EUNUCH MAKER: the Liner Notes
You can listen to and download EUNUCH MAKER here. I get like 200 free downloads a month, so go crazy. After that I will charge as little as Bandcamp permits.
Instead of an essay this week, I want to introduce my noise album, EUNUCH MAKER. I named it that for two reasons. First off, it’s funny. Second off, the whole album is partly intended as a commentary on the witch hunts of the early modern period, QAnon, and the Satanic Panic of the 80s and the role overly credulous media played in perpetuating these conspiracy theories. In all three of these conspiracies, there is an inherent castration anxiety.
In Aristotle’s haematogenous theory of reproduction, which survived into and past the middle ages, the only role women played in procreation was as incubators and providers of the base material (menstrual blood) for the fetus’ development. Sperm was considered the truly creative element. Therefore, obtaining an abortion was as much an affront to the father of the fetus and his creative powers as it was to God in early modern Europe. This put a target on the backs of early abortion providers.
In the witch lore found in sources such as Heinrich Kramer’s witch hunting manual Malleus Maleficarum, witches not only provide abortions (as many accused witches, often being midwives and healers, actually did), but also engage in infant sacrifice and cannibalism. This trope was and is repeated in the Satanic Panic and QAnon conspiracies.
Indeed, the rhetoric of anti-choice activists sometimes invoke child sacrifice via comparisons to the Old Testament figure of Moloch, an idol allegedly worshiped by apostate Israelites that demanded infant blood. Behind much anti-choice rhetoric and activism, I see a castration anxiety as much as can be found in these earlier ways of thinking. With the overturn of Roe v. Wade and the fact that the GOP put forward a QAnon-aligned Christian nationalist to become governor of my home state, artistic invocations of witches and Satan I previously felt were corny suddenly made way more sense to me. If you’re wondering what witches and demons have to do with noise music, I’ve already written about that.
Dürer, Albrecht, Artist. Witch riding backward on a goat accompanied by four putti / AD monogram. , ca. 1505. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/98509995/.
Composition
The process of composing EUNUCH MAKER was simple, but also incredibly tedious. I discovered that in Audacity, there’s an option to import raw data. The next logical step was of course to see what happens when I put non-audio files in. If you try this yourself, you’ll find that the vast majority of the result is the same white noise. There’s typically more interesting things on the start and end of the track, and that’s where I sourced most of the sounds found in the album. After that, it was a matter of picking out what I thought were the most interesting sounds and splicing them together. Occasionally I used basic effects like speeding up, slowing down, tremolo, etc.
In my opinion, the best noise artists are like painters, specifically landscape or abstract painters. They arrange colors and textures in a particular way to generate musical interest on a vast scale. This is a weak spot for many noise artists, in particular ones that focus on live improvisation and minimal intervention to direct the sound’s development. Photographers are equally engaged in a practice of making art out of processes they have little control over, but they still make choices in what they point their camera at and from what angle, and in the end they still only pick out a handful of shots to present. I try to be a photographer where other noise artists are more like livestreamers. I see the artistic merit in what they do, but it can get boring. While most noise tends towards being a sort of violent ambient music that is oddly meditative, I strive to interest the listener with a barrage of sounds that are interesting by themselves as well as in contrast with the previous and following sounds.
Buy me a coffee: https://ko-fi.com/inventedorgans
Follow me on twitter: @foster_writing