Art Metropole

#14862

Soft Subversions (2LP)

Artist

Andrew Zealley

Price

$40.00

Date

2021

Publisher

Disco Hospital Books & Records

Format

Audio

ISBN

PNPLP-01

Size

12 × 12 inches

Genre

Vinyl

Soft Subversions is the debut release by House of Intergenerational, the DJ platform for Toronto-based artist and clinical sonician Andrew Zealley. Published as a 2LP vinyl gatefold edition of 250 numbered copies, Soft Subversions is the sonic culmination of six years of research into risk, art, and sex in the era of AIDS industry: listening to risk and risky artistic and sexual practices as a method of aesthetic self- creation. Soft Subversions is produced by PSBEUYS and mastered by Brandon Hocura.

Twelve tracks flow across and through different dance music tropes, ambient sounds, minimalism, and other music genres that trace back to what Zealley imagines as an AIDS playlist: musics that unconsciously laid the foundations (and soundtrack) for socio-sonic and -sexual cultures and spaces where gay/queer men, and Black and Latinx people gathered together in celebration, resistance, sex, and nonnormative identity-making; and became sites where HIV first noticeably (and devastatingly) hit North American urban centres in the early 1980s. But this release is not just an historical survey. Zealley examines and activates this AIDS playlist through the lens of biopolitics and queer political theory, and uses sonic source material treatments, spoken word, and original music composition and word-work to reflect on and respond to the current moment: PrEP, U=U, and homonormativity.

Soft Subversions features poet/vocalist Robert Bolton, and artists and activists Alan Belcher, Anthea Black, Faizal Deen, Jessica Karuhanga, Shan Kelley, Tim McCaskell, and Simon Muscat.

From Continental Baths manager Steve Ostrow’s introduction to a Met soprano’s 1974 performance at the infamous New York City venue, Faizal Deen’s poetic rage over protecting the disco as a sacred site of queer power, discussions of mental illness and disco mystics, and field recordings made in gay bathhouses that draw the listener into different sonic scenarios, including a darkroom cluster fuck of men gathered around a leather-and- chain sling where a couple is fisting: Soft Subversions isn’t just about risk and art and sex, it is risky, sexual art that demands deep listening.

Two long-play records are housed in a full-colour gatefold sleeve with a two-sided poster/insert of visuals and notes. Each copy is hand-numbered in an edition of 250.