I never wanted to know what your name was
I only wanted to dance
You were a stranger I wouldn't have noticed
Isn't that enough romance?
Now take off your hands
And cool your demands
We kept the lights off and night long cause we were only gonna last for that one song

Cause I don't need your company and I don't want your words
For someone to love me well that's simply absurd
You're looking for something but everything that I heard
Was a half-hearted slur
I will never be yours

The silence outside the bar was so far from
The singing of lonely hearts
As we were leaving you whispered "Come over"
And such a silly remark
"I wanna know who you are"
Honey just play your part
You chose the wrong ears for your song dear, no
You were never going to belong here

Cause I don't need your company and I don't want your words
For someone to love me well that's simply absurd
You're looking for something but everything that I heard
Was a half-hearted slur
I will never be yours

And you can always try, of course
And you can act of your accord
But who knows what you're trying for
Cause you're just beating a dead horse
What makes you think I can afford
Another broken-hearted bore?
And I know all your wounds are sore 
But I do not have your cure

Cause I don't need your company and I don't want your words
For someone to love me well that's simply absurd
You're looking for something but everything that I heard
Was a half-hearted slur
I will never be yours

Yours

The Coast

The Ruse

Everything

Original score for Melanie Jame Wolf's "The Creep"
Installation series 2023-24
Image by Ashton Green

Music for Melanie Jame Wolf's The Creep

“Show me a plague, and I’ll show you the world!” Larry Kramer exclaimed in one of his final pieces written before his death on this day last year. Kramer spoke, wrote, and shouted about AIDS and against AIDS stigma for nearly his entire life. He railed against denial - denial of illness, denial of death, and the denial of the very responsibility that comes with our sheer proximity to one another. He knew that our porosity is as deadly as it is vital, that intimacy is holy because it can kill you. He begged us all to act like it. Plague! is a live set that works with publicly available recordings of Larry Kramer’s voice to create sound compositions that sustain his ever prescient message from one pandemic to another. Using synthesizers. found audio and field recordings in emotional and musical arrangements, Plague! soundtracks the grief that is the wellspring of love, and the love that is the source of grief.

Plague! (Live Recording, Petersburg Art Space Berlin 2021)

Tracklist

A message from Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos to “Free Media” Teach-In, NYC, January 1997
KRSLD - Power Movement
OSSX - Deli Breath
ETRA - NFASIS x ETRA: LENTO
TSVI - Progressiva
Badsista - Bagunça Minha B (feat. Jujuliete)
TSVI - Vitamina H
BRLLNT - All the things she said
Estoc - No Flag Large Enough
Interview with Angela Y. Davis, 1972
Metrist - OL Face You Got
Rosa Perreo - Banginclude - Boeke Funk (DJ Bigga)
Zutzut - Hunter Edit
Lilocox - House Deep Tech
Vince Staples - Little Homies
Awo Ojiji - Inwards
Ploy - Pax Cultura
Arundhati Roy in London, June 2011

Sapphic Faggot 2024 Pride Communiqué

Sound piece produced for choreographer Sandhya Daemgen's performance series "What's That Noise" and performed live at Altes Finanzamt, Berlin, in February 2019. 

This original composition works with Midori Takada's "Crossing" from her album "Through the Looking Glass" and recomposes it using a single hardware sampler. This is a live recording.

Untitled (Midori)

Composed, performed & recorded live exclusively on hardware

Quiet!

Like being wine drunk and the wine is good

Softly Inebriated

Freedom from Speech is a sound installation focused on the primacy of voice and testimony in the legal construction of human rights, rightlessness, citizenship and dispossession. Its positioned as an interruption to the legal and theoretical strictures that prioritize the voice as the sign of humanity and speech as the key to human rights. Produced in January 2018 and shown at FROM BREATH TO MATTER, a Berlin event series focused on vocal dance.

This piece uses vocal excerpts from interviews with Alexander Weheliye and A. Naomi Paik done by Leopold Lambert for the Funambulist podcast, among other sources. These interviews, as well as Weheliye's books and lectures, have changed my life and can be found here: https://soundcloud.com/the-funambulist

Freedom From Speech

No Main Switch is a sound installation and performance mixing prerecorded sound collage and live DJing. The piece was first performed in 2016 at the Performing Arts festival in the evening Alternativen zum Selbst, Kunsthaus KuLe.

No Main Switch

Nadezhda Kutepova is a human rights lawyer from Ozerk, Russia, a formerly secret city that was part of the Soviet Union’s international archipelago of nuclear extraction and weapons productions facilities. This sprawling project reached from her hometown in Russia to the uranium mines of Erzgebirge, East Germany, all the way the Semipalatinsk explosion fields of Eastern Kazakhstan and beyond. Kutepova had to flee Russia after being accused of international espionage. She currently lives under political asylum in France.

In the fall of 2017, a cloud of radioactive materials fell over Europe, which scientists have until recently been unable to trace to its source. This year, the former Plutonium production plant in Kutepova’s hometown, now a nuclear processing plant, was finally found to have been the cloud's point of origin.

Strangely, even in our overly visual world, sound has often been used in scientific data collection technologies related to the earth – think geiger counters and infrasonic monitors. shred the means is a sonic practice edging toward the sound that boils over the edge of its own measurement, against the "colonial asset-making strategy"* of geologic science itself.

*Yusoff, Kathryn. 2018. A billion black Anthropocenes or none.

shred the means was presented at Beyond Beyond, a sonic installation space by Gretchen Blegen with live-performances by Mars Dietz, HATAM, Hila Lahav and Jasmine Guffond. With remote viewing reports by Catalina Insignares and Carolina Mendonça. http://kunsthauskule.de/beyond-beyond

This is a recording of the live performance.

shred the means

I thought I would make a quick mix of new years bangers but what happened was an inevitable tumultuous emotional sound essay closing out 2019 in the center of the Cancer/Capricorn eclipse series. Who are you, and how do you speak to yourself, in the dead of winter? From now on, the Northern days get longer.

The spoken word piece in the beginning is "Open-Hearted Beauty" written and performed by poet Ahlaam Lala Abduljalil, who is on insta as @forthesakeofthislove. Other audio clips are excerpted from the 2015 film Carol and a lecture from radical lesbian working-class storyteller Dorothy Allison. Watch out for the sound of Judith Butler laughing, too.

Mood Swing: An Eclipsed Mix

The Chase

Yes I am
The woman you know
But how could we have predicted how far this goes?
All the things I left
Just to be alone
But it's alright
What I'm aiming for feels like a dream
That the way we weren't is how we could be
If you write me back
Do it honestly
And it's alright

Cuz if I'm going after a nightmare you'd tell me to wake up
I'm out here showing my ass, if you're not there 
Then you'd tell me it's done
I remember it all, but its not clear if I'm the only one
Or if either of us is the pallbearer for what you called love

Yes I can remain on my own
But I won't let anyone tell me what I've not been shown
All the fears I have
Can I let them go?
And it's alright
But you don't ignore the worst of me
And you say it hurts, baby constantly
You still want me back
I can't disagree
And it's alright

Cuz if I'm going after a nightmare then I hope we wake up
But I still know what it's like when you're not there
You would tell me it's done
I remember it all but its not clear if we're the only ones
Yet I see nobody else, and it's all here, is this what you called love?

The Chase

Sort of an interlude type track for an unmade album

Once

Sound artist
Berlin / NYC 
BODYSNATCH resident

"The term 'artist' is a way of socializing practice, the thing you do"

Mars Dietz aka Sapphic Faggot

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