Yosan Alemu, Comparative Literature, CC 2021

Alongside Sonata V by John Cage, I have chosen Yves Tumor’s music video for their song “Licking an Orchid.” Sonata V, due to its eerie and strange sound, has a sort of suspenseful nature to it. And in thinking of this suspense, I look to the work’s lack of a clear meter as perhaps a reason why it might be perceived as suspenseful—one is always anticipating the next note, sound, phrase. Similarly, Yves Tumor’s video conveys a sense of chaos and rupture with the music itself, albeit, this “chaos” at certain moments sounds and is visualized as a sort of controlled chaos. Particular frames in the video capture such feelings of frenzy, anger, intimacy, repulsion, etc. and these emotions are shown through a kind of see-saw effect, in that the artist’s experience extremes (i.e. anger, intimacy) all in mere seconds, so that the viewer does not really know what to expect in the next frame, or even in the next few seconds. When listening to Sonata V, I felt this see-saw effect, this controlled chaos, for it felt chaotic or disjunct, but at the same time it was also contained within its ( irregular) phrases that constituted the piece as a whole. Thus, despite these feelings of chaos or suspense, the piece itself is still organized, although its organization is rendered as disorganization.