cut. Again.

There’s something terrifying in it, because it gets loud and when it does it’s angry, but it’s that terror that makes it beautiful. That anger conjures a frantic circle at the front of a stage. My body can no longer enter it, though it knows how it feels. My body holds the memory of that circle, of every circle I can’t put myself in anymore. It remembers so many things, even those my brain doesn’t. My body can’t take the hits, but it has taken them before. I know how it feels to be angry, and so I know how it feels to be beautiful.

You Made Me/Skin on Linen is a record from Vancouver punk rock band called PISS. It’s loud, and angry, and beautiful. It’s built of pieces of things, speeches, and ideas and poetry, just as much as it is a collection of songs. The cover, a patchwork quilt, reflects this. The various pieces gathered to make the world. It’s not an easy record, it’s not a record that I can listen to in the morning when it’s dark and when I’m alone and on the street with my dog, when I listen to a lot of records. I’ve been afraid on streets before. I’ve been attacked on streets before. I can’t listen to this album on the street when I’m alone, not when it’s dark and not when I know I should be afraid. I’m not always afraid. I am always a little angry.

I listened to this record for the first time when I was alone, in the dark, at my desk. Black coffee and an orange. Take my pills on time. Drink water. Headphones on. Volume low. The promo I got from the label syncs to my iTunes, but out of sequence. I listen to the first two tracks, “Andrea I” and “Andrea II”, which are not the first two tracks but they are in this strange order. They’re samples of Andrea Dworkin talking about women’s bodies, how they’re perceived, how they’re used. She says she favours violence, because the law isn’t working to save women who have been attacked. Retribution is all we have.

Dworkin, in this new sequence, is my lead-in to “blocking a scene you can’t remember.” Its chords are strummed slow and careful. They ease into the song. PISS vocalist Taylor Zantingh starts talking. Her voice is calm at first, but quickly becomes rushed, then frantic. Her voice shakes. She’s talking through a scene. Interior. A girl’s bedroom. Nightime. She says cut. I can do better. Again. The scene starts over. The guitar is the same, keeping her there, calm. Steady. She starts again. Her voice shakes as more details come into focus. It’s harder though. It’s not easy. The details become vivid. Technicolour. The guitar is the same. The drums are steady. Cut. Again. Her voice is the instrument. The guitars and the drums are the same. But her voice becomes louder. Angrier. Violent. By the time she says does your wife know she is yelling. As she gets angrier, the music follows. As if she is a conductor now. Her voice is the baton dictating pitch and tempo. At the end, it’s a symphony of noise, crashing cymbals and churning guitars. It swirls around her as she screams I know.

It’s tender, and it’s only loud because it’s tender and because when you are tender and you are hurt the reaction is loud. Touching a wound elicits a yell, or a howl even. It’s reductive to say that it’s loud or that it’s noise. It’s pieces of a lifetime held together. The noise is a quilt, ready to be stitched and collected to a network of shared stories. It’s a punk rock record, it’s a noise record, it’s a collection of poetry and children’s voices. It’s memories. It’s emotional, and dense, and urgent.

The news of the ongoing rape case at Cornell University spirals out of control in headlines. Powerful men are accused of rape and sexual violence again, and again, and again. There are no consequences for any of them. Men try to doxx the women who levy accusations, and wonder why they want to remain anonymous to the public. Cut. Again.

This is not an easy record, it won’t be for everyone. It’s what makes it so beautiful. The anger, the necessary violence. Songs that have gathered beneath a swirling web of trauma, and ask what stories the disparate pieces of it tell. It’s asking how big these traumas get, what they mean, and what they teach. What does this web hold? How wide does it reach? Are these webs or are they tendrils maybe, and are those themselves roots that dig deep into the soil of our bodies. These will grow and coil out as bones, and they will be gathered beneath the skin, and bleed when cut or trimmed away. They can move and shake and rise into the air, even when they are bound by so many painful memories, and this is what makes it such a profoundly beautiful and cathartic release.

It’s not meant to be entertainment, though the songs are powerful and dynamic. It sounds at times like Chainsaw Records era Sleater-Kinney. It sounds like zines cut and pasted and hastily xeroxed. We might call it riot grrl, although sometimes that feels like people not wanting to admit that women make punk rock, or noise, or thrash, or whatever loosely defined genre you would like to attach to a thing. It’s all of these ideas. It’s patchwork. It’s meant to be like this. Textured. It’s meant to make you stop and think and feel.

What if we screamed about systemic violence, about the expectations and desires placed upon gender, and how they should behave. How they’re met with retribution. What if we confronted how we are all hurt by these systems. This is a record that feels like home, like a mirror, because it feels real, and because there are far too many of us who can see our reflection in these words.

On “I wanted To Be a Singer”, she sings I've been trying to make my pain mean something well before she says I wanted to write romance novels, now, I need perfect control over my victim narrative. She closes by screaming I learned some people only listen when you're screaming, but I wanted to be a singer.

Maybe what it is then is something simple. It’s a record for those whose skin has known the touch of hands it did not invite.

You can purchase this record at Bandcamp, or through Sub Pop. On their website, they say this:

as part of our album rollout, we’re partnering with autonomous spaces, anarchist info shops, lending libraries, and collectively-run, radical, or feminist record/bookstores in north america to distribute free records, cds, and tapes :~) for the next two months (sept 2 - oct 30) you can purchase an additional copy of you made me / skin on linen to be donated to one of these spaces! here’s how you can donate a copy: go to sub pop’s webstore to preorder our record from the dropdown menu, you’ll see an option to “donate a copy” from there, you can donate a copy of the album on its own, or you'll have the option to add a donation copy to your pre-order of the album. the donated copy will be sent to an organization in north america, which will then distribute it according to the unique needs of their community.