Uninhibited escapism is a central facet of rave culture, be it the fabled fetish parties of Berlin’s burgeoning techno scene or the queer-inclusive club nights held in Orthodox Christian Tbilisi. But for Terre Thaemlitz, better known in the scene by her lionised deep house moniker DJ Sprinkles, electronic music was never about freedom. “I grew up in Springfield Missouri,” she explains, “where listening to electronic music got your ass kicked.” For a teenage Thaemlitz, residing in America’s Midwest, there was no tight-knit techno community to fall back on, and certainly no queer havens for trans youths like herself to seek refuge. “Even the idea of there being a country where Depeche Mode was actually played on the radio was like a utopian fantasy,” she tells me, “but with time I learned that, in Europe, Depeche Mode was just regular pop music, and most fans were standard, braindead fucks anyway. For me, that escapist model — escaping into a social context that housed one kind of music — was not part of my experience.”
Thaemlitz’s distinctly non-hedonistic introduction to electronic music underpins her intelligent and insightful approach to art — from Soulnessless, the disruptive 30-hour long piano solo (and world’s first full-length mp3 album), which explores exploitation and wage labour, to the self-professed “unenergetic” electronic explorations of DJ Sprinkles that delve “deep into the bowel of house”. “For me any communal experience was much less about dancing,” she explains, speaking of her residency at former NYC trans club, Sally’s II, “and more about how that experience related to an intergenerational trans scene. People were exchanging information on how to stay safe, how to protect each other, what transitional therapies were working or weren’t, how to get access to hormones…” she recalls, “the music was secondary.”
And music comes second in Thaemlitz’s own practice, too. Her resoundingly conceptual audio-visual-textual output is fuelled by a decidedly feminist, post-humanist, anti-spiritualist and responsibility-based perspective, constructing a unique discourse that transcends the typical musical sphere. Her 2017 album, Deproduction, for example, considers how LGBTQ+ conceptions of family and matrimony tend, overwhelmingly, to surrender to heteronormative and Western Humanist ideas of the nuclear home, as well as tackling the taboos surrounding the moral decision not to procreate. And then there’s the wealth of pithy critical essays that populate the website of her Comatonse imprint, traversing everything from trans issues to communism, which, thanks to her 18 years living in Japan, take into account a refreshingly non-Western school of thought. “I came to Japan with pre-formulated Western ideas,” Thaemlitz tells me — it’s difficult not to be captivated by her effortless eloquence and the way she speaks with absolutely no hint of pretension or superiority — “and certain things are totally different — like how the relationships between visibility and power function.”
The differences between LGBT attitudes in Japanese culture and the West have been glaring to Thaemlitz, who spent 11 years living in New York, before relocating to Kawasaki via Oakland, California, and they’ve undoubtedly shaped their respective queer underground scenes. “Japan doesn’t conform to the Pride-based Western LGBT model, which is about the reconciliation of identities,” Thaemlitz explains. “In the West we’re so preoccupied with the idea that we visually represent ourselves based on what our identities are. In Japan it’s very much more that you have a façade, and that façade sort of facilitates a social performance that doesn’t necessarily correlate to what your personal affectations are.” It’s something Thaemlitz attributes to an absence of visible sexuality in the Japanese club scene — a far cry from the out-and-proud, bondage-clad Berliners who flock to Berghain every Sunday. Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing. “Berlin has its own overinflated sense of safety,” the DJ asserts. “I’ve been harassed in Berlin when I’ve been walking in drag before, and I’ve known other trans people who have.”
As a self-identifying “non-essentialist, non-op MTFTMTF…”, who doesn’t see herself as conforming particularly to either gender (but definitely not “male” unless circumstance absolutely demands it), Thaemlitz has the ~privilege~ of a firm grasp on the situation, having experienced marginalisation in both West and non-Western societies. “In the US, there is this English lineage of individualism where people will feel empowered and entitled to express themselves at all times,” Thaemlitz explains. “So if they don’t like you, you’re a ‘faggot’ and you get spit on, shouted at, punched… whatever. In Japan, it’s the opposite. If they don’t like you the worst thing they can do is ice you out and totally ignore you. For me, that silence is golden — it means if someone really fucking hates me they’re going to leave me alone.” But Thaemlitz is quick to point out that even this take on it stems from this kind of aforementioned privilege, and that she has known Japanese trans people who said they would rather be spit on, if only to have their existence acknowledged, albeit in unsavoury circumstances. “I in no way romanticise the oppressiveness of that silence in Japan — it’s totally fucked — but contextually for me, I feel safer.”
It’s somewhat of a contradiction that most of Thaemlitz’s overseas gigs, then, take place at majority white, hetero parties — because those promoters are the ones who can afford the cost of a ticket from Japan. “As someone who has always had a continuing relationship to closets, I know that no matter how hetero a space appears, you don’t know what everyone is doing,” Thaemlitz explains. And she’s also upfront about her reasons for DJing — “I only perform out of economic necessity,” she admits, “and the contradictions that come out of that are part of the contradictions of employment.” She’s keen to flag the bourgeois perception that art is divorced from labour, and the misconceptions, or double standards, that this perpetuates in the creative industries. “People mistakenly believe that artists and musicians are free to choose where we perform, when and for whom, but this isn’t how the world works. Especially for a producer on my level — by which I mean a low level. You really don’t have choices in that weird, lofty sense and that seems like a real fantasy modelling of capitalism; it’s really unproductive to someone who is anti capitalist.”
That being said, though, Thaemlitz still operates on a moralist basis as much as possible, and is fervently opposed to what she calls “audio imperialism”, whereby DJs accept invitations to play in impoverished countries, accepting luxuries during their stay that are totally foreign to their inhabitants. This thoughtful, irrevocably decolonial and power sensitive approach is the fabric of what Thaemlitz does — characterising her entire body of work in a way that’s both refreshingly self-aware and deeply genuine. Though Thaemlitz rejects the idea that she’s any less of a sell-out than anyone else — “we’re sold out the minute we are born in a hospital,” she declares, “there is a commercial exchange around our births. It’s over” — her truly inspiring output begs to differ. It’s rare to come across an artist making such urgently important work with such potential to stimulate desperately-needed conversation, so when we do, it’s well worth shouting about.
You can catch DJ Sprinkles tomorrow, 21 July at Climate of Fear at Modular+, Berlin.