Malesperi: Porn - Album Notes

This album has been a long time coming.

I have a long and troubled history with pornography, from the first copy of Health & Efficiency I found on the cistern of a public toilet to the unbelievably specific anime fetish art shared on discussion forums that makes me think that there’s nothing so niche that someone won’t have drawn it happening to someone with oversized eyes. I’ve always found it fascinating and exciting, a near omnipresent force that is rarely discussed openly except in terms of concern. It’s true that there is a great deal to be concerned about within an industry rife with the habitual abuse of vulnerable women (and to a lesser extent men). Mainstream porn is a sea of violent intercourse portrayed as a standard, drugs, blurred issues of consent, links to organised crime, and the habitual exploitation of people who need money. Few of these problems are unique to pornography, they are all to a greater or lesser extent symptoms of the spiritual malaise of late stage capitalism which cannot help but see people as a series of orifices to be plundered by those higher up the pecking order. Nonetheless, because of the peculiar characteristic of pornography as something both ubiquitous and occulted behind conventional social mores these problems are particularly widespread within porn.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Anyone with a camera and a desire to help other people get off can now be a pornographer on their own terms either as their full time job or as an additional source of income or social capital. Not all of these people are in it for the money, some are doing it purely for the ego gratification of being an object of desire on their own terms, others just get off on the idea of exposing themselves on camera. Some people are just reaching out into the darkness, putting their own very specific desires on display and hoping that someone, somewhere checks in to say they feel the same way. There is a growing world of queer porn that represents same sex desire in a way that goes beyond lesbianism overtly coded for the male gaze, or testosterone drenched muscle bros hammering away at each other in a grimly stoic silence. There is trans pornography made by trans people who aren’t being sold as a kind of freak show and whose bodies represent a broader cross section of real people at different stages in a very personal journey. There is BDSM porn founded on genuine consent and which contextualises the violence as a very particular kind of psychodrama lodged within a safe, sane, and consensual relationship - be that either romantic, professional, or something in between. Had my life worked out differently I’d have been open to the idea of being a sex worker, I’ve certainly given it away free often enough to know that I don’t have to attach any special magic to the act of fucking and the ability to do DIY pornography in which I could retain complete creative control would be appealing to me. Technology is empowering in all sorts of ways.

There’s a darker side to this too. Sexual predators are able to find other sexual predators more easily, they are able to share their obsessions, files, and techniques. They are able to carve out their own little corner of the net and that makes it obvious where there might be a willing audience for transgressive and abusive pornography. If you build it, they will come. More interesting are the people who lurk in a kind of hinterland where their specific fetishes may be neither safe nor sane, nor even in some cases consensual but where the only person at risk is themselves. Serious masochists with the scars to prove it, breath play obsessives teetering on the edge of consciousness, extreme chem sex enthusiasts, bug chasers desperate to be given the gift of AIDS, body modification as a sex ritual, people sexually aroused by the thought of eating themselves into immobility with the drive to make it happen, and one guy who has trained his ass to prolapse so that the rope of guts that hang out of his anus is long enough that he can jerk off with it. Some of these people have broken sex to the point where it turns into a kind of surreal performance art in the eyes of most onlookers. Watching a woman cram more and more outlandishly huge objects into herself eventually looks more like an olympic sport that a sexual act, a kind of homage to the liminal physical abilities of the human body.

My own tastes in pornography are wide and have developed significantly over the years. I find as I get older and my body begins to crumble into a pile of fat clogged arteries and regret I’m less interested in conventionally attractive people. They end up making me feel like Dorian Grey’s portrait. Sometimes it can be the smallest thing in the world that rings my chimes. Some people just know how to take a cock up their arse like a champion, some people know just when to look up during a blow job, some people ride the complicated wave of pain and pleasure through an SM scene like no one else, some people make abjection into art. My cock knows it when I see it better than my mind does. That’s what pornography is to me, a truly honest performance art aimed at those strange, unpredictable pathways in the brain that govern the essence of physical desire. You respond viscerally, perhaps intellectually as well, but always with that stirring in your loins. There’s something solipsistic about pornography too, when other people are involved in sex your attention is divided between yourself and the other participants for the most part. When you masturbate to pornography you are engaged in a thoroughly self-obsessed experience which is nonetheless mediated by the flickering image of the other on the screen. This isn’t universally the case, there are plenty of couples watching pornography together either as part of their sexual repertoire or simply as a shared interest. Sadly I’m immensely ill suited to watching pornography with others, the strange unquantifiable thing I’m looking for turns me into a chronic channel surfer, jumping around videos to try and find the moments that complete the feedback loop between my eyes, ears, brain, and junk. It’s hard to quantify but it often has to do with the moment where the performer seems completely in the moment, seems to be honestly enjoying themselves, or exhibits a genuine reaction to a stimuli that breaks down the artifice even for a moment. That isn’t to say I don’t enjoy the artifice as well. If there’s one thing that gay cis-male performers could learn from the cis-female compatriots it’s that it’s OK to ham it up for the cheap seats.

Sound is often an overlooked part of the pornographic experience. I find the sounds of sex particularly evocative, whether that be people talking or the wet sound of flesh penetrating flesh. I wanted to create an album that would explore the sonic landscape of people fucking on camera. Almost every sound in this album was originally from a piece of pornography. I set myself the goal of using samples from pornography that had been made freely available by the creators on sites like Xtube and PornHub Community. In some cases the sounds came from trailers for paid content. The vast majority of samples came from independent producers but in a very few cases I have taken samples from studio based porn. This is where I was searching for a very particular sound and couldn’t find it any other way. No synths were used in the creation of this album, in the past I have used samples based synths but with this one I wanted to maintain a purity of intent.

One thing I wanted to avoid was simply recreating my own sexual interests on record. There would be some value in the honesty which that would indicate but I’d struggle to produce an album that I felt was representative of my own tastes, not only because they are quite varied but because, as I have indicated earlier, they can be oddly specific in a way that wouldn’t necessarily translate into interesting sonic architecture. One of the things I learned in producing this album was that hot content doesn’t always indicate the depth of texture which makes a sample interesting to manipulate. Besides which I find it more interesting to work more broadly with material in the public eye. This decision also allowed me to ensure that the source material reflected a more diverse range of performers than would likely be the case if I just followed my own instincts. There’s still plenty of man on man action in here but there’s also some woman on woman, some fem dom material, and even some man on woman PIV sex. There’s a range of different sexual activities sampled as well, from CBT to pissing. Not least because I wanted to maximise the diversity of sounds on display. In one, a scat based track, it’s only there because I couldn’t resist the childish urge to end the album with a massively distorted fart noise. This is also the only track where I cheated on the samples as I didn’t really want to spend an afternoon watching hours of scat porn to find a suitably ridiculous fart sample.

In terms of technique I made use of a variety of different programmes and approaches to create the music on this album. Almost all of these were apps running on a basic iPad. Touchscreen controls are ideal for manipulating samples and effects pedals in real time and there are a plethora of great resources out there. Muckraker in particular is an excellent distortion app that can really fuck with a sample. TW Recorder I’ve found a very nice tool for editing sound clips and has a decent selection of options for messing samples up. It allows you to preview changes which is really helpful for trying out a range of different sound manipulations. Making electronic music, like making pornography, has really never been easier.

The album art shows detail from Sleeping Venus, Surprised by Satyr by Nicolas Poussin painted around 1626. It shows a satyr removing the covering from an apparently sleeping goddess while another satyr looks on. However on closer inspection it looks as if the goddess may not be sleeping. It looks an awful lot like she may be masturbating, her head thrown back and her eyes closed in the throes of orgasm. Look at the second satyr occluded behind the tree. It’s surely not just my fevered imagination that makes me think that he’s also having a wank at the same time. Is this an early depiction of a camgirl? I think it’s clear what is going on but Wanking Venus Observed by Wanking Satyr probably wouldn’t have passed muster in the 17th century, at least not in mainstream artistic circles. It feels doubly pornagraphic since the obstensibly classical image has always been a good way to show some naked flesh and still retain your artistic pretensions.

One change that I’m making to my music is that from this point onwards I’ll be donating all the proceeds of my creative output (including my novel) to charity. I feel uncomfortable making money out things I’d have done anyway but at the same time I don’t want to contribute to the devaluing of art so endemic in our culture. Charging and giving the money to charity feels like a good compromise. It’s also true that the power electronics, noise, and industrial scenes have a well documented problem with right wing extremism. Donating all proceeds to Amnesty International fighting for human rights around the globe is both a worthwhile cause and also a good way to annoy fascists. It’s unlikely to be very much money, I make music that almost no one cares about and do almost nothing to promote my work but I do sell a few copies here and there and it feels appropriate to give the proceeds away. Who knows, perhaps this will motivate me to put more effort into publicity.

https://malesperi.bandcamp.com/album/porn