natashalallresearchblog-blog

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The Still Waiting Discussion group concluded our regular meetings this academic year with a set of three individually led podcasts inspired by finding from our live streamed interviews with Sound: Gender: Feminism: Activism attendees. Mine focused on records collected as my mother migrated between continents in her early life.

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Here are some images from Rookie Mag, Polyester Zine and a poster for a clubnight named GalGals. This twee, young girl-esque aesthetic is relatable to the scene i wish to address with my novella. I aim to mesh the collage/stickers meets DIY drawing style with my hand drawn/collage scores for the final novella. I think I need something a little less ‘busy’ than these images so it can be read more simply as a score. But these visual details are essential in making a ‘score’ that is relatable for young queer girls who aren’t necessarily familiar with traditional or graphic scores.

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almost finished - three works in progress for my cheer plunderphonics piece. Previous feedback from my tutor Iris indicated that i needed to create a bigger range in pitch and panning. I am weary that I may have gone too far and might need to do more subtle adjustments instead.

Plunder Guns is a wholly new piece, I scrapped a previous work as it was too similar to the Cheer Laugh piece. Plunder guns portrays an aggressive femininity in the cheerleading, stemming from the cartoonish gun shots in cheerleading routines to mark certain choreographies. I exaggerated these cutesy shots into booming, harsh, and sudden ones. 

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The gender-bending of this work interests me as it is such a simple alteration to the pitch which instills an idea of a new gender upon listeners. The subtle progression into the ‘male’ voice really brings up questions of perception and simplicity in gender representation. I feel a similar very simplistic gender divide exists in the world of cheerleading and sport. A vocal pitch change might be a useful method to use in my work. I also want to explore stereotypical ideas of masculinity such as aggression and physical labour sounds vs sweet delicate dancing of femininity in sports. A lot of gun sounds, and male voice overs are being used in contemporary cheer music. The music now is also far quicker than traditional chants. The sound appears less typically feminine to my ear. I would like to explore these thoughts further. Perhaps this ties in with the new genres of cheerleading such as ALLSTAR in which cheerleaders do not cheer on a team or hold pom poms but perform hyper-energetic stunts. With this context, the agressive more ‘masculine’ sounds perhaps show females appropriating the power of male sports teams. The typical role of cheerleader as one to cheer on a male football team is deconstructed. Female aggression and energy is being explored and I want to bring sounds which suggest those ideas to focus in my work.

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I really enjoy how a beautiful, idyllic portrayal of spring has been turned into a chaotic mesh of crescendos, stutters and harshly cut samples. I am interested in Oswald’s reclaiming of moods and atmospheres as well as his ideas of reclaiming ownership of sounds or ideas that may be copyrighted. Turning typically beautiful atmospheres into that of chaos is something I am currently working on with my cheerleading sounds. I am reworking the preppy, cute and happy energetic musics into tracks that give more a sense of exhaustion, overwhelm, fakeness and even female manipulation.

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I recently acted in a sci-fi lesbian film, JOEY, for the Scottish Queer International Film Festival. My scenes were all shot in club settings and we often had to *imagine” the songs we were dancing too so that our dialogue could be picked up by the sound recorder. It was bizarre but it helped me focus on the other sounds of queer club interactions. Pint glasses wobbling on wooden bar tables, awkward pauses with throat clearings and stutters around coming out questions. Having to isolate certain sounds for my role enabled me to observe soundscapes I plan to use in my novella in a physical 4D space. I wouldn’t have thought to do such if I hadn’t been involved in acting jobs this academic year. It was a valuable addition to my sound studies as well as my acting portfolio.

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At a recent DJ performance at the Bunker Club, Deptford i included some of my plunderphonic tracks. The night is specifically for industrial, gabber, goth musics and I felt it would be an appropriate place to test out my tracks as the audience came specifically for less mainstream, ‘harder’ music. The night was a success, and the collaged, off beat sounds fitted well between gabber tracks. The plunderphonics tracks were much more delicate and minimal, it amplified the intensity of the gabber music which the audience seemed to appreciate

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Excerpts from interview with Artist Ariana De Groot

I interviewed Ariana on club experiences as a woman of colour. Her words painted great physical/audio images as well as reminding me of microagressions and reactions that I should include in my novella work.

Here are some excerpts:

I remember once when I was working at the door at Corsica this group of really annoying white people were like please like can you get us into that Latin club next door (the same security team work over both clubs, distriandina were having one of there own nights as it was Saturday) and I was like they can't just let u go in for a min, it's a totally different club, you would have to pay entry for there too. And they were just like oh pleeeease we really wanna go try it out/see it/something along those lines. And I just felt like wow stay in ur fucking lane whitey looool, like seriously tho they have their own space right there like I don't know why they feel like they have to literally occupy everywhere like just chill, go in the club,enjoy ur night, bye. Like u can hear the music from the Colombian club in the smoking area of Corsica and once I was working outside and I had to watch all these white people trying to dance to salsa and it was honestly horrible lol. 

Ok so fast forward lol to the end of our shift when I was sitting outside with the group of colleagues from Corsica and they start talking about one time one of them did a night and it was so awkward cus like almost no one came but Ene (the Peruvian guy who works at the other club) and they started talking about how weird it was that he came to the party and they started imitating his accent and what they said and they were all laughing about him. I just sort of tensed up and had no idea how to act. Thinking about it now I wish I had just been like lol you guys are being racist and rude about ene - like they're not my friends idk why I couldnt just b like fu bye- but just like in that moment I felt really awkward like I Felt a really bodily reaction like I was really hot and my muscles were tense, and I saw chip look at me ( that is the guy I had told I was Peruvian that night) I think he realised and kinda awkwardly stopped laughing, and I felt like he might have been watching me to see how I was gunna react, and like almost in that situation I was more anxious about people watching how I would react to it than actually just accessing my feelings and reacting to the racism in that moment. Also in a rly fucked up way I feel like I need to feel as tho I'm not making anyone feel uncomfortable so a lot of the time when stuff like that will happen I'll try make myself like blend in by like (this is so fucked) laughing along. And I honestly rly hate and don't think it's ok that I would do that but I think it's the only way I can like survive the social situation and feeling anxious in that moment.

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Excerpts from interview with DJ and Magazine Contributor Xena Hussain

Xena Hussain hosts Bakwaas at Breakfast at Radar radio and writes for Gal-Dem magazine. I wanted to interview her on POC experiences in our local social scene. She is confident in talking about these issues, as shown in her writing and radio work and I got some very honest insights and anecdotes from her.

excerpts noted down from vocal interview:

knew it was just gonna be thin white ppl… the art community we’re in right now… its always skinny white people

I’m a fat brown girl… i didn’t have uncovered legs until like last year… before then it was possible they didn’t even exist

table jobs for immigrants.. but no brown kids in humanities where we need to generate culture

you n your friend were the only other brown ppl there and i was like thank god… a step closer from feeling really really out of place

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Further coverage of the TYPICAL GIRLS 2 night I DJed at by Time-Out magazine

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I recently played at TYPICAL GIRLS 2 which was a fundraising event for International Women’s Day. I played a mix of hardcore, cheermix and nightcore. I wanted to create an atmosphere that portrayed an unapologetically femme DJ at an all female/femme lead night. The high pitched vocals of the nightcore and cheermix paired with the hardcore beats created such. I got good feedback from friends who are loyal to my events as well as people from the wider feminist scene I met at the night. Some of the staff who simply worked at the venue and weren’t female or self-identifying feminists appreciated the music too and said they rarely heard such intense music and appreciated it. It gave me a sense of female power, it was a good space to showcase my new mixes as there were friends who would support me from my usual scene, other feminists and also people i had less in common with but felt comfortable around as they were in the company of so many of my acquaintances. 

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I have been in conversation from the all-girl intersectional feminist DJ collective UNITI for a while now. They are local club kids who i see regularly at queer nights and we have built up a repertoire that means we trust each other to share and promote our works. 

On this show, the second track in is a trance track I created on ableton. It takes inspiration from female vocal trance, experimental pop and cheermix. I feel it was a good in between of eerie sound-art experiments i have been doing wiht my plunderphonics work and also relatable, easy-listening dance tunes I would play as a DJ in situations i which i would interact with the local scene and the UNITI DJs.  I would say this was the first step in getting my plunderphonics work heard, the track mixes aspects of the eperimental sound art scene with popular musics to allow those more unfamiliar ideas to still be digestable to my local club going queer scene. 

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some images of me trying out 2 or 4 virtual dj decks with cheerleading, hardcore and female vocal pop to create a hyper femme but aggressive/eerie plunderphonics track or even live set.

Image of me re-working the panning on a recent plunderphonics cheer track i created

Image of some of the cheer sounds and cheermixes that have inspired me and that i have sampled

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Reading these notes on Oswald in a book for Grateful Dead fans entitled The American Book of the Dead provides an interesting insight into audience reception of Oswald’s works. In general the ‘deadheads’ were fans of Oswald’s works... creating something they wish the band would do in future. I’m curious as to wether my reworkings of camp pop and cheer music would work in gay clubs and at cheerleading events. It might be a lot harder to dance to but maybe could be used as a short filler between songs... I will try them out playing them in my sets.

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I am part of a cheerleading team and it is part of the performativity to act hyper-femme and dance to energetic, cartoonish peppy sounds. I enjoy how immediately you can hear a performed gender and energy. These sounds to me are loaded with obvious, easy to read representations. They may be good for including in my plunderphonics work. Rather than reworkign and re-claiming pop sounds I might want to re-claim these cheer sounds which directly influence my daily life as an athlete in training. Mixing them into a more aggresive of eerie state could audibly portray femme/female-hood as something to fear, something with enough strength and energy to dominate the male-heavy worlds of sound or sport....

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Attached is a draft of the novella mid-way through the process. It includes details of what i might cut, what soundscapes/characters need developing, an old chapter plan etc

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Toying with animalistic sound language

After my earleir mention, I decided to test out using more feline sound language. I was inspired by Sarah Schulmann’s queer-rodent comparisons in Rat Bohemia and wanted to try feline-female comparisons of my own. Below is an excerpt from The Feline Mystique: On the Mysterious Connection Between Women and Cats By Clea Simon.

My own take specifically focused on queer/sexually liberated female-felines. This example takes a queer romantic encounter into the realm of a fantasy feline world.

I enjoyed writing like this.. I was unsure if it made the queer sex scenario seem a bit too exotic/othered though. The images/sounds were vivid however, and I was happy with that so i continued onto another test:

Perhaps these tests have lead me slightly astray from my original plan. I am enjoying writing them but the tone does not mesh with my existing club kid focused theme which focuses on queer club sounds of London’s dying queer scene. Maybe I do want to focus on that for now, whilst the scene is on its last legs. I want to document the spaces being shut down now. I think that would be most sympathetic to my scene’s current needs. 

Note: keep as a side work.. maybe develop later as an afterthought