Podchaser Logo
Home
011 -"Go Away", by Sasha Opeiko

011 -"Go Away", by Sasha Opeiko

Released Sunday, 23rd May 2021
Good episode? Give it some love!
011 -"Go Away", by Sasha Opeiko

011 -"Go Away", by Sasha Opeiko

011 -"Go Away", by Sasha Opeiko

011 -"Go Away", by Sasha Opeiko

Sunday, 23rd May 2021
Good episode? Give it some love!
Rate Episode

Go Away,  a new work by Sasha Opeiko, co-creator/producer of the Futile Knocking of My Heart, mixes sampled sounds from a classic horror film  with the frantic clickings of the death watch beetle,   slicing and reframing the fictionalized speech and soundtrack used to construct a haunting – a haunting that is trapped in the very structure of a fictitiously diseased house. 
The Deathwatch beetle functions here as a symbolic agent of destruction and madness through repetitious beating that counterpoints the booming of the house as it claims its doomed guests.

________________________________________________________________________________________
The Haunted House in Contemporary Filmic and Literary Gothic Narratives of Trauma
Monica Michlin

Open Edition Journals

 https://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/5933
Accessed Sunday, May 23, 2021

 The haunted house as “embodiment” of the Unheimlich

 Freud’s definition of the uncanny, because it is the negation of the word for “home” (unheimlich), in itself inscribes the home as site and/or source of terror”. …

(As literary critic Harold Bloom points out) : “Freud himself pointed out that this ‘unhomely’ might as well be called ‘the homely’ (…) ‘for this uncanny is in reality nothing new or foreign but something familiar in the mind that has been estranged only by the process of repression.’” (Bloom in Danielewksi, 359) Recent works like Dani Cavallaro’s The Gothic Vision: Three Centuries of Horror, Terror and Fear (2002, 87) or Laura Mulvey’s Death 24 x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (2007, 96) likewise comment on Freud’s word for “uncanny” springing from “home.” As Anne Williams puts it in Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic (1995): “English has adopted the term ‘uncanny’ to speak of this familiarly ‘unfamiliar,’ the ‘un-family-like.’ In other words the nightmarish haunted house as Gothic setting puts into play the anxieties, tensions and imbalances inherent in family structures.” (Williams, 46)

 For Freud, the psyche, however else he may describe it, is centrally the haunted house of terror Gothic. Freud’s remarkable achievement is to have taken the props and passions of terror Gothic—hero-villain, heroine, terrible place, haunting—and to have relocated them inside the self….
 
 As Ruth Parkin-Gounelas argues in her 1999 article “Anachrony and Anatopia: Spectres of Marx, Derrida, and Gothic Fiction”: “since Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, the genre has remained fixated on anatopias, the repetition of other forms of this house, as well as of its contents: its villains, incestuous relationships, disembodied parts, and above all, the buried secrets of its origins” (131), this “fixation” is in keeping with what haunted houses signify and encode, particularly if it is incest and infanticide. What has changed, as Catherine Spooner expounds in Contemporary Gothic (2006), is that contemporary gothic narratives display post-Freudian awareness that the haunted house is the place where trauma occurred, but also, and subsequently, the projection of the traumatized and haunted psyche itself:

 Just as Edgar Allen Poe’s House of Usher ultimately crumbles into the tarn at its foot, so these psychological prisons characteristically disintegrate under repeated mental strain, terminating in madness and breakdown.

In Gothic texts, therefore, the past is a site of terror, of an injustice that must be resolved, an evil that must be exorcised. (Spooner, 18)
_________________________________________________________________

Monica Michlin, « The Haunted House in Contemporary Filmic and Literary&

Show More
Rate

From The Podcast

The Futile Knocking of My Heart

"The Futile Knocking of My Heart" is a collaborative sound project by Sasha Opeiko and Martin Stevens, with contributions from guest artists. Each episode is an experimental rumination of melancholy, loss or speculation. Each artist is asked to find their inspiration using the sampled and modified sounds of the Deathwatch Beetle (Xestobium rufovillosum), a creature of myth and destructive reality. The deathwatch beetle is a woodboring insect which occupies ancient buildings, tunneling into the structural timbers. The beetles batter their heads against their tunnel walls with a heart-like rhythm as a way of attracting mates, producing patterns of an echoing knock that resonates through the structure of the dwelling. The knocking is an individual signal to a potential mate, the louder the knocking of the male, the more response it receives from a female. The beetles pair up sonically and approach each other over relatively great distances.Archaic superstition holds that the deathwatch beetle is a harbinger of death, likened to a clicking of the reaper’s skeletal fingers, and, the deathwatch beetle is named for the vigil (watch) kept over the dying or dead. Medieval myth conjured omens in a demon-driven world, both peasants and kings dying in their beds with this dreadful sonic accompaniment. The superstition is no longer applicable, though the lore survives through the beetle’s eerie nomenclature. The romance of the insect has also waned as living with a contemporary infestation of these beetles makes domestic existence extremely disquieting. The proliferation of parasitic life forms is incrementally self-destructive in that the beetle devastates the host’s habitat or dwelling, as well as its own. Coexistence with the deathwatch beetle can be likened to an uncanny 24-hour immersive inhuman sound installation designed and carried out by parasites.The response of someone subjected to a deathwatch beetle infestation is sensory, an embodiment of the uncanny, a psychological sensation of something familiar but estranged, a primal relation to the echoed stuttering heartbeat of the insects’ calling. ._______________________________________________________We are curating submissions for future episodes on an ongoing basis; please contact us to apply [email protected] All Podcast artist receive a free T! To cover publishing, we offer printed beetle logo t-shirts for purchase at - opeikostevens.bigcartel.com/ To access the live stream of a virtual deathwatch beetle infestation, "Structural Timbres: A Generative Infestation", programmed by Montreal artist Andrew Bradt - https://www.twitch.tv/andrew_bradt (There is also a recorded selection of this infestation as a podcast episode)._______________________________________________________Originally produced for and presented by Opeiko + Stevens at “Speculative Figures and Futures: Our Uncanny Postapocalypse (Part 1: Sights and Sounds)”, The 52nd Annual Convention of the Northeast Modern Language Association, on March 13, 2020.

Join Podchaser to...

  • Rate podcasts and episodes
  • Follow podcasts and creators
  • Create podcast and episode lists
  • & much more

Episode Tags

Do you host or manage this podcast?
Claim and edit this page to your liking.
,

Unlock more with Podchaser Pro

  • Audience Insights
  • Contact Information
  • Demographics
  • Charts
  • Sponsor History
  • and More!
Pro Features