Terre Thaemlitz is a transgender activist and speaker, musician and producer, record label owner and deep house DJ currently residing in Japan. Her work critically combines themes of identity politics - including gender, sexuality, class, linguistics, ethnicity and race - with an ongoing critique of the socio-economics of commercial media production. This diversity of themes is matched by Thaemlitz' wide range of musical production styles, which include electroacoustic computer music, club-oriented deep house, digital jazz, ambient and computer-composed neo-expressionist piano solos. Graphic design, photography, illustration, text and video also play a role in Thaemlitz' projects.
I eagerly invite you to join us this Thursday evening at Berlin's Hebbel am Ufer Theater at as Terre performs one of her legendary lecture performances - "Soulnessless" - as a part of the Life is Live 'What's Queer About Pop' Programm (see full program attachment, German only).
The performance begins promptly at 22:00, and following the concert, Terre under her DJ Sprinkles alias will present some house selections from her record bag in the WAU area of the theater.
WHAT IS "SOULNESSLESS"?
"Soulnessless" is an attempted deconstruction of "soul music." More precisely, a deconstruction of notions of "soul," "meditation," "spirituality" and "religiosity" as fundamental forms of mediation between consumers and audio marketplaces. To be released as an 8GB Micro-SD card containing over 30 hours of new audio materials, over an hour of video, and a book's worth of writings, "Soulnessless" pushes the boundaries of the album format in today's post-CD era.
"Soulnessless" is composed from an openly non-spiritual and anti-religious perspective that sees atheism not as a "solution" or "alternative" to religious organizing, but as an act of self-defense entwined with the hopelessnes of life amidst an unstoppable onslought of spiritual dogmas and superstitions. It consists of five pieces that approach the central theme from a variety of vectors, their tenuous connection being unlikely collisions of gender, audio production and spirituality. Although the elements' assemblage may at first appear haphazard or random, their grouping is in fact a deliberate structural metaphor for incongruous social simultaneities, and an aversion to thematic reductionism. In this manner, the structural complexity of "Soulnessless" is about diversity as ‘disconnection,’ rather than as the controllable and celebratory goal so often hypothesized in mainstream Humanist discourse. (Thaemlitz concedes the inevitability of the former, and protests the homogenizing dangers of the latter.)
In this unconventional "concert" combining lecture, slides, audio and video, Thaemlitz talks the audience through all five parts of the project, ranging from a +30 hour piano solo "Meditation on Wage Labor and the Death of the Album" critiquing the social conditions around commercial and academic music production, to a Feminist survey of the uses of electronic audio equipment by Roman Catholic Nuns in Philippine monasteries. This is followed by a screening of two audio/video segments, "Rosary Novena for Gender Transitioning" (20 min.) and "Traffic With the Devil" (24 min.), to be concluded with audience Q&A.
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