MUSIC

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Behind the Wallpaper was a staggering achievement in 2015, when Temple wrote it for Los Angeles- based avant-pop vocalist Julia Holter and Chicago’s Spektral Quartet. But on the longawaited studio recording, released this month by New Amsterdam, the piece is transcendent. Thanks in part to the spectacular work of audio engineers William Brittelle (Roomful of Teeth) and Zach Hanson (Bon Iver), Temple’s 11-movement suite takes new life, particularly in the electronic layers unique to this recording. Here, Holter’s voice is expressively distorted and echoed, and the Spektrals’ strings are also occasionally processed. (The decision to render their jaunty waltz theme in “Masquerade” as a crackly phonograph recording was a stroke of genius.) It’s not quite classical, not quite pop, and not quite monodrama—but it’s all scintillating brilliance. Kudos to the production team for managing to bring still more dimension to the imaginative abandon of Temple’s dreamscape. It’s always a hard fall down to earth when Behind the Wallpaper ends, but this recording makes it much harder than previous live iterations did. For one, Spektral Quartet is no more—violinists Theo

Espy and Clara Lyon, violist Doyle Armbrust, and cellist Russell Rolen disbanded the group last year, and Behind the Wallpaper was among their final recording projects. And the country has become more perilous and deadly for trans people than it was in 2015. But while we’re stuck here on this planet, in all its ugliness, what a salve to be swept up in Behind the Wallpaper’s gale. —HANNAH EDGAR

Various Artists, Blacklips Bar: Androgyns and Deviants—Industrial Romance for Bruised and Battered Angels, 1992–1995

Anthology anthologyrecordings.bandcamp.com/album/ blacklips-bar-androgyns-and-deviantsindustrial-romance-for-bruised-and-batteredangels-1992-1995

You know a compilation is “peak New York club” when it features Joey Arias. On Blacklips Bar: Androgyns and Deviants—Industrial Romance for Bruised and Battered Angels, 1992–1995 , the cabaret star and former Fiorucci store manager (who’s also executor of Klaus Nomi’s estate) appears right out of the gate with a breathy, aching rendition of “Good Morning Heartache.” The song is track two of the record’s 28, all of which are artifacts of the Blacklips Performance Cult, a ragtag collection of musicians, drag queens, and other artists who performed weekly at legendary East Village venue the Pyramid Club. The group was founded in 1992 by celebrated experimental theater performer and musician Anohni, along with performance artists Johanna Constantine and Psychotic Eve. The album documenting its threeyear lifespan also includes notable contributions by goth rockers Christian Death, croaking queen of darkness Diamanda Galás, queercore pioneers Dean & the Weenies, and John Waters collaborators Edith Massey and Divine (the former performing a bratty punk song and the latter growling through his signature disco track, “You Think You’re a Man”).

Part of what makes retrospective compilations like this so special is the way they situate more widely known artists and their work within larger scenes of people, styles, and ideas. Blacklips Bar underscores queerness not just as gender and sex- ual expression in opposition to heteronormativity, but also as creative expression that eschews many normative approaches. For example, in their only known recordings, transsexual menaces Meng & Ecker provide two immensely danceable tracks celebrating the joys of ejaculation (“Shoot Yer Load”) and piss play (“Golden Showers”). Celluloid Closet author Vito Russo has a short, impassioned discussion with Gary Reynolds about respectability, homophobia, and the AIDS epidemic (“Disrupt Their Lives”). Undersung gender-bending dance freak Princess Tinymeat describes gender panic (“Angels in Pain”). Blacklips Bar is a sublime document of the diverse artistic tendencies of night creatures inhabiting New York, and shows how queerness and the avant-garde are o en linked. It captures an almost supernaturally creative scene at the height of the AIDS epidemic, which decimated the art world while creating the perfect cultural and political conditions for the Disneyfication of New York. As queerphobic legislation sweeps the nation, Blacklips Bar is a timely reminder of what’s already been lost—and the raucous, weird, wonderful things that continue to be worth fi ghting for. —MICCO

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