Keep Out: Nuclear Semiotics, The Bruce Mansfield Plant, and Ethel Cain’s New EP
Tuesday night at approximately 9:14PM, I laid myself down in my dimly lit room, turned up the AC, and plugged into Ethel Cain’s recently released EP Perverts. Roughly 90 minutes of grinding, moans of pleasure and pain, murmuring, and droning later, I awoke from my catatonic state and was left feeling abandoned but relieved.
I overall enjoyed the EP, although many parts scared the shit out of me in the best way possible. I am looking forward to listening to the collection while writing or high out of my mind. I am in no way a music reviewer so I will not try to be one and explain the tonal shifts, sampling, and theory behind Hayden Anhedönia’s work. I simply would like to throw out a cool connection on this site to other Children of Cain.
Stating in an Instagram post, Perverts was essentially birthed due to the brutalist structures of the Bruce Mansfield Plant. Having shutdown in November of 2019, the coal power plant’s three units and chimneys still stand stretching up to the sky. These structures exist all across America, which is perhaps why many relate to Cain’s deep reverence towards them. I remember driving along I-5 on the way to San Francisco as a little girl, my mama telling me to hold my breath as we passed them to avoid “breathing in the chemicals that give you cancer.” These monoliths, pillars reaching out the earth and secreting gas which could kill according to my dear mama, implanted themselves into my conscious as something to be fearful of.
Listening to Perverts and having this implanted idea in my mind, I could not help but shake that Cain’s sounds could serve as a warning. And then my boyfriend, an architecture student and brutalist fan himself, brought up nuclear semiotics. Long-term nuclear waste warning messages. Nuclear semiotics is essentially the study of how exactly we can communicate with future generations about the dangers of nuclear waste and harmful sites through language, structures, and visualization. How is one supposed to prevent human interference when languages are bound to evolve and possibly even decay though? How can we predict the context of how these messages will be consumed? Should these emblems spark fear like the smoke which billowed out onto I-5? These symbolic, indexical, and iconic signifiers floated around my mind as Hayden teased her release. Complex and sometimes outright clues to her next project—warnings that something was indeed coming.
And that is what some of Perverts sounded like upon my initial listen. Maybe not a warning, but a message nonetheless, perhaps to those who cannot or will not understand language. A message embedded into sound with faint murmurs of something that once was droning in the background. A desperate plea urging us to understand and accept it. Let it in. It is happening to everyone.
Works Cited
Meier, Allison. “A Nuclear Warning Designed to Last 10,000 Years.” Hyperallergic, 21 July 2016, http://hyperallergic.com/312318/a-nuclear-warning-designed-to-last-10000-years/.
Pandora’s Box: How and Why to Communicate 10,000 Years into the Future. https://www.mat.ucsb.edu/~g.legrady/academic/courses/01sp200a/students/enricaLovaglio/pandora/Pandora.html.
