3 minute read
Destroy With Your Own Hands
by Peggy Kyoungwon Lee
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.
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The audacity, to touch a playback technology in ways that weren’t meant to be used.¹
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»² 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»³ 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?⁴
The audacity: to compose with four turntables, a solo performance.⁵ 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.⁶
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.⁷ 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: nonwhite working-class women, hypersexuality, «stripper nails», feminine excess, the racialized labor of the «Asian nail person».
And she reconceptualizes its referent, by 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.
This essay is part of the Norient Special All in It Together, a collaboration between Rewire and Norient.
Peggy Kyoungwon Lee is a writer and professor based in Washington, D.C. You can learn more about her creative writing and scholarship on race, sound, performance, and literature at: https://peggyleewrites.com/
¹ vpro Vrije Geluiden extra. 2018. «Maria Chavez: Ruining Vinyl Records», 2:52. YouTube. November 25. Accessed March 1. (https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=1kKGAMQVzw4).
² vrije geluiden. 2018. «Maria Chavez: The Language of Chance», 1:46. Youtube. November 25. Accessed March 1. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFkKNbbfRzs).
³ Stevens, Wallace. 1989. «The Woman That Had More Babies Than That», in Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose, ed. by Milton J. Bates. New York: Vintage Books: 104.
⁴ Clive Campbell aka DJ Kool Herc’s younger sister, Cindy Campbell’s birthday on August 11, 1973.
⁵ Rezaei, Mariam. Wolf’s Tail. 2021, bandcamp. (https:// mariamrezaei.bandcamp.com/album/wolfs-tail).
⁶ Stuart Hall. 1983. «Thatcherism — Rolling Back the Welfare State». Thesis Eleven 7 (1): 6—19.
⁷ Experimental Sound Studio. 2022. «Option Presents: Victoria Shen — Evicshen». Youtube. June 13. Accessed March 1. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dPpZchcsNA).
⁸ Cook, Greg. 2013. «Art Salon: Painting Nails to Rethink Art History». WBUR. March 21. Accessed March 1. https://www.wbur.org/news/2013/03/21/ victoria-shen-manicure.
