Girls Against God

I connect myself and the whole classroom to it. When I get told off and am given a written warning, the South reclaims ownership over language, the uncontrolled portal.
But that moment I say fucking hell, it isn’t just the words but also the voice that Southern piety fears. The voice is uncontrollable. You can’t even close your ears. Even though it’s the word, hell, the name, that’s supposed to conjure the devil into the material world, it’s really the voice that calls and lures him. It’s the voice that materialises and reproduces. It’s the voice that acts, that shapes, that performs and expresses. It’s the voice that makes the language specific, so that a word is no longer just a word, but an exact moment. Like music, Southern witchcraft is more powerful than both God and Jesus combined.
So, I was too young to be part of black metal, and Venke and Terese weren’t in on it, either. Maybe you missed it, too. But now we’re a band, and the band has to play gigs. This gig has already started; we’re on our way; this time what’s oozing down and out onto the streets is us, through the parks and the squares. The audience has no idea we’re performing, but you’ll all hear it if you plug your ears and listen to your brain buzzing away. It’s still not very distinct, but it’s as though the brain sound has an additional echo. A slow feed is building in there, Scream backward, corpse paint in your ear.
We glide through town alongside the dragging drone of the trams, creaking and flowing onward like slow Viking ships, disappearing down Oslo’s slippery throat. No one can see us: we’ve smeared hands and face with black henbane, rosemary and boiled plums, and now we blend into the shadows with the spirits and the 4G network.
Dusk falls while the tram slinks towards central Oslo. In the carriage, small patches begin to darken on empty seats, like grey dew; the stains grow steadily darker, as if daylight disappears faster there than the other spots, as if the streetlights don’t work on them. It’s us. The other, ordinary people don’t see us; they just know that the seats we’re sitting on are taken. We’re the only ones who are able to make each other out, gradually, each other’s shadows.
Two shadows recognise each other and high five. Random passers-by give a start; they hear the sound but don’t see the hands.
As we get off the tram the trash-stench is under our noses, and under our feet, like glassy ideological ice. Inside the gate to the little townhouse flat where we’re headed, the roots hiss under the lawn. We hear them, and we hear a faint rumble from the sound system inside the club: the sound of black. The windows are boarded up and painted shut, and the music emerges from deep in the middle of the building, frequencies oozing from every crack, a blurred unyielding mass, as if dough were rising in there.
Inside, the gig has already started; just like outside, it has always been under way. I hum along to the frequencies leaking out of the building into the backyard as we draw closer to the venue, through door after door, down hallways and into rooms. My voice changes as the sound gets louder and fills my ears more and more, changes to balance mouth and ears, impression and expression. After so much childhood biblical sick, my mouth is empty and dry, so much more room for and?
Now we’re in the room where the gig is happening; some are on stage and some down on the floor. Everyone is dancing around slowly. We join, become part of the mass, on the floor at first and then the floor is elevated: we’re on the stage. The music is slow, like the sound of a spinning ouroboros, a tail-eating drone that never started and never stops. We pick up instruments; perhaps we take them from someone else or swap a guitar for a synth, because it’s important that the music changes, that there aren’t too many lonely solos or riffs. We pick up microphones.
We try to summon a different kind of song, one that doesn’t have God in the mouth or in the content either. All noises from our bodies are helpless and awkward, but through microphones and the strained sound system we don’t sound real anyway. Our voices are coming from a synthetic body, from wires and metal threads and magnet capsules, but also from our bodies which have understood how veins can be wires that tear loose and rewire, bodies where the sound’s new connections have already happened.
At times there are intervals in the concert and you can hear voices chatting quietly and familiarly. No one chews gum. Sometimes we nudge one another. Our lips move. Occasionally we burst out laughing. Then the playing begins again and the dancing continues; the faces and the bodies get redder and the expressions more intimate.
Some are making love to their own hand, or to someone else’s hand. The clit is in the throats, in the hands, in the spit particles, on the lips and in the skin cells.
Who’s who, no one knows. Someone has switched off significance and blacked out the dichotomies. Intimacy doesn’t require hierarchies and formalities. Tonight we’re both acquaintances and strangers. We can stand next to each other and feel the heat from each other’s bodies; we can rub our hands against instruments or vocal chords against vocal chords; we can play, with or without instruments. Clothing fibres, skin, steel, plastic, rubber, bronze and tin from wires, instruments, and even us, all rubbing together, creating heat waves in the room. We dance on stage. We take each other’s hands for brief moments, then let go again to continue to shake the instruments. The microphones