What happens when a record player is played with acrylic nails instead of a needle? Read an essay by the scholar and writer Peggy Kyoungwon Lee in which she evokes a world that refuses to be reproduced.
The audacity,
to touch a play-
back technology in ways
that weren’t meant to be used.
Take the record in your hands and break it.
If the spindle hole is still attached, put it on the turntable. Yes, on top of whatever was already on rotation. There is a topography now. You’re scaling, not playing, the needle will jump up and down on the jagged edge of the break.
Destroy more records, let the samples find you.
«Loss»
Cue
«Loss»
Loop
«Loss»
Static
Loss is not the same as vessel. Loss is an infinity mirror of sound. You reach out and touch air and spectral space.
(If you must, grieve what cannot be – those silent fragments that will not play, shed onto the floor).
The Vessel Was Never a Real Thing Anyway.
«The self is a cloister full of remembered sounds» (Wallace 1989, 104) and to feel the edges of his mortality,
he will hear himself in the seashore of
repetition, each wave’s salty revolve, and
in his dreams, the profound
return of Mother’s voice, his sonic point of origination
Take back the event, resist reproduction.
Give (m)other back.
she is not an itinerary of desire; she is her own sensual ear:
each rotating turntable creates lines, lines which never rhyme.
can you listen without want?
can you listen with her?
you hold one end of the line, as she
enjambs the wire
between value and sign, because she can
and didn’t you know, every scratch,
every break, is a sister’s birthday?
The audacity:
to compose with four turntables, a solo performance (Rezaei 2021). Playing a Margaret Thatcher speech, she interrupts her, again and again. She refuses civility, so Thatcher can barely finish one statistic: «One in, one in, one in...» Thatcher’s speech is aggressively spliced and scratched, pitched and stabbed; eventually, her voice drowns within layers of dense, exhaustive noise. The prophet, Stuart Hall, on Thatcherism and its legacies – the policing, white nationalist conservatism, neoliberal capitalism – describes politics as a theory of interruptions (Hall 1983).
Empire is a circle, disrupt and destroy, again and again, with your own hands.
The audacity:
to play the record with all her fingers, greedily, clawing it with long, acrylic nails the color of hot coral (Experimental Sound Studio 2021). Under each nail, hides a stylus. Her fingers ride the warped, scalloped grooves of vinyl as you feel through sound, riding the bump; the nails allow the polyphonic shrill of a Beijing opera record, on a high RPM; she removes and throws the nails into a spinning brass singing bowl, clattering.
She tinkers with the cultural baggage of their visual referent, owning it: non-white working-class women, hypersexuality, «stripper nails», feminine excess, the racialized labor of the «Asian nail person» (Cook 2013). And she reconceptualizes its referent, by grating the noise, standing up and even breaking the table of her instruments, or self-grooming with a mike comb, noisily.
At Rewire Festival 2023, the artists Maria Chávez, Mariam Rezaei, and Victoria Shen will collaborate and perform with 12 turntables, using Shen’s acrylic nail styluses. In their architecture of presence, chance, and sound, you will not be transported or returned. You will be challenged to listen and feel their wild breaks, uncomfortably close, radically opaque. Be curious; wait to hear the edges of your silence, confusion, loss.
