop emotionally reacting to the AI’s tests, are forced to enter a black pit of goo and receive an injection that makes them re-live the portions of their past lives that are preventing them from going clear, to borrow a term. These future people are sent back to the exact plot of the 1903 novella, along with a 2014 Los Angeles timeline in which the man and woman are now a french actress house sitting in an LA mansion and an incel stalking her who is literally quoting mass murderer Elliot Rodger.
The 1903 plotline is gender-swapped in the film to make the woman the central figure, but the central idea and much of the dialogue remains intact.
The woman meets a man at an art gallery, and the man reminds her that they’ve met before, in another country. The man reminds her that she told him a secret, something he had never forgotten. He asks if she still believes what she told him. That secret, we learn, is a specific fear. Something deep and primal that she had never confessed to anyone else. He asks her “if the thing you then spoke of has ever come to pass?”. When she prompts him to say what it is, he remembers:
“You said you had had from your earliest time, as the deepest thing within you, the sense of being kept for something rare and strange, possibly prodigious and terrible, that was sooner or later to happen to you, that you had in your bones the foreboding and the conviction of, and that would perhaps overwhelm you... It’s to be something you’re merely to suffer?”
“Well, say to wait for—to have to meet, to face, to see suddenly break out in my life; possibly destroying all further consciousness, possibly annihilating me; possibly, on the other hand, only altering everything, striking at the root of all my world and leaving me to the consequences, however they shape themselves.”
This feeling, referred to as “The Beast”, goes on to haunt the same woman across the three timelines of the film like a predator that she cannot escape. The cheap way to read this movie is assigning “The Beast” to some kind of literal 1-to-1 metaphor for either depression or anxiety or SSRIs or therapy or trauma, but what it spoke to in me was something more ancient, a gravitational pull. It tapped into not my sadness, not my pain, not my dysphoria, but doom.
While many were quick to call The Beast an internet-brained Mullholland Drive, to me this film’s closest Lynch analogue – with the caveat that no one, including Bonello, will ever be "the new David Lynch" – is obviously Inland Empire.
Storytelling and specifically acting as a nightmare portal into the trauma baked into our DNA, “a vast network, an ocean of possibilities”. An endless drama of loss. To re-use part of my Inland Empire Letterboxd review:
We exist as so many selves within selves, hurdling forwards and backwards in time, that to try to extract a one “true” self from the chain unravels the thread entirely. Obliterated and reconstructed in the digital pixels of the camera lens - born anew on the other side of the opening.
This same feeling that the protagonist of The Beast describes, that Henry James described over a century ago, exists somewhere within me too. Deep into the recesses of consciousness that scientists have yet to map. A feeling that something, possibly everything, is irrevocably fucked. A feeling I have lived with for as long as I can remember, long before and long after transitioning, making me live a life defined by fear and regret. The fear that “love is not enough”.
I feel helpless to stop it. It never fully leaves me.
The scariest, saddest lyrics on Perverts – the ones that send a chill up my spine – are these:
There was a point where everything bent down
And it took something from me
Something I can't quite explain
And I always wondered if it would come back
What The Beast, Twin Peaks, and Perverts are all "about", in my humble interpretation, is the fear that this something can never be recovered. That things will never be the same.
The fear that I fell in love with a false idol to a god that never existed. That I came in, “at the end” as Tony Soprano put it. That it’s already over.
The fear that the angels aren’t coming back.
On “pulldrone”, the longest track on Perverts, the narrator describes a countdown of 12 “Pillars of Simulacrum” that make oblique reference to Baulliard’s dissolution of reality into the hyperreal; taking some creative liberties as she forms her own mythos. The 12 steps outline a process that sounds less like a philosophy and more like an instruction manual for descending into madness: apathy, disruption, curiosity, assimilation, aggrandization, delineation, perversion, resentment, separation, degradation, desolation.
Much of the imagery of Consequence of Audience is referenced directly on “pulldrone”: the Great Dark, the bell ringing through the mist, “the insatiable need to see what happens inside the room”. Upon reaching the room, she resolves:
Lo, wellspring of knowledge
Of feeling, of sensation
Beauty, overwhelming
I will dislocate my jaw to fit it all in
From there, things fall apart. The eroticism of the sublime curdling into dissociation and alienation, as the drone of the hurdy gurdy grows louder and louder in the background. What begins as a desire to know the real, a desperate need to “know what god knows”, only sends her spiraling into suffering when she is cast out. Eventually she reaches the end of the rope, and the album arrives at its dark heart:
Nine, separation
I was an angel, though plummeting
The stars are as beams shining through the wheel
I am sure that Hell must be cold
Ten, degradation
Nature chews on me
Eleven, annihilation
This agony
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
Twelve, desolation
Therein lies sacred geometry of onanism
Of ouroboros
Of punishment
I am that I was as I no longer am for I am nothing
Which brings us to what we’re really here to talk about today: emptiness.
“Do you think that if you were falling in space... that you would slow down after a while, or go faster and faster?”
“Faster and faster. And for a long time you wouldn't feel anything. And then you'd burst into fire. Forever... And the angels wouldn't help you. Because they've all gone away.”
- Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me
In my own memories, I’m not there. Obviously no one can see their own face unless they are looking in a mirror, but much of my life has been spent dissociating and compartmentalizing the things that I have experienced from my sense of identity. I genuinely struggle to put the two and two together of memories that I cherish and what I must have physically looked at the time. Unless I have pictures to remind me, it's as if the self who experienced those moments never existed at all.
This is in part a byproduct of the weirdness of transition and the years of extreme dysphoria of my youth – in which my internal life drifted entirely away from the body going through the motions – but these feelings of disorientation have continued well into my time living as a woman. It’s not that transition hasn't helped, but I still find myself getting lost in the woods of memory and self. I don’t find myself wishing my body or face to be different, as much as I find myself not wanting to think about the fact that I have a physical body at all. There’s a reason my favorite Radiohead song is centered around the lyric “I’m not here / this isn’t happening”.
To live a life derailed by dysphoria and dissociation is to slowly watch yourself erased from your own memories like Marty McFly disappearing from the family picture. I look at images meant to represent my past selves and see the eyes of strangers looking back at me. Empty faces. False icons, signs signifying nothing.
I spent my entire life oriented around who I couldn’t or shouldn’t be, as I skirted around the edges of the void that was non-self. I was all shadow and no surface, a photo negative without an original image. So many school nights I would lock myself in my room and stay awake as long as I could — because sleep meant morning, and morning meant going back to a life of trudging through the motions. Alone, in the dark, I could finally be nobody.
I don't think about myself as a writer, or an artist, or filmmaker. I don’t think of myself as a woman, or even a person. I don’t think about myself at all. In my hopes and dreams there is no “me” there, achieving those goals. I find that loving outward and towards others is easy, for my nothingness cannot hold onto this love for myself. I am a barren garden that may never grow fruit, so I give my seeds to someone else. I believe in love, and I believe in the goodness of humanity, but I do not believe in myself.
I am a vessel, a tulpa. A tool manufactured for some higher purpose that I may never learn, by a creator I will never meet. I am dry air billowing over dark, forested hills. I am an empty basin.
I am nothing.
I do my drugs and I have my orgasms and I seek out my gods
And i started wondering if i came back from it all different each time
When you were young, you said you wished that someone loved you
It is 9:30PM on the west coast, and I am lying in my childhood bedroom, in the dark. I am listening to Perverts for the first time, and I feel the nervous excitement of not knowing what will happen next. I let go of all expectations and start experiencing it happening to me.
I slip into that quiet infinity — between sounds, between worlds. I feel the vibrations of the music, entering through my ears and filling my body with a static hum. The electricity changing me from the inside out. The words “I love you” repeating over and over and over again until all meaning is gone.
The boundary between my body and the darkness around me begins to dissolve. I feel nothing grip me with its hands, pinning me down to the bed. My eyes roll back into my head, and my jaw goes slack. I let it all inside. Nothing fills me with its black emptiness, pouring it down my throat. Until everything in me has been erased. Until I see the face of god, and I see that it is empty.
And then Perverts ends. And I take off my headphones, and I hear the wind and sirens again.
I’m still myself. I’m still stuck in this body. And the fire is still burning.
I wake up the next morning, and suddenly the blockage in my soul is gone. Somewhere deep inside, I’ve sprung a leak. I am powerless to stop it. Months if not years of repressed bile finally comes up to the surface. I open my mouth and the black emptiness spills back out of me, along with every other thought, memory, and emotion that I’ve ever had.
I begin to write it all down. And I write and write and write, but no matter how long I sit in front of the computer screen the thoughts and feelings won’t end. I babble on and on and on and it’s no use. There is no way to communicate it all. But I keep trying anyway.
I spend days and nights thinking about it. I beam more images and sounds into my brain and I try to find a way to wrap my arms around all of it. Everything and nothing.
I lie in darkness and I listen to Perverts again. And again. And again. I press my palms into my eye sockets like when I was a kid, watching the colors and shapes form in the black nothing. I try to purge myself of unwanted emotions. I try to let nothing take me away.
Finally, it does.
The deep rumbling nothing consumes me, and my body releases me from its shackles.
I am freed of the thoughts and the feelings and the sensations. I float up, out of myself, and my body disappears below me.
I step forward in the darkness, towards the gaping mouth of the temple.
I reach out…
And I touch myself
I feel nothing
And it feels… good