- Your shopping cart is empty!
SCOPOPHILIA - Violent for Being Sexually Desired CD
2024 re-print of 2021 release.
Comes as CD in 6-pannel digipak plus 12 pages booklet.
The collaborative project by Harriet Kate
Morgan (aka MILITARY POSITION) and Ester Kärkkäinen (aka HIMUKALT).
One cannot
write about Scopophilia without discussing the female condition, as both
artists sublimate their own biographies and biologies into sound.
Literally,
'scopophilia' means an extreme sense of the male gaze, with the woman bearing
nothing but her own sexuality.
Yes, this album is a fractured autobiographical
rendering on the inherently fraught situation of being a woman; but more so, it
is a raw production of power electronics, industrial decadence, and provocative
discipline.
Although leading different lives in
separate countries, the two share a number of similar influences, SPK, Atrax
Morgue, Brainbombs, Lustmord, Vatican Shadow.
Their respective solo work is
largely industrial and can be quite minimal in comparison to Scopophilia.
In
the album's dark techno rhythms - heard on tracks such as "I Would Die For
You" and "She . Her . Myself. And I" - Scopophilia create a
unique and completely different sound altogether from their solo work.
These
tracks are lurid, sensual, intimate, and violent all at once, stirring visual
images and narrative fragments through the noise.
Both Morgan and Kärkkäinen
have a past experiences as sex workers, and they believe this album could be
their own private soundtrack to a strip club or a dungeon.
The album is more than a synthesis of the bruised noise from
Military Position and postmortem electronics from Himukalt, through an
uncanny communion of misery, mania, sexual addiction, innate trauma, the
loss of self, the aftermath of abuse or controlling situations, the
horror of being in a female body and the subsequent feelings of
entrapment this brings.
The record has an element of complete sadness and abandonment but also
embodies some sort of empowerment - a moving forward, a sense of
revenge.
Violent From Being Sexually Desired brings forward a definite vignette
of female sexuality but framed more as a sort of ailment, a disease,
something that isn’t desired or warranted and the thoughts that run
through one’s mind as a result.
It acts as a sort of diary, a commentary on their past and their
subsequent feelings of disempowerment as well as thoughts on what it is
to be a woman and industrial artist.