MISCmedia for 3/19/01
A Symphony Between the Sheets
by guest columnist Christopher DeLaurenti

It's the moment that always freezes my heart.

I'm at her place; the lights are low, and maybe we're entangled on the couch, or perilously swaying next to a glass table. Soon we're in the bedroom.

She smiles, nods to the other stereo--this one smothered with candles or books--and offers "Music?"

For a moment, I lose my butterflies and a dead weight drops into my guts.

What do I say? I say nothing.

We wouldn't be this far if we didn't appreciate each other's taste in music and whatever else, but I like the stereo silent. Some want to hide their sex lives from children, neighbors, and roommates, but I prefer the challenge of sinking my teeth into the pillow instead of grunting behind the sussurating camouflage of some radio station.

Forget it, I say "sure" and pray that the music isn't crap, or worse, inspires me with some sort of brilliant yet distracting insight that within a few minutes evaporates--along with our mood--into nothing.

As a musician, I find the standard choices of lust-inducing music ill-suited to sex. For me, a potentially epic erotic offering like The Rite of Spring conjures the image of giant spaceships careening into battle and molting their metal carapaces.

Slow, moody jazz from the '50s and '60s will pad the room with a pillowy intimacy, but what do you play when you need to go faster? Hard bop just doesn't cut it.

Judging by the LP jackets from the '70s, Bolero should be a sure-fire aphrodisiac; but it has the same effect on me as rock, pop, or uptempo jazz, whose beat seems better suited to robots than to lovers abed in rhythmic flux.

Deftly-made mix CDs or tapes might help, but I can't touch the mastery of club DJs who can subtly elongate an ever-accelerating tempo for an hour or more.

So where is my lust-inducing music?

While I like music that uses the sounds of sex, such as Luc Ferrari's Unheimlich Schoen or Hafler Trio's Masturbatorium, my favorite erotic music lurks between the sheets.

Alongside the sweaty clasping and slithering contorted penetration, fucking can be quite musical, not only with the steady press of skin, but in the ebb and flow of bodies moving in concert, the swoosh and ruffle of sheets, and maybe that tell-tale creak of a bed rasping like a violin strung with springs.

Fucking transforms language too; meaning as much or more than any words, the embedded yelps, coos, sighs, and grunts restore speech to music's embrace.

Best of all, the sounds, like the love you make, are yours.

NEXT: The heroism of America's TV critics (or at least one of 'em).

ELSEWHERE:

• Maxim's one-page world history of sex (found by Daze Reader)....

RECENT HIGHLIGHTS:

• Goodbyes to film critic John Hartl, the outre-music zine The Tentacle, and some cool stores.
• A last lingering look inside the OK Hotel.
• Seattle as a city that works (and works and works).
• The terrible beauty of the freeways.
• The end of our little makeover parable.
• PBS discovers marketing to kids.
• Courtney Love reinvents herself as an anti-major-label crusader.
• Handicapping the Seattle mayoral race.
• The local Mardi Gras ought to be just as dumb and naked, just less fight-prone.
• Fun, sort of, with earthquakes.
• Hardcore porn producers tone down their works for a new mainstream market.
• Comparing a couple of WTO protest videos.
• That integral aspect of the Seattle zeitgeist, complaining.
• Previewing a whole empire of MISCmedia products.
• Does the "Northwest Lifestyle" personality type even exist?
• An amateur experiment in age-regression therapy.
• A fantasy-fandom HQ pulls a disappearing trick.
• A photographic ode to the wonders of snow in Seattle.
• How a conspiracy theorist might view the power-crisis mania.
• Complaining about the Filmlooked versions of Red Dwarf.
• Learning to like Valentine's Day.

ARCHIVES:

• 2001, 2000, 1999, 1998, 1997, 1996, 1995, and 1986-94 columns
• Reviews of literature & art, nonfiction & culture criticism, movies & videos, and music & noise
• Longer articles and essays
• Some slightly weird little fiction pieces
• X-Word crossword puzzles, now with on-screen solving
• Cyber Stuff, links to cool and/or useful sites
• A listing of many Things I Like (and a few things I hate)
• The origin and future of MISCmedia