Music

Parenthetical Girls Bleed for the End of Privilege

By Kelly McClure

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Over the last two years, Parenthetical Girls have been self-releasing their latest album, Privilege, as a series of extremely limited, mail order only, 12" EPs. Aside from the gorgeous songs featured on each album, the stand-out for this project is that each of them were numbered in the blood of one of the group's members. 

The experiment in fetishism, in the face of the ever-increasing death of the album as a creative format, comes to an end this month with the fifth and final installment, Privilege, pt. V: Portrait of a Reputation in which the whole project is turned into a box set. Learn more about the set HERE. 

Zac Pennington, front man for the band, describes the band's decision to bleeeeeeeeeeeed: 

"Affirming all haters, I think it's fair to say that object fetishism was as much at the heart of my desire to make music as any emotional impulse—I'm willing to wager that I'm not alone in this. It's why the idea of making a series of records explicitly designed as fetish pieces was so appealing. For someone with no desire to breed, the impulse to make THINGS sometimes feels like a gross patriarchal left over—to spread seed as far and as fruitfully as possible. Yuck. Anyway, that brings us to the blood thing. Depending upon your disposition, the idea of numbering records in blood specifically is usually interpreted as either a morbid or romantic gesture, but for us it was always foremost a way of elevating and rarefying the object. 

Since the beginning of this series, we've been (poorly) documenting the process of our blood draws as video certificates of authenticity. It's all fairly clinical—we're not masochists in the literal sense—and unless you're a haematophiliac (boom: wikipedia), they're probably pretty boring. But it's proof that it really happened—that the three red digits on your record came out of our filthy veins. Plus, I haven't talked to a lawyer or anything, but considering that 500 people all over the world have immediate access to our DNA, I'm pretty sure we can get away with almost crime and still have semi-plausible deniability." 
 
Here's the premiere of the fifth and final video in this series. Safe to say, this isn't for the squeamish. But really, don't be a pussy about it.
 

@WolfieVibes

By Kelly McClure 9 months ago
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