Heard this interview with Terre Thaemlitz (a.k.a DJ Sprinkles) last night on All Things Considered on my slow, snowy drive home.
“Most of my music is made in a kind of anti-climactic way, and very much involves boredom, and a kind of non-performativity… and if there are improvisational elements, it’s kind of parodying the idea of gesture as a kind of rock format, and critiquing that from a transgender and…feminist side.”
- Terre Thaemlitz
“…in the original house tracks, when they talk about “escape”, it’s not escaping the work-a-day grind of your work scene… it’s about escaping very serious political structures that are pressing you, and very serious gender strictures that are opressing you… and doing it with a sense of humor, a sense of glamor…”
- Jesse Doris, producer
A lot of the cultural criticism stuff is also relevant to the underground psy-trance scene, I think, although not so much from a queer perspective, but from a transhuman one. That is to say, for me a queer perspective has always been implicit in the politics of psytrance, since the movement definitely supports a refusal to “essentialize” one’s identity —a la queer theory—and seems to accept postmodern/post-binary notions of gender and sexuality. I think a big difference is that the messages and aesthetics in house music are nods to a collective memory and experience of social/political oppression, whereas the similar messages in the psytrance scene come from a Spiritual or Religious experience of paradigm-shifting away from Western materialism/scientific imperialism, which also yields messages of peace/acceptance and unity of the human family.
