Interview #140 — Marcus Whale
by Martyn Reyes
Marcus Whale is a musician and performer working on Gadigal land. His work deals with the haunted nature of desire through the camp theatricality of Christian liturgy and mythology.
His performance works, often in collaboration with Eugene Choi and Athena Thebus, have been presented by Next Wave, AsiaTopa, Liquid Architecture, Sydney Contemporary, Sugar Mountain and Underbelly Arts Festival. As a musician, he is a member of the duo Collarbones and trio BV. His second album, Lucifer, is forthcoming.
Marcus speaks to Martyn Reyes about what inspired his new album, desirability through the white gaze and the queerness of Lucifer.
Lucifer can either be interpreted as the devil, or in a more positive light, as the ‘morning star’ or ‘fallen from heaven’. Given the tone of your album, I’m assuming you refer to the former. Why do you draw on Lucifer as a source of inspiration?
It started with this artwork that Athena Thebus made, called Lilac Lucifer. It was this five-minute video that she asked me to do the score for, and it starred Ricardo Morales as Lucifer. Lucifer was this figure of the forsaken by god. It's this dramatic, beautiful video which is also funny. There's this section where there were all these crying virgin Marys superimposed on screen, while Lucifer picked petals off a rose until they were gone. There's this comical thing about the sadness of Lucifer. But I found it a really poetic way to reclaim evil from the moralistic structure of Catholicism, while taking the high drama from its mythological basis.
What I found super exciting was that it took existing structures of the images, and then flipped and subverted them, often seen in the tradition of queer performance. I think Lucifer represents the ultimate evil. There's something really excessive about taking the ultimate evil and trying to play with it.
Religious themes are explored consistently throughout your practice. Can you elaborate on why?
I wasn’t brought up religious, except my mum would sometimes take us to a Buddist temple and lead meditations. But when I was ten, I joined St Mary's Choir at St Mary's Cathedral. I instantly fell in love with the ritual of mass through singing. The epic grandeur, of not just the service and liturgy, but simply the building itself, really placed an indelible mark on me. I would be staring into this high window in the cathedral, as the sun shined through during the service, letting it burn into my retina. I thought of that as my way of communing with god.
I came to really believe in god for three years really intensely. It also collided with my sexual awakening. Because of the patriarchy the church has male choirs, so I was surrounded by boys my age and older. Somehow it was this weirdly queer environment. There was this weird utopia existing while the dogma said homosexuality is abominable. Right in the centre of this institution was this playground of fairies. I conflated them in my mind and so I think of the transcendent and the spiritual as being linked with my conception of the erotic.
When religion comes to my work, it's sometimes in order to represent the possibility of heightened states of being, really embodied ways of being, or ways of expanding beyond the mundane through the body and through representations of the body––which is a lot of what happens in the album.
After a while I realised it was bullshit, but I found it impressive how pure everything was and how that was interwoven with the deep belief in, for instance, the sacredness of objects or sacredness of rituals. Particularly, transubstantiation was something I found interesting. The idea that the wafer is literally the body of Christ. It's not representing Christ. It is Christ. I think stuff like that, to this day, is the strength of its ritualism.
Inland Sea expressed an ‘imaginary utopia’, dealing with sexuality and colonial dispossession in an Australian context. Tell us about what is being expressed in Lucifer.
When I started writing songs for the album they were all radically submissive. The early songs I wrote are all about giving yourself entirely to another power almost like possession, allowing yourself to be possessed in both senses of the word. It was about Lucifer as this ghost that floats through the world and his power was accessible by the giving of yourself. I thought of that as being an echo of giving of yourself to any spiritual force. I also thought of it as being super linked to queer sexuality––where you surrender your body to the moment, to the process and to the situation rather than to the sense of procreation.
Songs like ‘Work your Gaze’ are about what state I can find by giving myself entirely to someone else. It was also about devotion and having really intense crushes where all I want to do is be thought of and I would do anything. I want to be seen, I want to be recognised and consumed. I imposed the figure of Lucifer onto these desires, to be consumed almost in a magical way. Could I make a spell out of being a sub?
At some point I realised that I'm not a bottom exclusively. My personality is like way more vers but I found it really poetic––am I going too far?
No, please say whatever you’re comfortable with. I love an overshare.
What I am trying to say is that this story of the album has way more to do with giving yourself over and to a totality of devotion.
I’ve attempted to reclaim the figure of Lucifer as this bosom for everyone who was forsaken by god and it being an analogue for queerness as well. I was wanting to take this devotional energy away from something I was rejected by and place it into something which might grant me freedom to be myself. Freedom to be beyond myself, be made bigger, more powerful and a vessel for something that I would never imagine.
While a lot of the production is dark, ominous and heavy, I also found a sense of calm listening to your album due to your vocals being so arresting and angelic. In a tweet you said this album would be a ‘stressful listen’. Is that something you did intentionally?
It's definitely intentional. For a couple of years I was really into metal––around the time I was finishing Inland Sea. You can hear a little bit of it in there as well. There are heavier moments and I wanted to dive more intensely into that with Lucifer. I wrote this poem called ‘I Want To Be A Goth’. It's published in my book Wheeze, and that puts it plainly. I just wanted to be a goth. I wanted to get into horror. I wanted to do metal. It was me in some way reclaiming my teen years. I felt a bit ripped off that I was into all this gothic music but never into the fashion and I was just a little dweeb nerd and couldn't go all the way. So this is me returning to that a little bit.
Even the Collarbones tracks we were making at the time sound like Nine Inch Nails, so I think the tone of those earlier songs were trying to reach a heightened, almost psychedelic state of total darkness. I think of these sounds as being a way to depict the drama of what I was trying to experience by making music. I also wanted to replicate the feeling of being spooked. I think a lot of the stories I'm trying to tell in the album are to do with the early morning before sunrise.
For me there was this real synchronicity between Lucifer as the morning star and that time period as being a moment of anticipation for something. And allowing that to be this magical space where you could have some sort of portal to other places and other ways of being outside of the normal. I guess musically, it became represented in the type of sounds you hear in the album that are quite spooky.
I came to really believe in god for three years really intensely. It also collided with my sexual awakening.
That's definitely what I got from listening to the album. Especially with headphones in and home alone, I felt a sense of unease and spookiness after a couple of tracks.
It's worth saying that Lucifer is literally referring to the morning star. Venus appears at different times throughout the year. Either anticipating the sun or following the sun. Either the morning star or the evening star. And the Greeks thought that Venus was two different stars. That's why Lucifer is referred to specifically as the representation of Venus––this shining bright light that anticipates the sun. That's one of the main things that links it to queerness as an anticipatory state. This idea of queerness being this state that we never reach and something that isn't reachable. Because once you arrive, there's always a beyond.
Desirability and longing are heavily investigated within your music. In both queer culture and Western media, Asian men are notoriously known to be desexualised and considered undesirable. Does the desirability you associate with in your music have anything to do with this?
I don't think I have a problem exactly with being seen as desirable or not. I'm not sure how much of it is in this album. I've wanted my race to be matter of fact in the work this time but I'm always aware of this stuff. I'm probably more aware of this stuff in my life than I am in making art. But I think being othered makes it easier to understand.
In reference to Inland Sea, I was going with this submissive thing where I was trying to question gay desire as a means of male solidarity and glorifying men. I developed in some parts of the album this uplifted idea of the man, then questioned––wait, this man is a white man. That's in the context of what was ultimately internalised white supremacy in my desires. Particularly as a teenager. If I had a type it was a blonde blue eyed twink, which I have to take some responsibility for. I was raised by a white father and a chinese mother and I always tended towards my dad culturally.
I wanted to spend my twenties unpicking all those patterns that were ultimately replicating the dominant beauty standards that we were taught to follow and taught to lean towards. As someone who can probably pass as white, I think that it's important for me to stake my claim to being outside whiteness and also checking my desires outside of whiteness, because there's a kind of betrayal that went on throughout my upbringing. A collaboration between me and the world.
How does your experience as a QPOC inform your practice/ music?
I think we're so often called upon to comment on, respond to or wield our identities in our work. People have spoken about this a lot but we always have to remember these situations are very real and inform how we live––the ones that are imposed on us by dominant structures around race and sexuality. I think it’s important to not fall into the trap of performing for the white gaze and the white gays. At the same time, I do that all the time.
It's almost inevitable.
My point is that it involves a lot of negotiation about how much you're willing to embody a particular way of being in order to be marketable. Because increasingly it pays to be like ‘I'm a queer asian of colour performer and you're going to love this because it's going to make you feel so much better about yourself because you're consuming work by a minoritised individual’. And so many of us are privileged as hell. You don't hear about that.
What's important is to on one hand, elevate those parts of yourself which you'd like to express and which are not covered by dominant modes of expression. But on the other hand to negotiate being fetishised and try not to fall into the trap of simply replicating, duplicating your fetishisation for attention. It's really hard. I would say I fail at this sometimes. But the failure sometimes ends up with you benefiting from it, so it's a bit of a quandary.
I think it’s important to not fall into the trap of performing for the white gaze and the white gays.
Being a member of the diaspora can be so nuanced and a lot of people exploit that. But for a lot of QPOC their work rests on their identity. It's a really strange world to navigate.
Yeah. Exploiting your story for clicks.
And sometimes I would, and I have. But that seems to be the only thing that would get me money.
I think on some layer I've enjoyed making work that doesn't have to do with my race, but I just am my race? That's kind of nice and not everyone has that story. But I'm still undergoing this long ongoing process where I'm discovering more about my mother's family and because I have assimilated so hard as a kid, there's a lot I’ve lost.
You put out your first Collarbones album in 2011. As you draw closer to a decade in the Aus music industry, do you think things are looking brighter for POC, or is there still a long way to go?
I saw this tweet the other day from Katie Day that said: ‘remember Interpol?’ followed by this tweet with promo pics of various popular bands from the 2000s. And they were all these incredibly poorly styled white men with beards and I was clicking through the images thinking, thank fuck I don’t care about any of this anymore. 2010 was boring as fuck. Anything is better than the indie music scene from 2010.
I think things are better now for sure. There's way more people who look like you and me, who are doing well and also aren't siloed into some identity hole. I'm really excited for what my friend Mohini is going to put out soon from Habits.
You’re technically trained in composing and have a lot of experience with classical forms of music. In understanding music theory so well, how theoretical is your music making process?
I don't write anything, I don't score anything. So a lot of the skills that I’ve learnt from doing a lot of classical training, I don't really use anymore. A year or two into university I also started to reject any conventional notation, almost as a way to unshackle myself from it. At the same time, I learnt I have a bunch of skills that have come from having the privilege to get this kind of training and they are deep within me. Even though I make music more intuitively now, those instincts have come partly from the way I understand music through a western classical music lens.
It seems like you’re quite uncompromising and self-assured in the art you create. Is that something that comes natural to you?
I would always choose to be more strong and bold in the choices that I make, than nuanced or subtle. I live for drama in the work that I make. I need it to be spectacular and maybe that's to my detriment but I think that I just want it to be strong. I want people to have a response. I want people to feel like they've seen something. Ideally I want people to feel like they've been changed in some way. I believe that art can be transformative. That's the ideal for me. I want it to be an act rather than a commentary. At the same time, I make a lot of my music with the text in mind or the context in mind. So it isn't just meant to be this sensual spectacle. There's always something else going on, but my primary thing is that it needs to be sensually powerful through how theatrical it is.
That definitely translates in your live performance. The first time I saw you perform you had two guys with drums and I don't see many local gigs incorporating things like that.
I want to be different. I wanted to stand out to the point where for the first three or four years I was playing live under that name, I wouldn't play any gigs without the drummers almost without exception because it needed to have the power the drummers gave it. It needed to have the shock of seeing something unusual and something that has a lot of impact. I now have moved on to trying to do that in other ways.
When you're watching a gig, really you should be immersed in it in the same way you'd be immersed watching a movie, play or dance. It shouldn't just wash over. I get frustrated when I'm at gigs and people are just having a casual chatty time. When I'm watching a gig I'm usually at that place as well. I get annoyed when people talk to me. I try to make something where you can't look away. I want it to be irresistible and have an irresistible force. So that's the motivation behind doing things the way I do them.
Do you have any advice for emerging musicians, composers, producers, radio hosts, writers?
Oh my god. It's probably different advice for all of them. I'll be more general and say: don't compromise yourself because you want to be liked because who gives a shit about someone who resembles something else.
Who are you inspired by?
The first person who comes to mind is Ocean Vuong. When I read their work I feel like I'm on fire. The way that he wields language is more powerful than anything I've ever read. I psychically fall on my knees in despair every time I read one of his sentences and that's what I want people to feel. I find it deeply inspiring.
What are you reading?
I’m doing my masters right now in music composition so I've mostly been reading queer theory––I don't know if it’s obvious. There's this book called Queer Phenomonology by Sarah Ahmed which has has become quite central when I’m writing. I’m reading this unpublished manuscript by Angus McGrath called Blue Ballet. I'm also reading this comic called Hell Blazer that my friend Kane lent me.
How do you practice self-care?
By watching movies with my friends and moisturising my face.
What does being Asian-Australian mean to you?
Lately for me it's meant trying to constantly uncover new things about myself. It can be exciting but it's a mournful experience because you wonder what I've been doing for the last 29 years.
2010 was boring as fuck. Anything is better than the indie music scene from 2010.
Find out more
Interview by Martyn Reyes
Illustrations by Matt Chun