Harry Burke on Tongue in the Mind – Review

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As a teenage indie fan, I spent countless hours on peer-to-peer file-sharing platforms like LimeWire and Kazaa, and later on blogs and MySpace pages, where I discovered bands like Velvet Underground, Boredoms and Gang Gang Dance. Each produced from art scenes, these acts not only marked my adolescence but, by showing me alternative ways of listening and living, aroused my curiosity for contemporary art.

In their New York debut at National Sawdust early last month, Tongue in the Mind forged a new branch in the art-rock lineage. The project follows almost a decade of collaborations between artist Juliana Huxtable and multi-instrumentalist Joe Heffernan, also known as Jealous Orgasm, who are joined by DJ and producer Via App on electronics. Huxtables’ art practice spans creative registers and reflects on themes such as furry fandom and the psychedelic edges of queer desire. An acclaimed DJ, her inventive sets defy genres and expectations, whether she’s playing Berghain or a bar’s basement. Tongue in the Mind synthesizes this research and testifies to the musical and artistic maturation of the trio.

The performance was the finale of Archive of Desire, a week-long ode to the Alexandrian poet Constantine P. Cavafy (18631933), programmed by the Onassis Foundation. Cavafy’s outspoken writing offers a window into gay life at the turn of the 20th century, in modernist verse peppered with sometimes sublime Augustan symbolism. Her voice is a fitting precursor to Huxtables’ own poetry, which is by turns comic and carnal, lucid and playful, and marked by bold precision.

TRAIN, the opening track, featured Heffernan on grand piano. Its waltzing riff fused classic timbre with show melody, as Huxtables spoke lyrics, filtered through delay and echo effects, culminating in the melodious cover of oh sweet one, you! A few songs later, Heffernan was shredding doom and unresolved chords over star guitar embossed with imitation diamonds. I didn’t really want to act like, feel like, act like, do all that, Huxtable crooned, dipping his shoulders to a driving stadium-sized beat. The virtuosity of the outfits invoked the formal expertise of forward-thinkers like Ben Patterson, the iconoclast co-founder of Fluxus, and the off-the-beaten-track flair of jazz experimenters Sonny and Linda Sharrock.

Pretty Canary, out this summer on Bill Kouligass, PAN, is a nearly seven-minute psych-rock gem. Half-rhyming lyrics (pretty canary, cherry color, in my blue garden) paint a picture of innocence lost in a surreal suburb of a Walmart and Buckcherry stripper pole and a fucked up tattoo. Heffernans drums breathless rap-tap in the first half of the songs, and crescendos in thumping kicks and thundering cymbals towards the end, as Huxtable chorus: He lost his shield and floated and screamed and now he don’t stop laughing!

Somehow the audience was captivated as Huxtable, backed by upbeat synths from Via Apps, moaned and gasped into the microphone, exploring the membrane between speech and sound. There were echoes of a young Morrisseys’ wit and range, meanwhile, in Piss Poor Taste, with its outrageous chorus: Laughing at the bad piss taste I showed by letting you fuck me the face. The tracks going from sparse, reverberating ballad to glamorous, leather-hell rock was gorgeous.

Huxtable has observed that art allows her to draw people into a more focused world than some of her other pursuits, such as nightlife or writing. Listening to Tongue in the Mind, it’s tempting to conclude that extravagant, fleeting, and emotive rock music offers even richer means for world-building. Yet this betrays the full scope of the band’s vision. The late feminist philosopher Mara Lugones has praised the value of travel between worlds, a practice she says is the foundation of loving perception and coalition. Tongue in the Mind gives sonic form to this notion, modeling the rare gift of innovation without assimilation.

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