Conference Agenda

This paper brings a close listening of Indigo De Souza’s 2021 track “Real Pain” into conversation with both ethnographic interviews and discourse analysis in order to unpack the ways in which De Souza’s music creates spaces of queer care in performance by recourse to what Lauren Berlant calls a “good non-sovereignty.” For Berlant, good non-sovereignty is the very promise of the political: good non-sovereignty happens when we can afford to be swept up in something, because we trust the communities in which we are enmeshed. Indigo De Souza creates good non-sovereignty in performance by creating spaces where listeners can take care of one another, and then by manipulating their emotional-affective responses through sound. In contrast to the riot grrrl’s polemical “girls to the front” praxis, De Souza asks fans to make space for one another, both expanding and softening the register of address. In asking listeners to wear their masks at shows, to take care of their mental health, and otherwise look out for one another, De Souza creates a space of trust that allows listeners to experience catharsis—to surrender their sovereign control over their own emotional states and feel the resonance of shared traumatic experience.

Hailing young and marginalized subjects, “Real Pain” features the layered screams of De Souza’s fans, who sent recordings of themselves at the artist’s request. These recordings are stacked on top of one another in order to build a collective screamspace that sits at the heavy heart of this track, exemplifying what Ann Cvetkovich identifies as music's capacity to "make an emotion public without narrative or storytelling; the performance might just be a scream, a noise, or a gesture without a sound" (2003, 286). Signifying by sonifying, De Souza conflates all painful experiences into one general expression, allowing listeners to vibrate alongside the band and experience catharsis as a sonic form of care. Disproportionately affected by climate grief, attacks on reproductive freedom, and more, young fans willingly surrender control over their own emotions in the space of a concert in order to be with others who experience similar genres of pain.

Taking her project name from Hildegard von Bingen’s mystical constructed language, vocalist, multi-instrumentalist, and songwriter Lingua Ignota’s music explores the intersections of Christianity, trauma, domestic violence, and sexual assault. Sonically, her music traverses deconstructed elements of metal and noise music, vocal techniques that range from extended screams to classical mezzo-soprano, and extensively researched references to Catholic, Pentecostal, and Primitive Baptist musical traditions. The resulting complexly layered musical texts deploy the subjectivity of Christian faith as a metaphor for intimate partner abuse.

This paper traces the timbral, textual, and vocal-expressive layers of Lingua Ignota’s 2021 album SINNER GET READY as they shape a deeply uncomfortable sonic experience in which a victim’s struggle to make her abuser love her is given the apocalyptic scale of a sinner struggling to avoid the eternal hellfire threatened by a supposedly loving g/God. Throughout the album, the lyrics consistently support dual readings, in which the narrative subject could be understood to be talking with/about the Christian God or an intimate partner. Lingua Ignota’s use of elements of noise, industrial, and metal music flips these traditionally phallocentric genres to reclaim specifically feminine experiences of victimhood, avoiding what she finds to be patriarchal expectations of the “civilized” ways female abuse victims ought to behave (Pelly 2019). Simultaneously, her layers of Appalachian instrumentation and vocal references to shape-note singing and Primitive Baptist hymnody recontextualizes these faith-based sounds in ways that explore how Christianity’s embeddedness in American culture renders it a mirror for interpersonal entanglements and the structures that prevent escape from abuse of all kinds. Although the album could be glossed as anti-Christian, closer listening reveals an abiding empathy for the desire to love and be loved that accompanies both spiritual and romantic desire. Finally, this paper further expands Emily Milius’ (2021, 2022) work on how timbral nuances of vocal performance can communicate a trajectory of healing and triumph over abuse; I demonstrate how Lingua Ignota’s vocals, rather than focusing on recovery or redemption, focus on creating space for rage, anger, and the raw experience of betrayal and violent victimization.

April 2023 marks the 40th anniversary of the release of The Final Cut, the last album by Pink Floyd with Roger Waters as composer and singer. Waters, whose father died on the battlefield in WWII, was deeply affected when his country entered the Falklands War in 1982. Unsurprisingly, the album deals with post-war trauma (in fact, he had explored mental disability in previous works). From a broader perspective, Joseph Straus has argued that 20th-century music frequently performs disabilities as alternatives to the normative/normalizing narratives of overcoming. But The Final Cut represents a step further by using these elements strategically to tell stories from divergent perspectives that unfold simultaneously, leading to complex multi-narrative configurations.

In my paper, I will examine the songs “When the Tigers Broke Free” and “Southampton Dock.” The two tracks are structured in a similar way: a major-mode harmonic progression repeats four times. In the first three statements, these harmonic backgrounds operate in tandem with male voices in the low register, while in the last ones, Waters sings in the upper range producing a deliberately broken sound that contrasts radically with the other voices. Indeed, these fourth statements add an otherwise hidden perspective to the songs by revealing and unleashing the so-far repressed mental disability caused by war. While the first three statements of the tracks project a carefully crafted (in fact hypocritical) stoicism, the inclusion of non-normative voices uncovers the horrifying traumatic post-war consequences that the other elements of the soundscape silence, thus generating powerful affective dissonances. I argue that analyzing The Final Cut could help us to delve into the neglected centrality of disability in multi-narrative music, at the same time that it could also allow us to rethink some of its many ramifications in our current era when war has re-emerged worldwide.