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HUMAN SEXUAL RESPONSE
We make beautiful music together, baby!
BY MIKE MILIARD

"You are about to have one of the most beautiful experiences that you have ever enjoyed," intones a voice, at once alluring and vaguely sinister, at the start of Jessica Vale’s The Sex Album. "Be sure that you are comfortably settled ..." The words are addressed to the listener, but could just as easily have been a pre-coital pep talk aimed at the song’s, uh, musical instruments. Every sound on Vale’s record that isn’t her singing is woven from minutely manipulated recordings of live sex acts.

But anyone expecting Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin’s breathy "Je t’aime, moi non plus," raunchily revamped for the 21st century, will be sorely disappointed. Vale’s co-conspirators, Berklee grads Ivan Evangelista and Jean-Luc Cohen, have distorted the sounds of amorous coupling to such a point that they’re all but unrecognizable. Sometimes (in "Intro," for instance) they mold barely discernable moans into oscillating sonic waves, conjure breathy murmurs into gusting winds, and divine sounds of burbling liquid from ... well, we’ll leave that one alone. Elsewhere ("Boy in Black"), one would never guess that the skittering electro-drumbeats and cartoonish muzak were once the impassioned utterances of a copulating couple.

Vale, a New York City multimedia artist, says the idea for The Sex Album stemmed initially from a concept she’d had for some short films. Eventually, though, she realized that "for a lot of reasons, film didn’t seem like the medium to do it." So she teamed with Evangelista and Cohen, and the threesome slinked into the inky night, looking for raw material. The couples they recorded were "people we had approached in clubs and different social settings," Vale explains. "We told them about the idea, asked them if they’d be interested in letting us record them. In some cases people agreed, and in others they didn’t." For those who were game, "we tried to record them in a setting they’d be comfortable with. We didn’t just bring them into a studio and hook them up with microphones."

"We got the sound sources with a variety of microphone methods — everything from putting mikes up into rooms, all the way down to actually putting miniature microphones into body orifices," says Evangelista. With that raw footage, they went to work. "We wound up manipulating and distorting a bunch of sounds using a variety of programs," he says. "I did some of the manipulations on the more basic end of the spectrum, pitch-shifting and distorting and stuff like that. Jean-Luc is a computer synthesist. He did a lot of cutting-edge processing with less mainstream software, used a lot of granular synthesis to really extract textures out of the source material that you couldn’t really get through traditional means." The process was painstaking, Evangelista says. (And often, when they weren’t getting the sound they were after, they had to go back, fluff the pillows, and record more.) All the while, the overarching goal was to avoid an album full of salacious "grunts and moans."

"I didn’t want it to sound like the soundtrack to porno with some vocals over it," Vale says. "I wanted the music to be a little more lush, a little more intimate and sensual, and I wanted people to pay attention if they really wanted to know what the source material was. I wanted it to lend itself to play in spaces like clubs. But a lot of the music is slower and darker, and it’s something that’s a bit more appropriate for a quiet setting at home, or even headphones."

While a song like "Disco Libido" is indeed a pounding, bass-heavy club track, it also betrays, subtly, its origins: through all the manic music, it seems to breathe, humming with a warm, organic energy. "Exit," meanwhile, with its murmured vocals and washes of ambient noise, is oneiric, haunting, almost desolate. Vale says she wanted The Sex Album to evoke the "wide range of sexual experience. I don’t think that sex is just something that’s superficial, and I feel a lot of music, especially these days, is focused on that. I wanted the music to represent a lot of different situations. Sometimes sex is slow. It is dark, it is scary. I wanted it to be a little raw."

Purchase The Sex Album at www.thesexalbum.com.


Issue Date: April 1 - 7, 2005
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