Patricia MacCormack, a researcher publishing in areas of transgressive media, post-humanism, feminism, horror, and body modification, writes on topics as varied as “Mucous, Monsters and Angels,” “Inhuman Evanescence,” and “The Queer Ethics of Monstrosity” in her publishing work. Throughout, she asserts an argument highlighting a “sealed body which is complicit with the massacre that capitalist and Oedipal systems perform on the body,” formulating a necessarily extreme view on how the body unfurls in light of the emergencies it undergoes through identification: a post-human body, a contently massacred body with “Multi-Dimensional Modifications” — a “Great Ephemeral Tattooed Skin.”
Both Swan Meat and QUALIATIK conjure visual and sonic aesthetics in alliance with MacCormack’s subject matter: through their music, the gnarled sprites often summoned in QUALIATIK (and Dasychira)’s curatorial platform UNSEELIE, and in S.A Mayer’s artwork for Swan Meat’s “Tame.” On the latter, Cookcook described aptly how the work does not “wallow in its own shadow and instead alights with the spiritedness of a player in the process of conquering an obstacle-ridden quest.” Both relishing in our corporeally, to use MacCormack’s language, “massacred” condition — the artists similarly confront the obstacle-ridden descent that occurs in the sublimation of the body into other forms, into Otherkin, Non-Therians, and Vampires. They emphasize our “transcorporeal” intimacy with the entirety of non-human and non-living species across our world: stuffed raccoon, great faerie, parasyte, puppy breath.
You can hear this ascent into other form on QUALIATIK’S new “vocal flip” of Swan Meat’s “Tame” release “Puppy Breath.” As harps and jagged melodic synth-pads warp around each other throughout a grotesquely baroque passage, her voice bears into the track — at times floating delicately, at times pressing itself into the mix so that it blurs further into liquidity.
QUALIATIK hums:
You form a vapor on
the surface of my palm
i wonder when you’re gone
do you feel me there?
Swan Meat also recently released “THROAT,” which continues the illuminated dungeon synth legacy laid out on “Tame,” accelerating it into wilder OST territory: into lurching oblivion.
