Sensualism is all about the prioritizing of one’s pleasures. It doesn’t just have to come in the form of a person’s touch or an orgasm. Oftentimes, sensualism comes in the form of a good lick of ice cream, the way the room is lit, the sound of music, that euphoric feeling after meditating for an hour or two, anything that is meant to both please and heighten all senses existing or remaining. The best way to describe Baltimore’s Venus Kii Thomas is that xe is, indeed, a sensualist.
Venus has been open and inviting with xyr pleasures. Whether it be enjoying a nice blunt, taking sexy photos, or making music, Venus prioritizes above all the ability just to enjoy being alive and free in nature. You can attribute this to being open about being on the spectrum—a neurological disorder focusing on the overall heightening or slight dulling of one’s five senses. Venus explores all this about xemselves with a nomadic and enthusiastic spirit and ear, which showed massively throughout xyr discography. In the past, Venus dipped into minimalist avant-garde jazz with We Are the Vanguard and even expanded xyr jazz palate while working on the expansive opera Bitch’s Gospel. As of recently, though, Venus has switched from the piano to the modular synth and mosied over from spiritual avant-garde to spiritual ambient/electronica. Xyr’s entry into the synth world began with the skyward AMALGAM and has morphed into something more progressive and conceptual in xyr latest album confrontationally titled faggot.
Xe appears on the cover holding xemselves, round, prominent breasts, belly chains, and a crystal necklace in the wind. Xyr eyes gently closed amongst a blue sky and brittle, leafless trees. Likely in Venus’ view, the sensations that run through one’s body listening to certain music aren’t very different from the ghostly percolations that run through your body when feeling sexually aroused. Sounds morph, change, and sometimes peak within the compositions to mimic suspense and splendor. For example, after the gentle morphing of sound that opens the overture of “faggot introduce,” suddenly you are catapulted with the dizzying rush of synth blips on “faggot 1.” After the introduction swirls, at the two-minute mark the bubbling synths start to boil over and explode like the strong smell of bathroom potpourri. It’s an audio abstract painting of what it is like to have overwhelming sensations.
After the goosebumps, comes that neurological flick of the switch on “faggot 2.” The sound of crackling electricity bounces back and forth over waves of compounding and confounding chords. But “faggot 3” is a track where you are offered a moment of reprieve with sparkling pads and synths that swirl and even occasionally bend in ways that lend a sense of uncertainty and anxiety. If taking the album’s Bandcamp bio description of “moving towards my body’s destiny” into consideration, the song may be a mere tunnel into the flowery synth composition of “faggot 4.” Also, just so you know, your headphones are not messed up.
Surely, you don’t need the entire concept to enjoy the record for what it is: a new-age album that doesn’t mind dipping into soft noise and retrosynth territory, as reductive as using genre descriptions may be to the album’s overall concept. For all one knows, “faggot 5” can merely be the sound of a creeping haunted scene or a distorted photograph of something grandiose and romantic. “faggot 8” could sound like a starry-eyed ambient piece reminiscent of Brian Eno’s freeform perfume-inspired opus, Neroli. But it is all connected as a meditation towards one’s body, sensualism, and, to Venus themselves, “faggotry.” After all, “faggot 9” builds cycling stems on top of larger dissonant synth brass stabs to function as a test of one’s senses by the way such jumping sounds can possibly spook and overwhelm.
Putting this album in a genre box is not only hard to do as it runs the gamut between library music, soft noise, and ambient synth music a la Lisa Bella Donna or Hélène Vogelsinger, but doing that would miss the entire point of the album. It’s an audio meditation on both freedom and one’s bodily senses. Oftentimes, we can take for granted the ability to sit down and truly feel ourselves and how we are when surrounded by the world around us. Surely those not quite initiated into musical spiritualism would think the synopsis and the description feel imposed upon them. However, all it takes to truly understand is to focus on this record and give it plenty of patience. Dive into the album, and allow it to unfold like a flower on you. Once it does, faggot may just activate the soft, sensual side of yourself you never got in touch with before.
