Author: Emmanuel Neill

During the Vietnamese War, the US devised several uses of psychological warfare tactics, or psy-ops. Perhaps the most famous of these is known as Operation Wandering Soul, or ‘Ghost Tape 10’. In Vietnamese culture, honoring the dead and ensuring that they have a proper burial is extremely important, otherwise the dead will continue to roam the Earth as ‘Wandering Soul’. Knowing this, the US created a sound piece in which the ‘voices of the dead’ can be heard crying out over a soundscape composed of eerie field recordings. They would play this out of speakers, nicknamed ‘the clanger’, in areas where Viet-Cong were active in order to try and scare them out of hiding. Although the operation was not a success, and they stopped using the technique in the early 1970s, the tape itself has allowed me to think about the concept of control using sound, especially in relation to auralism. 

My interest in psy-ops, and psychological warfare in general, speaks to my greater interest in control. This is also where the inspiration I take from fetish and from operations like Wandering Soul come together, as I find these different methods of control useful to think about. For Voice Pigs, I wanted to interrogate the link between control, trauma and sexuality hence why I interviewed a dominatrix whose subs fetish is held in sexual trauma. In terms of Operation Wandering Soul, the reason why the US army believed it would work is because of the beliefs that the Viet-Cong hold over the dead. For someone to be controlled by sound, specifically the noise rather than what is actually being said, there has to be some element of trauma attached to it. In Voice Pigs, it is that the singing the dominatrix performs for the sub is the same as songs his mother would sing to him. This comes from a space where he, clearly, is unable to process his relationship with his mother and how this manifests into his sexuality. In terms of Wandering Soul, I find the link between the ways in which traumatic sounds can be used to control someone and how being forced to listen to a sound can elicit various responses fascinating.  

The tape itself is a mixture of ambient sound and crying voices. One of a young girl sobbing for her father, another of a soldier telling his friends that he has returned to announce his death. All of them are lost souls, their voices distorted against the ambient grain of the tape. However, what the voices are saying can all clearly be heard. Although the US claimed that the operation was a success, there is no evidence to support this claim. Instead, it has been reported that the Viet-Cong knew that Wandering Soul was a recording. Therefore, they fired and revealed their snipers hiding spots which was not the intention behind the tape. That was, rather, to get the Viet-Cong to leave by tricking them into thinking that their dead were coming back to haunt them. To me, it is a point of interest to consider how using someones loved ones against them can be a form of control and to privilege the superstitions that come alongside this. 

A girl lies on her side with two contact mics attached to her stomach. She announces in the video’s title that there is an entire rotisserie chicken inside of her, which she is going to be digesting. The contact mics pick up the sounds of grumbling and growling. Although this is not inherently sexual, the comments are filled with people timestamping the video with the best sounds or the times when the stomach is loudest as well as people lamenting that they would like to be eaten by the person. Mostly, the latter comments are focused on wanting to be inside of the stomach. On various porn sites and fetish forums, people swallow gummy bears whole and film the digestion process with a microphone attached, people who endeavor to eat the most amount of food possible and then listen to it digest. While the community appears to have much overlap with those who are into vore (being swallowed), they are specifically attracted to the sounds of stomachs, and how stomachs digest or hold objects.

While looking at different kinds of auralism, or concepts which have auralist potential, I stumbled across a short clip of a woman swallowing a hundred marbles and using an internal microphone, as well as contact mics, to record the sound of them sloshing and clinking inside of her as they roll about. At one point, she rolls onto her side and the marbles tip over themselves inside of her creating a very loud sound. Here, she is conducting a kind of ‘object vore’, but one where people can imprint their own ideas and subjectivity onto the sounds. As has been prevalent throughout my research for Voice Pigs, sound is being used as a method of fetish, and in particular a form of paraphilia. 

For Voice Pigs, as I have constantly reiterated, the piece is focused on auralism and the ways in which someone can be controlled by sound alone. Digestion fetishists became interesting to think about because of the specificity of the sounds that are erotic to them. I would have loved to interview someone with this fetish, but they are difficult to get into contact with and much of the content I found online is from years ago. However, when conducting the work for Voice Pigs I wanted to have a wide range of sound fetishism to draw from and inform me. Digestion fetishes are strange, and while I struggle to understand the appeal of the sounds I find it fascinating how these everyday sounds can provide such a strong allure. 

The next shredding session is scheduled! This may sound as though it has been taken straight from the report of a serial killer shredding their victims, or an office pep talk gone awry, but instead it is from the user of a fetish forum focused on the destruction of raincoats and other outdoor wear. Specifically, these users are interested in PVC rainwear, how it boils or burns, stretches and shreds. Some of them want to wear the clothing before it is destroyed, whereas others see this as sacrilegious. There is no one way to destroy the rainwear, but one thing that unites the purveyors of this fetish is that they find the height of the eroticism, the point of climax, to be seeing a raincoat, or other rainwear, get destroyed. 

My awareness of this fetish started when my partner showed me images of raincoats inside one of their porn magazines, which they collect. They were particularly drawn to images of people wearing full latex outfits, which obscured their face as well as body, with a raincoat over the top. They took me to the Rain Time exhibition at Horse Hospital, and were enamoured with the look of the coats. I must admit, though, I didn’t get it. I understood the aesthetic appeal, but did not see how this clothing could be erotic. Everything thus far had been about the wearing of the clothing, and aesthetic appeal which I could understand only as being similar to a latex attraction. It was only when they showed me a porn DVD, titled RainCoat Destructions, that I began to understand, and take inspiration from, those within this community. 
RainCoat Destructions can, perhaps, be best thought of as a series of vignettes. There is no traditional plot, but instead a series of scenarios in which raincoats are destroyed with an axe, hammered or blown out of a cannon. Though the images were intense, I was immediately drawn to the sounds of the raincoats. The filmmaker makes sure to capture the sound of the coats rustling, being dragged through the leaves, the sound of the raincoats as they are being shredded or hacked to pieces. The actual wearer of the coat is not important, even though she is credited, and instead the camera zooms in close on her boots, her coat and her gloves.

Watching this DVD, I was almost overwhelmed by the noises and I understood that this side of the fetish is not based simply on the look of the coats but also the feel and the sounds that they make. As the woman shuffles through the woods, the coat rustles and the leaves below her crack and what she is destroying is heard loudly and erotically.

Voice Pig, my upcoming audio documentary, revolves around interviews with a dominatrix who uses auralist techniques to control her submissive. Using both her voice and interviews we have conducted in spaces such as pubs and the side of a road, I want to explore the control that can be audited through fetish voice play. Particularly, the raincoat destruction fetish community has struck me because of how intensely the community relies on sound for their pleasure. The rustling, the tearing, the shredding, the crackle of the fire as the PVC burns: this is as erotic and as perverse as the touch of fingers or licking of the tongue. How do these noises not only appeal to a listener’s most primary sensory urges, but can be used as a form of control through the erotic and the sound of fetish.

The Foley for Voice Pigs became very clear to me as I was exploring the project. I wanted to use the sounds of a motor way to contextualise the lonesome and separative themes of the piece. To do this I walked up and down part of the north circular at night and during the day to capture the oncoming traffic, wheels rolling on crunchy tarmac and the various textures of the trucks and lorries passing by.

I heard water and saliva too. I thought these sounds contextualised the heavy sexual themes and anxiety within the piece. I set out by recording still water in a bucket, swooshing it around with my hand and the tongue and saliva movement of myself and my peers. These ASMR-y, heavily textural sounds felt challenging and uncomfortable, heavily denoting the concepts of the piece.

The sounds of boots walking up and down a corridor also seemed to play into the themes of fetishism, I recorded these sounds and added them to my roster.

Over the course of a week, I continued to collect sound, placing them within the piece where they would be most impactful. I plan on using these samples in IRIS 2, a spectral synthesiser, moulding the sounds together to create hyper textural patches.

In a silent room two figures stand without talking to each other. One of them climbs into a black full bodysuit, while the other helps them. Despite the fact that they are not verbally communicating, the two of them are able to maneuver into the suit. There are ever so slight rustles, as both figures are already wearing a full body suit. The room itself is white and sparse, with no furniture being visible aside from a large chair that looks to be used for restraining someone, and the corner of what appears to be an office chair. There is a white tile floor and plain white walls, so the room is atypical of a ‘dungeon’ which many may assume is the standard setting for BDSM activities. Furthermore, the space does not seem to have any decoration in it at all and, because no other camera angles are used in the video aside from a wide angle static shot, it is unclear what else the space is used for. I would not go so far as to refer to the space as the overused term ‘liminal’, but it certainly seems to exist as a non-space, one without a clear purpose or clear boundaries aside from those that the camera brings. 

The figure who is not in the black suit uses a machine to inflate the figure in the black suit. This video is entitled Heavy Rubber Latex Lesbian Inflation and I discovered it on the channel ‘HotFetLife’ on PornHub, though I have been unable to find the origins of the video. However, based on the video’s title we can assume that, despite the fact that the bodies are not obviously gendered, they are both lesbians. It is up to the viewer to place their preconceived notions of lesbianism onto the figures in order to get off, or simply enjoy the video. 

As the figure begins to inflate, the room is filled with the sounds of a machine whirring, and the soft noise of the latex as it expands. The face of the black suited figure blows up to appear even more inhuman lacking even more clear human facial features. There are no bodies grinding together, no pale flesh and fluids, no one is even talking to each other. Instead, the second figure tenderly caresses the inflated body while the whirring continues. The camera slowly zooms in, and then zooms out, and all the while the noise of the machine seems overwhelming inside of the room. Here, the erotic nature of the images is not from the touching of flesh but from the sounds of machines and the touch of rubber to rubber, expansion to expansion. 

Finally, the figure reaches peak inflation and is deflated. They are removed from the suit, and the whirring stops. The sequence is finished, and although no one has obviously climaxed a full form of the erotic has been reached. It is not about how you are, but how you wish to be seen. 

Researching videos such as this has always lead me to question how certain sounds can be erotic, how one does not need to touch in a traditional way and how people can see themselves through sexual acts. Partly, the topic of my upcoming documentary Voice Pig is inspired by my desire to explore people’s deepest desires. Furthermore, I find the grainy aesthetic quality that this video has extremely alluring, and it has been an important aesthetic model for many of my projects. 

ART JOSEPH is perhaps the most prolific artist I know. On his Instagram he posts at least two new drawings a day, usually either based on posters of films he enjoys or drawings of his friends. Below, on the left hand side, is a comparison of a drawing Joseph did of my partner alongside an image of them, to give an idea about how Joseph’s art style manifests. Joseph has multiple disabilities, although this is not the focus of his art nor of his life. Instead, Joseph pays no mind to the art world and focuses on doing drawing for pure pleasure. Sometimes, I have watched Joseph produce several drawings in the space of just a few hours. Joseph is an outsider artist, but he is also my friend, and therefore he defies the mythos of personality that is often prescribed to artists. 

Alongside a friend and my partner, I attended the private viewing of Joseph’s first solo exhibition ‘Pretty Bubblegum Woman’ at The Haggerston Pub in Dalston. In the upstairs exhibition space, there were around fifty pieces of work on display – his ‘drawings’ as Joseph refers to them. Some were on display in frames and for sale, while others were on display in folders on a table in the centre of the room for patrons to flip through. There were also hats from Joseph’s time volunteering at the Rio Cinema, Dalston, a place in which he met many of his friends and that continues to have a great influence on his artwork. Popcorn in boxes taken from the cinema was also given out.

I spoke to some of Joseph’s collaborators, artists Dandy Day and Gar O’Dwyer who helped curate the exhibition, about their struggles with creating the space and their main takeaway was simply that it was hard to decide what to display! With Joseph’s output spanning eight years of constant drawing, the amount of work he has is truly astounding. 

Joseph loves to sing karaoke, specifically Creedence Clearwater Revival. As part of the exhibition, he curated a playlist of music that he enjoys for those attending the exhibit to listen to. This meant that, instead of either silence or quiet background music not meant to detract from the art on display, we were in the exhibition looking at the artwork to the sound of Eminem, Tina Turner and Survivor. In a less organic setting, this choice would have been ironic, a choice made in order to separate the art from its creator and to install some kind of ironic distance for those viewing the art. Except, for Joseph, the music he chooses to accompany his work comes from a place of sincerity and not from a desire to impress. 

I love Joseph’s art, and I love how much Joseph loves to create it. He has dabbled in pottery, beatboxing, theatre and prose – including writing an entire zombie novel entitled Evil in East London, but always returns to drawing as his main artistic practice. He is sincere, and exists without any need for mythos or attribution. Alongside how well he can capture people, this is something I greatly admire about Joseph, and why I tell every person I meet about his artwork at any given opportunity. I find his take on art refreshing, and attending the exhibition energised me, giving me confidence to try out new techniques or methods that I otherwise may not have attempted. 

Al is grabbing my shoulder, shaking me. Balloons people couldn’t quite hold onto are pshh-ing around in a nearly totally dark, sodden machine room. Hakken dancing legs are in the air, the strobe reflecting off old Nike TNs. Sixty people are jumping and dancing to a huge F1 rig at the back of the room, the jump up DNB is creating a thermal wall. You can feel the separation in temperature, a sweaty, warm, misty wall you can pass through, it’s almost like the fog you cross before a boss fight in Dark Souls.

I’m at Bass Slutz, some where in South London. Bass Slutz is a queer focused rave run by a group of my closest friends. Due to the sad reality that Jump Up raves may not be safe or inviting for queers, Bass Slutz aims to invert the hyper-masculine roots of Jump Up music and reclaim the genre for queer people in a space where queer people can safely listen to it. The people who attend Bass Slutz and its sister night Gutterring directly influenced the main ideas for the Latex Maid.

Their personalities, emotions, what they have to say and the music they listen to was crucial for writing the transcript and most of the people I talked to at this rave are included in what the Latex Maid has to say. I loved the idea of capturing the energies from these raves and injecting the personalities of its inhabitants into the Latex Maid. The music that is played is also a huge influence on the music that surrounds the piece. This music is a fundamental part of the personalities of the people included within the piece, therefore a mixture of Gabber, Jump Up, Hardstyle, Country, music by crack-pot conspiracy theorists and 2000’s tiny pop anthems are all present.

After Bass Slutz I really started to feel comfortable using music I didn’t like to build the surrounding audio. I started to feel like this was incredibly important to capture the people that are at the corner stone of its personality.

I also started to really think about why, deeply. For me the Latex Maid started to take on my own personal insecurities, not only with how talk or what music I enjoy but physical anxieties I have about body and gender. This was an important step in the growth of the Latex Maid, I started feeling an emotional call and response from the project – I take a bit of you now here’s a bit of me.

Below, is the current transcript of audio I’ve recorded and snippets of conversations I’ve remembered. This monologue is what I plan to edit and turn into the ferocious, speedy dialogue for the Latex Maid to squeal. This monologue is at the centre of the piece, creating, what will be the amalgamation of one hundred interactions, emotions and personalities.

A bending guitar, jerking out a buzzing squeal followed by a warm humming drone, Dylan Walker is rocking back and forth, weight on heels, then on toes, gently twisting the knob of a pedal. He’s holding a microphone in hand with the wire wrapped around his fist like he’s getting ready to box an opponent. The floor is quivering from the sub. A gentle nod to the drummer (Dave Bland) then a discharge of blast beats, shrieking, jumping, sweating, grabbing arms and shoulders, throwing beer and bodies – the butterfly feeling in my stomach began to feel satisfied, I love these moments and I love where the music and the people take me.

I thought a lot about this energy the few days following, I thought about how it could be captured and used in the most justifying way possible for a gallery piece. The latex maid is an amalgamation of my closest friends, people I don’t like, people in passing, capturing whatever I found affective no matter how unenduring, insufferable or moving. The piece has deep roots in social perception and the anxiety surrounding it, creating a very real person with all their worried, brash charisma in tow.

I found myself plucking small pieces of personality from the people at the Full of Hell show. Sharing beer and nips of vodka smuggled into Electric Brixton with strangers, listening to their political worries and wobbly opinions – I felt trusted for no reason other than our shared love for grindcore and powerviolence tethering us together. I feel so inspired by these small, some would say, insignificant interactions. I felt belonging and trust.

After the show, I started to feel a lot of emotional attachment to the Latex Maid. Originally, I planned for her to be teeming with irony – a salty inside joke I could play on my friends but after I begun to hyper focus on these interactions, the people around me and the people included, I feel like it is becoming more connective. The emotions of the people recorded are delicate, regardless of their sincerity or my own opinion.

 Although the humour isn’t lost with the Latex Maid, I have begun to abandon the fearlessness of its old sinister irony for creating a person more living and complex.

After ringing multiple medical universities in search of a dental mannequin, I was able to source two from the Queens University nursing school in Belfast. One more full head was unusable as the teeth were immoveable inside the mannequin, although the other one was perfect as it had all the elements, I needed to fit an actuator to the teeth and move them. I then began looking into what actuator would be appropriate in order to make the teeth move. I wanted an actuator that displayed movement like that of a sex toy, this was important to me as one like this felt complimentary to the themes and personality of the project. I decided on an 1000 rpm actuator, with the pistons exposed, for about forty pounds.

As of this blog post, I’m still currently working with the hardware and coding element of the project to get the actuator to move the teeth concurrently with the monologue. I expect some elements / hardware to change as I continue to experiment with the piece to get it to a perfect place. I’m working with my coding wizard house mate to write the code. I’ve found this element of the project really challenging as I’ve never done anything like this. I’ve been really enjoying being a step out of my depth and learning.