ETERNAL/RETURN
A Body Complicates: in Conversation with Female Wizard
Female Wizard, a.k.a. Alexander Powers, is a musician, dancer, performance artist, and raver. This interview was conducted in Berlin, October 2023, when Female Wizard visited Europe all the way from Australia, as rare a trip as one can imagine. Given that we had met Female Wizard at the beginning of Becoming, an early supporter who inspired us a lot, we couldn’t miss this opportunity to meet her. We had just moved to Berlin and had no idea what we were doing or where we were, it was perhaps the least ideal conditions to sit and talk about Spinoza, but nonetheless, from a variety of strange, small apartments and basements in and around Kreuzberg-Neukölln, we recorded many hours of dialogue over several days. We then transcribed a lot of this, and began editing it down into a take that would fit the magazine. We appreciate tremendously the effort made by Female Wizard to participate in producing this interview, and we are really grateful for the insights she offered us. It was sincerely a pleasure to hear your stories, and we hope this interview does justice to your character.
PALAIS SINCLAIRE:
So... who is Female Wizard?
FEMALE WIZARD:
The name Female Wizard came as a joke, really. I was Brooke Powers when I came out, and that was around the time I started DJing, I learnt how to mix records and collected all this 90s New York House, this was my thing as a DJ for like 5 or 6 years. I was amongst the first of a wave of very visible trans girls suddenly presenting themselves in the wider, non-queer music scene, in Melbourne, at a time when this new kind of Tumblr-derivative intersectional feminism was erupting. It was really cool, lots of very new conversations were happening, but they were also really clumsy, and mean at times. The focus on identity in the 2010s was heavy-handed, and although I was a good DJ, I was also symbolic of something, and that created some conflict in me: why am I getting attention? Is it for good reasons? What does this all mean!?
So, it was after Dark Mofo, and encountering the dance music history of Kodwo Eshun, that I realised really what a queer approach or methodology to music and DJing is. For me it was more than the label or aesthetic markers or queer music, it was a way of using music to disturb and disrupt. I started blending noisy or experimental sounds, having long atmospheric breakdowns, asymmetrical beats, to deliver to people new relationships to their own bodies as they navigated this music, new relationships to the social as the sounds undermined expectations. And I knew, from when I saw Merzbow, that all kinds of noise and sound can inspire a body to be moved, it’s like a revelation to discover this. If I can move others in the same way, I feel this is an opening up of possibilities in this world. That’s all that I hoped, and that still guides me, and I think the experimental is ruthlessly queer. It is queerness in action and it is pivotal for us to engage with it. All this is the difference between Brooke Powers and Female Wizard, a maturation of vibe you could say.
PS:
Well, I’m really thrilled that we got to meet, Female Wizard, and I am hoping we might be able to strike up a conversation with you about your music practice, hopefully about some of the ideas about Spinoza and materialism that we touched on in a recent conversation. Where did that story begin?
FW:
So, I had a moment last summer; Australian summer. I was in the middle of reading The Ethics by Spinoza, and I had planned to go see this Bach Cantata recital at this Church because I had never heard Bach played before and it’s a really beautiful cantata. After the recital I was walking through the park, and it was just this incredible moment of “being in love with God”, in the way Spinoza understands it, an “intellectual love of God”. It’s like this contemplation of beatitude, except for me it was less like a contemplation and more like a smack in the face. I ended up going back to that church several times because each time I’d leave the service, I would be placed back in this feeling. It’s like all my urgent desires took a back seat, and I could just look around at anything and be moved by the mere fact of my existence. It felt so important, and unlike the spiritual experiences I had sought after before, it was not about the negation of this life for some higher more real plane of existence, it was an unconditional affirmation of life. I stopped going eventually, the Pastor had, at some point, given this speech that sort of said “it’s not enough to just come for the music, that’s not what we’re really doing here”—“it’s not enough to just to love and to contemplate God, you have to accept that Jesus is your saviour”. I mean, who the fuck is Jesus? I don’t know. So, you know, I stopped going. It’s upsetting, you know, because to go to a church and hear beautiful music is a phenomenal experience.
PS:
I was in the school choir when I was young, because I’d been enrolled to a primary school with strong connections to the church next door. We had mandatory choir, but I don’t regret this, and to this day I listen to choral music with some relative frequency. This came up in my study of music philosophy of late, particularly because of one small part of Derrida’s work in the famous Tympan essay. In criticizing the history of western philosophy as logocentric, Derrida determines that the voice is privileged as a means of discourse, as opposed to, say, writing. Over the years, my interpretation of some of this work lead me down a path towards the understanding that what makes the voice special is that it resonates internally as well as externally. In essence, the boundaries between internal and external become blurry during this process, and to give the crudest punchline ever: verbal communication, utterance, is somehow a process of self-embodiment or self-realization (“being at one with yourself”). As you speak to someone, you and they vibrate, there is a very literal, physical, sonic resonance between the two of you. To sing together, then, even in a materialistic sense, is to all vibrate in unison.
FW:
There are no harmonies in Bach, only voices. I want to know more about Bach’s spirituality, because he was very religious, and I don’t know much about Lutheranism, but there is a sense of necessity in Bach’s work, a reason for each note being there, but also his music is constant, there is a constant pulse. It’s no coincidence his music triggered in me Spinoza’s concept of beatitude, the notes don’t represent a transcendental idea, each note is its own voice, completely affirmed.
PS:
I have definitely read in the past, accounts of Bach’s music as masculine, penetrative and even rampant. “Bach fucks”.
FW:
It’s like dance music! And it swells. The bassline, basso continuo, it’s a Baroque thing but it’s often there in Bach and, in many ways, in dance music, too. Bach’s work has this mathematical virtuosity, and I can see it as quite post-modern, in the sense of post-modern dance, where choreographers found external ways, chance operations, of making creative decisions in order to distance art from their own agendas, whether through rolling dies or flipping coins. Bach sets up an initial melody, then has it layer on top of itself, expressed through 3 or 4 voices at once, repeating and weaving over and over, and it’s the logic of the music that must make his decisions. This is called fugue, and they can be hard to listen to because they are not very human. It is like how Deleuze describes Spinoza as allowing us to ‘think up to God’, Spinozist theology rejects religious imagery and myth because these are human analogies that describe God as human, it is hard to say anything about Spinoza’s God as it is hard to think a thing not confined by space-time, Bach’s fugues are kind of like this, the continuous nature of the music reflects the universe beyond our grasp yet at the same time implicitly within us.
PS:
I admit for many years I blocked-out Classical music, as I was studying Ethnomusicology for some years in an institution which emphasized decolonial theory in music studies — there felt something “oppressive” about the western classical tradition that held such value in Pythagoras and Bach, as two examples of extremely mathematical composers at the beginning of the west and the peak of the enlightenment. For example, Noise music, and the general direction of the Avant-Garde, seems to have quite a different agenda to the mathematical composition of Bach, where there are no notes, no voices, just textures and intensity — instead of sovereign, integer intervals arranged mathematically, noise music organizes and distributes frequencies in a very different way. In a way, I mean to say that one can draw parallels between Bach’s composition and, say, the Newtonian imaginary, and one can draw parallels between Noise music and the Quantum imaginary. None of this is to discount Bach, just explains why I never really spent time with him — it’s a matter of having felt suspicious of the ideology within Bach’s work. That being said, it is very exciting to me to hear how you speak of Bach, especially in relation to noise, texture, and materiality because this alters how Bach could be read in relation to the overall hegemony of dualisms within the west. If one read Bach as being purely a composer of mathematics or logic, then his music would seem to affirm the hegemonial dualisms of mind over body, immaterial over material, positive over negative. If you are arguing that Bach cared deeply about the materiality of the sound and the instrumentation, then his work seems to affirm, as you say, the Spinozist monism that rejects Cartesian/Platonic or Dialectical dualisms. Now that you say it, it is clear from the rhythmicity of Bach compared to other classical composers—the very act of being rhythmic is to acknowledge the materiality of the body, where we feel rhythm. I could get down with a materialist Bach, and I now appreciate how interesting it is to imagine Bach encountering the synthesizer.
FW: *furiously digging through archives of Bach’s work*
Well, as an example, there is a particular recording that I’m looking for, maybe it’s this one... Oh? How strange, this version leads with a flute. Not what I was looking for.
PS:
Bach doesn’t fuck with Flutes?
FW:
No, he totally does but the version I’m looking for is with the Harpsichord, like this one, but I was hoping for a noisier harpsichord. As an example of how we can open up this topic of Bach and Electronic music, there are two big questions we can ask: First, is it okay for Bach to be played with the sustain pedal [on a piano]? And then second, we have this question about whether Bach would play a Moog.
PS:
It reminds me of what you said recently in relation to Kodwo Eshun: synthesizers can make such a broad range of sounds that it moves the traditional idea of an instrument into a strange position. As you said, we used to be quite strict about what we agreed upon as something that makes a musical sound as opposed to noise—only a strict set of devices could produce the tone necessary for music—but now, with the synthesizer, that has become undone, and so the range of what sounds we might call musical opens up enormously.
FW:
Exactly. I could talk about Tape, where musical sound used to be made by hairs or animal hides, but now it’s just a sound effect on magnetic material. You can see a lot of incredible work from the tape revolution even within the classical tradition, like with Kaija Saariaho. It brings me back to the question of Bach: yes, Bach would play a Moog, because if you’ve ever heard an Organ, it is basically a huge analog synthesizer, and Bach was known to be the greatest organ expert and player of his time. He was a master at what we would now call synthesis, apparently able to assess how to tune any organ down to the millimeter differences in thickness of the pipes. It’s interesting because we have to remember that he wrote keyboard music for instruments that do not have much dynamic, such as the harpsicord, so when you hear Bach played on the piano, Bach most likely never heard that in his lifetime. People might see that as not historically accurate to use the sustain pedal, it means certain frequencies will hang in the air and impact the harmony of the piece overall, this is the level of detail this music requires one to think about.
Of course, there is no pure Bach. Bach was only revered by other musicians in his time, not so widely known across the world, and was quickly forgotten about when he died, until Mendelssohn discovered and presented the St Matthew’s Passion in the 19th century, so 100 years later. There is no access to a Bach not sculptured and reformed by the way his work lives within a web of forces that feedback and feedforward. It’s like how sound doesn’t really exist, or exists within this feedback loop where an output produces vibrations that cause disturbances in air pressure that meet the transductive structure of the ear, converting it into neuroelectrical signals that are interpreted in our mind as much by our physics as by our ideas we have in our heads. You spoke about this similarly in your book Affects & Dreams, but there is no sound out there unheard, it is always all these things at once.
I could also talk about In a Landscape by John Cage, it is such an incredible piano piece but it’s also a noise piece.
PS:
Actually, Polymnia played this piece to me yesterday. Imagine that.
FW:
I’m so obsessed with it! It’s the best! This piece is played with the sustain pedal held down for the whole thing. I relate this piece to Bach because I perceive Bach as having some relationship with noise, in some way, and it’s from around this position that I could argue that Bach would play a Moog, he most likely would have made an incredible electronic musician.
Maybe I could summarise it as the following: if we take Nietzsche’s idea of standpoint and pluralism, where he says that philosophy is written from your personal will to power, from directly where you are; it always has an agenda. His first chapter of Beyond Good and Evil is an example of this, where he rips off scathing polemics about Plato, Spinoza and Kant, saying that they were all too stupid in thinking they were saying real facts about the world, that their work was pure and reached toward objectivity. Yet, even though I get that Spinoza’s metaphysics is pre-Kantian dogmatism, I keep really relating to it. It really describes the metaphysical behaviour of immanentism, and I see all these parallels from learning about para-ontology, Afro-American ontology, gender non-conformity, what you might describe as in the negative or “non”... A parallelism of body and mind, rather than the competitive opposition between the two aspects of the Cartesian model. An absolute affirmation of existence, there is no virtue or negation. Some people, I suppose religious people mainly, think this is evil, but this has brought me closer to experience an unconditional relationship with love, or what we could call God. We definitely need to avoid the void, as if there aren’t bodies, localities and entanglements involved in what’s going on, feedback loops I guess I call it sometimes, and I like to use these crude criticisms of theatre dance performances: imagine that the scene cuts to black, and the lights come up and all of a sudden there is this empty theatre space where nothing has ever existed before and nothing exists past it—it’s dishonest. Yet, I don’t think this applies to Bach, not when we understand his materialism.
PS:
Maybe the way more traditional interpretations of Bach through history have emphasised the idealism and mathematics of Bach, effectively “erasing Bach’s body”, either in the sense of diminishing the importance of how Bach wanted music to feel to people (rhythm, texture) or in the sense of diminishing the importance of how Bach’s performances came from his body, through his body, how we moved and orchestrated his mobility in order to produce the right textures, rhythms and sensational intensities. Moving towards a musical materialism has definitely been a major part of my work in the last years, especially since the essay
“On Bodies”, and the work that has influenced me the most in this regard is Thomas Nail’s trilogy on Lucretius—and it is ironic that you just described God as Love—which he interprets as a metaphysical work that imagines Venus as a reflexive, Spinozist Deity. What Nail describes in these works is a materialist metaphysics of desire, a philosophy that follows Lucretius and Marx in arguing that matter is not in motion, but is motion.
In that essay, all that time ago, I had described a category of the arts as “negative” because of the way they negate or contradict a positivist hegemony, it’s just a simple inversion of the western tendency to assert the masculine and the mind in the positive, and the feminine and the body in the negative. With that in mind, a “materialist” music (if the positive would be immaterial or ideal) could therefore work against this dualism, because it forces the listener to “be a body”: we know the music is really working when it moves the body, through dancing, for example. More recently I wanted to go back to the idea of the muses, and what constitutes a musical (as in of the muses) art form. In terms of what is the museness of music, it could be this moment of aligning the mind and body, activating the two, stirring all the waters.
FW:
That’s what guides me in my approach to performance making today, because, say, dance in Australia can often lack intensity, and I feel that the only thing art calls for now is an approach to intensity, and approach to a limit: what are you doing this for? Just to express your little thoughts and feelings? In dance music or experimental electronic music, you can just get right there. It’s easy. In performance, I am adamant to draw out starkly the violence of the performance situation, especially as a trans body on Stage. Like, second-wave feminist vibes, letting the audience know they are violating me as a performer by paying to watch me physically exhaust myself. I feel like this needs to be drawn out and confronted as much as possible right now, I and my peers want to attack performance-making with a sense of desperation, we are wanting to find what is the edge of performance-making right now, in this time and space, and what is happening over this edge. It’s wildly amazing that in the last couple years in Melbourne all of a sudden there’s like this little group of queer radical performance makers I’ve found myself around, I never had this before, it feels like it could be a movement, we are all very excited to see where this is going to take us this year!
PS:
How are you finding your experience of Electronic music here in Europe, particularly here in Berlin?
FW:
Honestly, as someone coming from a different context, I would like to know more about what it is that gets people so into this European sound, say the sound of Berghain where I was last week. I suppose the sound of that system really is nourishing, and there is a sense of surrendering yourself to the experience for as long as it goes on for, and it’s all part of how you can be in Berghain for 10 hours and feeling like you’ve just arrived an hour ago. It’s because everyone is getting lost in that de-subjectivised and timeless experience. When the sound system sounds that good, you only need a kick to achieve that. It’s no surprise why people always use words like Church, Temple, Ceremony, Ritual; it’s always these words, so it brings us back to religion.
PS:
It’s an inversion of the church experience you described earlier, perhaps, where instead of the music being secondary or a sort of frivolous, irrelevant aspect that is quite beside the point, in this contemporary electronic dance music culture, the churches have almost no other point besides the direct experience of the nourishing music and collective transformative experience. You asked me about this in another conversation, when I mentioned this in the context of Adorno. A collective transformative experience is an act of world-building, where, through ritual, we transform our experience of ourselves, the world, or the universe in such a way that we might stumble upon new interpretations, new ideas, new assemblages and so on. Yet, he also said that this has little to do with luck, and that this ritualism has to be figured out, and the knowledge of these rituals has to be passed down. It’s quite opposite to the speaker in the Church you attended who said that the musical aspect of the ceremony is the part that could be dropped, or is not the point. For me, the point is that music can change how you perceive and experience yourself as a body, through this Body-without-Organs idea that we can mutually perform. Somehow music is an antidote to individualism and the symptoms of hyper-individualism.
FW:
Individualism has been on my mind a lot because of this **gesturing to the motor and vocal tics she was experiencing during this time of her life**, this new behemoth of diagnostic criteria I have to deal with. The criteria itself only occurs at the point in which it interrupts hegemonic neurotypicality, meaning, the thing we’re all gaslit into thinking is normal by school and whatever. It doesn’t really feel like anything is wrong with me, they actually feel kind of normal, like I’ve dealt with having an over-active, paranoid, weird brain my whole life. They are only disturbing because they disturb others, because they can be so hard to understand for people. And this is where we get this diagnosis, “neurological tic disorder”, as if these tics can only be understood as some kind of isolated problem detached from the experiences of my life and who I am as a person. It’s sad that most people are convinced by this, as someone who’s lived a queer trans, druggy, muso, artist life, I simply can see right through that.
PS:
I can’t help but think about the research that draws parallels between hearing loss and “neurological disorders” such as Dementia. The ear is deeply connected to our social life—based on Derrida and Nietzsche’s accusation that Kant “bypassed the ear”, I wrote that chapter of Affects & Dreams about the ear as the negative organ, a gateway between the body as social and the body as material. I think we can wrap up the interview with this, with a head full of images of a ritual ceremony in Berghain where Bach furiously delivers the most killer, hegemony destroying, four-voice Moog solo to a backdrop of an 8-armed Jeff Mills, equipped with four 808s, restructuring the symbolic tectonic plates of reality through advanced underground techniques that recode our minds, dissolving the Cartesian dualisms. You know. The good stuff.
Reference List & Mentioned Works
More brilliant than the Sun by Kodwo Eshun
The Ethics by Spinoza
Tympan Essay by Jacques Derrida
Beyond Good & Evil by Nietzsche
Lucretius Vol I-III by Thomas Nail
On Bodies by Palais Sinclaire
Affects & Dreams by niko mas
Bach - St Matthew’s Passion (Mendelssohn Bartholdy)
John Cage - In a Landscape