Swan Meat is performing for Paranormal Storytime presented by AQNB at London’s The Yard Theatre on February 16, and dropping the FLESHWORLD EP via Infinite Machine the following week on February 21, with new poems and a remix premiering on AQNB today. The Cologne-via-Washington D.C. producer has released her body horror inflected rave previously through the likes of PERMALNK and Bala Club, makes up one half of duo House of Suns with DJ Heroin, and is a resident on London’s Rinse FM.
For her upcoming EP Swan Meat has built on the “fleshy amalgam” of her visceral club music sound, molding it “into a monster both terrifying and lush”. Her new poems evoke the cyborg imaginary of organic and technological references that are scattered throughout FLESHWORLD, from which two singles ‘SUCKLING’ and ‘LITERALLY SEETHING’ have been released. In her remix of the former single premiering today titled ‘SUCKLING GROWN’, Swan Meat delivers a dystopian techno warehouse anthem, closing the loop between her written and musical practices by incorporating spoken word from her poems into the track’s closing textures.**
SUCKLING
The impulse response,
The echo is the subject
Swallow a vowel
Swallow appleseed quarternote
A piece of music is a coughdrop shattered on wood paneling
And barefoot —
The sharp toward softness
Incisor buries self in Laffy Taffy
Tongue in navel
Lagoon for pixies trailing fruit flies on humanhair leashes
with clever little eggsacs
& how they hover like clouds
Over coastline of flesh & lanugo
Crown of ash & molar
This heft of milk: crab’s canon whirling
My plenitude of greyest matter
My sweetest dumbest angel
The splayed butterfly of hunger
One frequency modulating nectar
The tusk I drive into the song is a needle
Darning minnows’ heart
The song is the stem of the lungs sprouting wings & fungi
Here I am wringing
my spleen again into rows & rows of keycaps
So greasy they might come
loose if only to laugh at me, at me
& flake rapidly as cotton candy
Or spliced MIDI
Beak of crow Bobbed dog’s tail
A voice inside a wasps’ nest calling
Song of crushed glass A kick drum inside-out
Is actually an ocarina
in a dungeon on Fleshworld
Where even the bats are DJs
But they’ve slept for years now. Don’t worry
LITERALLY SEETHING
A skiff for dust mites in the time domain
This broken nail
& on sweat ferried ashore
Oar a needle pricking
A whiff of sound then
A murder of whiteheads in the phasor
This kite of skin is spectral & hovers
moonlike & for my haters, clouds
& the becoming mallow
of tumours: with this knife
With this clamour of fog
& noise as my witness
I clog the pores of the earth
But for one mouth gaping,
wanting coin. One wafer purloined
means 5 minutes of gameplay
then with translucent shell
scurry on, little radian:
game over. For lust & limbo, coefficients
and gluttony, UFOs
Harmonics for greed, sin of not being
blind. My drive toward potential
sticks w/ the trouble
& kills numbers, yanking crows
from the sky and Styx
from the thick of “god’s” viscous drag.
MECHANICAL BULLGIRL
versus Trojan horse in octagon:
A yolk of tar,
My mechanical bull’s heart
Her coat a swath of noise
& hooves dancing morsecode
slumps of MIDI thru glass-pane
Or project file buttered in frost
One leg, then the other
For her hunger: a roil of diamonds in a blender
Hello deepest hole says the oil spill
where I shine her calves
Into raindrops, fundamentals
& cranes pull rocks from clusters
So many beaks chattering the animal me can’t take it
nor these fireflies peppering our kludge
giving us diseases
& then turning the switch on her back
like a loose tooth stopping ribbons of blood,
melted snakestongue; cherry punch; she dances
her always-creaking the grey milk of everything
EUGENIA MARIONETTE
We take it for granted that knuckles are breakbeats
Can you amputate a snare I asked Siri
& she burped which is fair — like wrenching a wad
of gum with a cudgel from the dark
annals of an eye socket
there’s things one must destroy completely:
Cantos, bitrates, muscles, girls
I know because I’m an atom, I make them
& watch my mildew puppets
dance on fawnlegs in the sun & when they’re hungry
a fleck of skin, here & there,
while the trees weep maple syrup in droves for no one.
Oh fuck it — are you happy yet, little kewpie?
I’ve told you all you need to know.
My dark horse Fourier rots among stones & mermaids
underneath a lake of milky zeroes & its my fault,
there was nothing left to pummel:
neither frequency nor spare rib. Might I a spider in his honour
weave a flag of retinae & drive it
into the flurry of the earth? A nervous system eternal,
relentless, inevitable, which is also a bag of soap
waiting to pop? Not yet.
Can you crucify a song? Yes.
DENTISTS TOYS COME OUT @ NIGHT
And so the hollowed out domes
of horseshoe crabs became my bedshoes
& traipsing the gums of earth as I did
my steps rung out like popcorn foley thru compressor:
oh but if I could pluck
the sound from the sand & then against
my cheek hold it like an iPhone or a baby cow.
But I am confined to sea, an urchin
& pump my arms always(forever?) through sourceless
dial tone pudding. A gutted fish stuffed
with couscous & gravel. A fuligin
cloak… This is what
it feels like to “be on drugs,” by the way.
This cavity is sinister!
It’s a seed in an empty coffin.
& as orgiastic laughing gas leaks
its perfume through left cheek’s womb
dentist’s toys come out to play with their bells
and fleas & bones & mirrors & problems
& shake their little duncecaps
Like gumdrops freckling thru snow in a stop
motion winter softly
I wear smeared sleigh bells as lipstick & kiss the sky forever
Swan Meat performs for Paranormal Storytime presented by AQNB at London’s The Yard Theatre on February 16, and is releasing the FLESHWORLD EP via Infinite Machine on February 21, 2020.
