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Wednesday, August 8, 2012

Sex / Album Clouds of Porn: Erik Blood's New Album Celebrates Our Addiction to Dirty Pictures

Posted by Charles Mudede on Wed, Aug 8, 2012 at 11:31 AM

ERIK BLOOD Exactly the way you want to experience a lover.

ERIK BLOOD Exactly the way you want to experience a lover.

Touch Screens is about pornography. And you know pornography when you see it—fucking is the image's entire meaning. We live in an age that has relocated such images from magazine racks and movie theaters to laptop screens and screens that are sensitive to our very touch. At this point, I have no choice but to recall something philosopher Graham Harman stated in a lecture I downloaded from the web: "Everything is an image until contact is made." Meaning, the lips of a person you want to kiss are only an image until the moment you have made contact. At that final moment, everything changes: The image becomes real; it has texture and a taste. Before contact, the image in reality has the same status as the image on a computer screen.

But neuroscience has shown that images, be they real or not, are always very real to us. Watching, according to those who study mirror neurons in our brains, is also doing. Watching someone fuck is also fucking someone. Touch Screens, however, never looks at porn directly. Its main concern is the moods and passions generated by the pornographic image.

I have listened to Touch Screens a hundred times. I know the record inside and out. I love it when an album seduces me so completely. The utter weakness of my lines of defense against the force of Touch Screens' 12 tightly packed tracks is a source of continuous pleasure for me. Something that approximates Barthian jouissance is felt when one surrenders to the erotic sounds and the vaporous mind of Touch Screens' maker, Erik Blood. Blood is a local musician/producer/sound engineer who has released two solo albums (one of which is a soundtrack for the Brazilian film Center of Gravity) and worked with Shabazz Palaces, THEESatisfaction, and the Moondoggies.