Transsexual Heart Breakers
A review of Macronympha's 'Transsexual...Part 2'
“They go and they cut it like a banana split. And shove it in!”
“Really!”
“Uh-huh.”
“So the dick is, actually, still there?”
“It’s inside, pushed inside. But they cut it [unintelligible] to make it into a vagina.”
Macronympha released the first Transsexual, a 7" split with UK jizz noise legends Smell & Quim, in 1995. Each artist took a lead on one track while the other provided backup, switching off on either side. Accompanying the record was a 24-page booklet, a collage of fetish photography and pornography.
28 years later they released Transsexual…Part 2, (no space), an unexpected but welcome follow-up. It’s different in one notable way. Where the original opens with a playfully lurid interview with a trans woman about her bottom surgery experience, Part 2 is strictly electronic attack, replacing its predecessor's stabbing mid-range bursts and vocal aerobics with more of the classic low-end-meets-squealing feedback aggression familiar to those who have heard their excellent (best?) record, Intensive Care.
The material on Part 2 could perhaps be considered archival. It was initially recorded the same year as both Intensive Care and their split with Grunt. The recordings themselves are, surprising to no one, noise of the highest caliber, twin bursts of violence that are at once emblematic of late 90s harshness and refreshingly undigital. It’s not clear which of Macronympha’s rotating cast of perverts performed on this particular release, but much of the material from this year appears to feature only Joseph Roemer and Tim Oliveira – down from the quintet that made up 1995’s also excellent (also best?) album Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Exciting for noise fans, true. But there was an obvious question, though one I decided I didn’t care to answer until I actually heard the material: how might such a bold display of identity fetishism play in 2023? How does it read to a trans woman, even if that particular trans woman happens to be pretty fucking lenient when it comes to this kind of thing?
Answering it is predictably complicated and elliptical. What can be said is that Part 2 does not have the hang-ups of its big sister. The lack of explicit gestures toward the themes of the record in the sound itself allows the user to extrapolate whatever meaning they want from the other piece of this puzzle: its own accompanying full-color booklet.
Though exploitative on its face, this sizable collage of pornography, newspaper clippings, advertisements (personal and otherwise), and illustrations is an astonishing document taken as a whole. It also managed to provide a wealth of insight into the public perception of transsexuality, more specifically transfemininity, in the years surrounding my birth. Reading these newspaper articles alongside beautiful done-up girls playing with their cocks on sets that may as well be the Sears photo room after dark puts you square inside a time and place whose context we are at risk of forgetting.
These are snapshots of the trans experience beginning to be filtered and retrofitted to something consumable:
REAL Silicone Breasts
SEX CHANGE SURGERY: The Inside Story
Navajo teen took taunting in stride: Transgendered boy's mom discusses slaying
To be marketed to; to be exploited; to be killed. What a life!
Some might still question the motive for putting this material together after all these years. Isn’t this crass and exploitative? I mean, duh. But as a connoisseur of such depictions of trans women in art, I have come to believe that the true fetishist comes to a deep, if a bit slanted, understanding of the object of his desire. It cannot be an accident that this collage juxtaposes a newspaper clipping in which the mother of a trans child is interviewed about their murder1 against an ad for "THE BACK TO SCHOOL, UPSKIRT SEXPLOSION". These are the kinds of things you notice when you're looking long enough.
And as you thumb through all this detritus, the sound pummels you from behind, because that's what Macronympha has always done best, for better or worse. They stick your nose in it. The record's a 45, so the trance is broken after only a few minutes, like getting tossed aside when you didn’t even cum. But there's a lot of different ways to get fucked, and Transsexual…Part 2, in its way, explores a lot of them.
Is any of this a mea culpa for the cruder approach taken by its predecessor?2 Tempting to think that way, but I doubt it. This just had 28 years of additional time to gather context. And anyway, Macronympha were never in the business of apologizing for anything.
So maybe the motives don't matter. Transsexual…Part 2 is a timely and jarring experience almost by default. If there is a record this year that best approximates it conceptually it might, funny enough, be the gorgeous Arthur Russell archival release Picture of Bunny Rabbit, whose carefully curated presentation made for a new definitive statement in a legacy artist's catalog. And Transsexual…Part 2 is, if nothing else, one of the most resolutely Macronympha releases Macronympha had to offer.
This album was released by Fusty Cunt in April 2023. It has since sold out and is not available to stream. Sorry. Try to get a copy on Discogs here.
Fred Martinez, Jr., who identified as two-spirit, was bludgeoned to death by Shaun Murphy in the mountains of Colorado in 2001. Murphy was sentenced to 40 years for second degree murder, but is presently a free man. Fred Martinez, Jr.’s body had wounds around the wrists and large slashes to the abdomen at autopsy. Was Martinez bound at the wrists? Did the abdominal wounds come before or after the bludgeoning? Questions I stopped trying to answer for tonight.
This is possibly at least partially due to the influence of Smell & Quim who, though crudely brilliant and singular, were not necessarily known for their advanced gender politics.