He removes his penis from his clothes and his clothes from his body and he slides it, hard as stone, back and forth through the gushing flesh of my upper thigh. I can’t feel a thing but I could cum just from watching. I have my own wonder too. The air in the room is hung from the ceiling unmoving like a puppet sleeping on his gallows. I am so lucky that he loves me, I am I am I am. He fucks my butchered leg like a stray dog and I cum over and over and over again watching him.
Then the sow’s mouth opened, and she spoke. He wasn’t certain how the words came, but they came. A boy’s voice, lilting:
“This is the state of the beast,” it said, “to eat and be eaten.”
– Clive Barker, “Pig Blood Blues”
To remain virile in the light demands the audacity of a mad ignorance: letting oneself catch fire, screaming with joy, expecting death—because of an unknown, unknowable presence; becoming love and blind light oneself, attaining the perfect incomprehension of the sun.
– Georges Bataille, “Guilty”
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Perhaps film is such an intoxicating art form because of its inherent mythological qualities. The element of sitting in dark rooms, transfixed by moving images that are – or at least used to be – created by a physical process, through a machine. It recounts moments of deep ritual experience as much as of stage magicians. There’s a power not just in the film, its creation myth or the lore of its participants, but within our very gaze of looking up at this massive window.
I wonder what it was inside Ethel Cain that she saw when she gazed at the Bruce Mansfield power plant towers that transfixed her so much. In a tumblr post, she details her unique relationship to the structures: “They became a beacon of religiosity, of sexual liberation and enjoyment, of contentedness. When I would drive home, I would masturbate in the dark and think about them and only them. I think I miss the power plants more than anything since leaving Pennsylvania.”
I think I can glimpse the origin of her fascination: Cain, who considers herself a filmmaker, grew up in a southern Baptist family, and was deeply shaped by experiencing religion. How we perceive nuclear power is, in a way, an inextricable reflection on our awe of God. The 2019 HBO show Chernobyl magnified this in striking imagery, depicting blinding lights that annihilate souls, that tear apart flesh. When the two workers finally reach inside and stare down at the exposed core, the image is that of a cosmic monster – a thing that disassembles your atoms when you are in its presence. The nuclear towers are the boundary, the protective wall between it and us – as well as its actual body. It’s a cage of the power within.
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If God is love, then witnessing his power is to witness a moment of unreal bliss and beauty that still means annihilation, for no man can ever witness God – this is an essential element of Christian mysticism. Many directors have investigated this imagery physically – Danny Boyle did so prominently in the finale of Sunshine, but could only grasp their imagination of it. George Batailles, fascinated with the photograph of a dying man that was cut apart piece by piece, wrote an entire philosophy on this ghoulish moment of surrendering the body within God, attempting to reach this critical moment of unification. For Cain, things are infinitesimally more complicated.
In a YouTube video entitled “the ring, the great dark, and proximity to god”, Cain details a set of esoteric concepts that she developed after the release of Preacher’s Daughter, her celebrated solo debut album.
I will attempt to summarise the elements thereof as follows. “The Ring” is, in essence, a mixing philosophy that charts instruments individually, but also encompasses the unique and whole experience of the finished work, as visualised by Cain. Once this circular pattern of completion is achieved, the finished song will result in what she calls “The Pull” – a spiritual experience (one of the examples she cites is Purity Ring’s “Grandloves”). Through this experience, one is transported into the “divine theatre” – the realm of God, ecstasy. According to Cain, there one is in the presence of God, but God rests behind “the veil”, an impenetrable barrier that marks the dividing factor between God and the self. She doesn’t understand this as a mystical idea, but more as “a higher calling, […] a connection greater than oneself […] the euphoria of being spiritually enlightened”. Tearing through the veil and becoming one with God is “an unknown and discouraged experience” – which leads us back to Bataille… or Chernobyl, or Sunshine.
Now, all this is nothing new to religious rhetoric. Transcendental practices often speak in similar motions, and even though she rejects mystical comparisons… so do the mystics. Artists have attempted these figurations before, too, prominently through Coil and other acts of the British post-industrial movement, such as Nurse With Wound. Junkies, too.
What makes Cain’s ideas unique is that they are enriched by yet another philosophical – or theological – concept, which she calls “The 12 pillars of Simulacrum”. Inspired by Baudrillard’s writing (frequent the link if unfamiliar), this movement is embodied by 12 short visual works Cain has uploaded as well as a short story and included interview in HommeGirls. Obtuse in nature, my interpretation of this movement, which charts from “Apathy” and “Disruption” all the way to “Degradation”, “Annihilation” and “Desolation”, is an elliptical experience with obsessive inclinations towards entering transgressive moments that climax in transcendence. Or, if that is too abstract: masturbatory rites of touching God, which repeat until little is left of the self and only the act remains.
One could call this addiction, but… that doesn’t really cut it. Because frankly, most people live through this attempt to fit a higher calling and breathe the ecstasy – maybe with drugs, or in sex, or on the dancefloor. Maybe in the arms of a distant love, or the gaze of God. Really… it is happening to everybody.
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Perverts is called an EP, but with its nine songs and 89 minute runtime, that seems a descriptive folly that can only be explained as contractual obligation. Cain made certain to explain that this was not a record that fit into her overarching “Ethel Cain Cinematic Universe”, planned as a trilogy that started with Preacher’s Daughter, but instead a standalone work that had transformed over time. A first “draft” had allegedly been finished, and completely scrapped. While the preceding paragraphs – with their discussion of theological esoterica and canonical material – provides necessary context to understand Cain’s intention with this work, the conceptual density this suggests is not quite what Perverts actually is.
This is where I must confess – Preacher’s Daughter did not do much for me. I considered it conceptually rich, but also strained in its length and glacial atmosphere; a work that functioned as meta-narrative but often kept you at arms length through its inherent performative elements. Cain rightfully describes herself a filmmaker, and as “a little shit” – both things her tumblr blog magnifies. But then the album made ample references, from JT Leroy to August Underground, which the embodiment never quite matched. It was an occasionally deep experience, but its transgressions were often contained moments within a larger, somnambulist whole that seemed more concerned with pop variables.
Well… turns out that Preacher’s Daughter was a trap!
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When asked if Perverts is meant to scare the listener, Cain responded “not really, at least it wasn’t my intention. perverts is an erotic project to me personally.” Which, well, if you read the introductory lines from Cain’s “Circus”, you might question to what degree her translation of the erotic and horror go hand in had. Returning to the quote on her sexual relationship with the nuclear power plant towers, it’s suggested that there is a dark side to the experience of eroticism, a suggestion of annihilation and cannibalistic (self-)submission – an image also at the heart of Preacher’s Daughter.
But besides suggestion, the latter was, well, moderately PG – how else could Obama put “American Teenager” on his year end list? It’s gloomy and gothic, but also Spielbergian in its semantics of lived pain and the quest for a higher truth – an adventure melodrama that, even if dark, is perfumed and draped in honey.
Well, turns out Perverts is a snuff film.
I’m going to describe my first time of listening to this record, which was on an early, gloomy winter morning in bed, drapes shut. It was utterly horrifying!! The album, at multiple points, features what I can only describe as sudden and violent sonic jump scares, which, through sudden bursts, suddenly transform even familiar environment into a nightmare.
In other moments, Cain uses clever, suggestive audio mixing to enhance atmospheres that are oppressive, liminal and frightening. There are a lot of comparisons within the composition and performances, from Puce Mary to Akira Yamaoka – artists I am very certain Cain is a fan of – that are celebrated for their harsh and serene world building. She has provided multiple literary reference points that, equally, describe similar liminal habitats, so I venture to guess that this is, once more, very intentional, and a plays on the audience’s expectations. Because make no mistake, this music was found in an abandoned, derelict house somewhere in a forest, likely on a blood-drenched tape.
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This becomes clear when the record opens with a distorted rendition of “Nearer, My God, To Thee”, a christian hymn that Cain speaks fondly of. It then progresses into a spoken-word piece, which also introduces a fundamental background noise track of, allegedly, running water from near Niagara Falls, which continues throughout the album’s entirety. Over this, a muffled, deep voice speaks almost unrecognisable words: “Heaven has forsaken the masturbator / No one you know is a good person / Fast, reckless driving often leads to slow, sad music.”
At some point, a strange bell chime erupts, suggesting vast structures of fogged darkness, neither Hell nor Heaven but something in-between. The industrial drone finally explodes into a barrage of different frequencies, whose acidic tone and oppressive density seems to suck the air out of the lungs. Then, suddenly, a string melody is introduced that retains the power of Angelo Badalamenti’s eternal mood music, only for the sound to suddenly cut out, and the voice to declare: “It is happening to everybody.”
As explained before, there are ample comparisons that can be made – there’s some Twin Peaks here, some Silent Hill, a lot of Catholic anxiety and occult ritualism, but the effect is hard to put on paper. It’s a genuinely physical, unsettling, but also euphoric song, which – through its masterful composition and sound design – reaches textural brilliance.
As if to mock the listener, it leads to the project’s lead single, the achingly dark “Punish”. Cain has described the song as the lament of a pedophile that was shot by the father of one of his victims, and proceeds to maim himself as a form of self-induced punishment. God is absent, in his stead is the sound of creaking playground swings that Cain, fittingly, recorded at midnight. With its gothic atmosphere and aching vocal performance, the track has shades of Nicole Dollanganger and Chelsea Wolfe but, my god, through its immense body and intense lyricism reaches a level of its own harrowing excellence. The lines “Shame is sharp, and my skin gives so easy / Only God knows, only God would believe / That I was an angel / But they made me leave” are nothing short of devastating.
The album goes on to dwell in dark territories, and I do not want to give away many of its surprises. I don’t do this to “ruin the fun” – there is enough here to pick apart to have people enjoy the dig (there’s already suggestions of hidden sounds from Zelda and a vibrator in the album’s textures). Yet, I’m going to try and investigate some of its themes and images.
“Houseofpsychoticwomn” – a rework of an earlier track – has a ghost-like voice repeat “I Love You” ad infinitum, with what sounds like the stretched gurgles of a pornographic movie, taking the form of a deep sea angler fish that transfixes its prey. This is a warning!
“Vacillator” is nothing short of a masterpiece, a Slowcore hymn that unites “Resting Comfortably” and “Shame”. Cain seemingly investigates the strange, green glow of self isolation within addiction and masturbation: “I like that sound you make / When you’re clawing at the edge and without escape / Do you like that, baby? / I could make you cum twenty times a day”. Minimalist and sensual, it finds tenderness in what is a very dangerous and scary form of existence.
“Onanist” plays with images of Dante’s Inferno and metal textures, a doomed lullaby. “Pulldrone” explores the “12 Pillars” concept over a constant drone, and the record’s most challenging one due to its ritualistic nature – good luck with finding the Harlan Ellison reference. “Etienne” pays homage to utopian architect Étienne-Louis Boullée, whose often unrealised, spherical or temple-like funerary monuments are mentioned by Cain: “i imagine he must have felt so lonely, like noah building the ark.” The short narration at its conclusion is heartbreaking, and certainly something many listeners will intimately relate to.
The violent “Thatorchia” returns to religious imagery, investigating ‘the bitter acceptance of the knowledge that god will let you near but he won’t let you stay’. Finally, the elysian “Amber Waves” has the womb-like comfort of post-coital glow, but adds deeply harrowing lyrics of detachment, disengagement and loss, familiar from Xiu Xiu’s tender “Fabulous Muscles”. The song takes its name from The Reflecting Skin, but transgresses the movie’s confines to ask questions on the validity of boundary experiences – yet it also concludes that these experiences, this self-inflicted harm, is in itself a comfort zone or safe space. A toxic relationship that is marked by absence, by pain, by the knowledge of an eternal loss: “I’ll be alright / I take the long way home / Shaking the bottle and letting them roll / ‘Cause the devil I know / Is the devil I want”.
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As stated above, I consider Perverts sort of a “snuff film”, an experience of horror that indulges as much of its qualities as it exists within the transgressive experience of an observer existing within its structure. Snuff films are made for its audience, and they elicit the reaction of “That… has got to be fake”, as the real and unreal merge within the observer’s subconscious reaction. It is, inherently, wrong to lay eyes on it, and its existence bares witness to the unimaginable, and doing so implies – and shifts – the role of perpetrator.
And what else could Perverts be? It’s, clearly, not some sort of cursed videotape that kills its listener. It combines field recordings (so found footage of real environments and actions) with ritualistic compositions and lyrical performances… and constant horror. It is a document suggesting acts that are societally unacceptable, spiritually questionable, yet deeply fulfilled within its state of euphoric completion and gradual hypnotic power. Voices that melt and dance in dark blood. What you indulge in here is something else, and it will change you, make you into something else. A perpetrator that chooses a side when play is pressed. It is achingly beautiful and uncompromisingly hardcore. This might be too much to take, or too painful, or too frightening to you. But don’t worry: it is happening to everybody.
I Love You.
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