The Grey Wolves & Macronympha – “Polluting Young Fresh Minds”
Okay, so it’s not like I had sex to this record, but it was definitely used to beguile me. Embarrassingly, or maybe naturally, LiveJournal is involved in this brief courtship story. It was 2005 and I was an avid LJ-using repressed homosexual. I was obsessed with power electronics, musicians owning up to this moniker and their third-rate, second-generation successors. I even began a bedroom tape label just to showcase the abrasive music I had been making, with eventual plans of performing live.
Relocating to Seattle and relieving myself of a burdensome cassette-dubbing deck prevented me from fully developing—and potentially purging—this desire to be the veritable Pamela Des Barres of the noise scene. The tape label site was linked on my LiveJournal profile page, and an online friend who had released a record on the label directed his Seattle-based friend, Enrique, to my profile.
“You are really witchy and special,” Enrique commented on a LiveJournal entry about a Text of Light performance I had recently attended. Several weeks transpired, in which Enrique—who ran a formidable classical music blog—was in rapture of my vast knowledge of American Tapes releases. All of our conversations were innocuously conducted through LiveJournal comments and IM. He knew almost nothing about contemporary experimental music but was probably more taken by my confusing asexual nature and total virgin status, which I began to be less secretive about.
We set a date to meet, and as it approached Enrique’s posts began to center around the most arcane, private-label noise releases imaginable. Of course, I was completely turned on. “Polluting Young Fresh Minds” was all too appropriate as I gave him a shoulder massage that evening—fraught with sexual tension—while we watched a poorly-dubbed VHS copy of Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story that I had brought over.
As much as I would have enjoyed the strains of The Grey Wolves and/or Macronympha accompanying my first sexual experience, it was the repeating DVD menu page to John Waters’ Female Trouble that provided the soundtrack to a pretty great blowjob, albeit frequently interrupted with Enrique’s bizarre exclamations of, “Oh my God, your dick is exactly like my ex-boyfriend’s!”
Tobias Bernstrup – “Jpeg-boy”
I was definitely fucked to this song, but not while wearing crimson thigh-high patent-leather stiletto boots or an equally-constricting leather corset. (Please don’t make me explain Bernstrup’s stage costumes.) I had recently downloaded the album and was intrigued by Bernstrup’s incessant sexual come-ons, cloaked in a post-apocalyptic, digitally-processed croon blanketed in equally bleak and clinical synthesizer instrumentals.
It was Pride weekend in 2010, and only months previously I had broken up with Enrique. His completely phony enthusiasm for noise music unfortunately extended to every fiber of my being, yet paradoxically he envisioned that the rest of our lives together would be best spent spooning on the couch watching Roseanne. Also, I was constantly horny and he never wanted to pluck every flower of my nubile frame.
Naturally, I developed a voracious appetite for sex months after my relationship with Enrique ended. I needed to unlearn his touch. Full disclosure: he was also the only guy I had ever had sex with. Back to the scintillating Pride encounter, I was with my friend Hannah at Duplex, a gay bar in the Greenwich Village that was close to my studio apartment.
Living right off of the West 4th stop guaranteed me a never-ending supply of dick, as “we can go to my place, I live just a few blocks away” never fails in sealing the deal. While Hannah and I were catching up at the ground-level bar I was unabashedly eyeballing a shirtless muscular dude with the most beautiful head of natural silver hair, a la Anderson Cooper. I made a point to show Hannah the upstairs bar so I could walk past this fellow and shamelessly lock lips with him. He was more than intrigued, but I didn’t ditch my lady friend.
Eventually Hannah became tired and wanted to head home for the evening. She insisted, like a true friend would, that I stay at Duplex to consummate this lusty encounter, and immediately departed, leaving me to beeline right over to That Silver-Haired Daddy of Mine. We talked, pounded down neat whiskeys, made-out and spent all of five minutes walking to my apartment.
I’ll spare the grisly but divine specifics of gay sex, but all assholes are really just crouching exits, hidden entrances. Whiskey begins what a great lover continues and concludes, and let’s just say I was mercilessly but ecstatically smashed like a goddamn grape by God’s celestial foot. Bernstrup’s Reanimate Me was on deck, and in one of my more lucid moments I noticed “J-peg boy” was playing. “I remember just how it used to feel, I remember when you were real,” Bernstrup feebly sang as I was thoroughly enjoying my out-of-body and mind experience.
