Zap Bain

Essays







Incubate: Spirituality, Songwriting and Anzaldua’s Rewriting Realities
(2024)


By writing a song or creating a piece of art, is the artist in full control of the outcome or they uncovering what is already there? If so, am I following a path to a song already written, either by another power/reality or my own unconscious? “[By] Paying deep attention to irrational events and messages from the environment, dreams, fantasies, and other imagin­ing processes are attempts to understand, to reach awareness” (Anzaldua, 34). The artist receives “messages” to interpret through their art practice and so she must make herself accessible to a parallel reality (inside and outside of herself) to understand what is beyond the explainable.




The Bio-mechanics of the Musical Matrix: An Eco-Erotic Critique
(2022)


This essay dissects the Musical Matrix’s bond to the queer feminist ontology of “The Erotic” to bring life to the mechanical complex systems of the mind, body and its environment. The Informatics of Domination threatens to control these mechanisms of the body and its environment through the promise of transcending the limits of nature by encoding it into information. This disregards the way these processes are not simply informational, as there is an experiential embodiment and active non-linear motion that makes these systems “alive”.



With Attitude: The 90’s Cyberfeminist Art Movement’s Influence on the Current Queer Berlin-New York City Electronic Dance Music Community
(2024)

The reuse of ‘straight’ and ‘masculine’ genre markers from 90s electronic music take on different meanings for masc-gays and femme-queers in the 21st century. There is a large masc-gay community that is served by a specific type of techno genre as it desires a harder hyper-masculine sound with no traces of femininity. In my interview Miss Parker pointed out a pattern they noticed in Berlin, “the harder the drugs people are using, the darker the music you’ll hear in a space.” The “hedonistic/individualist” muscle gay culture and its correlated dark ‘repetitive’ genre has dominated 2000s-2020s Berlin. This paper and the femme-queer coalition are pushing back against this culture through genre, because it comes from a dissociative hypermasculinity that is not reflective of a cyberfeminist re-imagining of the digital age.