A Symphony Between the Sheets
by guest columnist Christopher DeLaurenti
It’s the moment that always freezes my heart.
I’m at her place; the lights are low, and maybe we’re entangled on the couch, or perilously swaying next to a glass table. Soon we’re in the bedroom.
She smiles, nods to the other stereo–this one smothered with candles or books–and offers “Music?”
For a moment, I lose my butterflies and a dead weight drops into my guts.
What do I say? I say nothing.
We wouldn’t be this far if we didn’t appreciate each other’s taste in music and whatever else, but I like the stereo silent. Some want to hide their sex lives from children, neighbors, and roommates, but I prefer the challenge of sinking my teeth into the pillow instead of grunting behind the sussurating camouflage of some radio station.
Forget it, I say “sure” and pray that the music isn’t crap, or worse, inspires me with some sort of brilliant yet distracting insight that within a few minutes evaporates–along with our mood–into nothing.
As a musician, I find the standard choices of lust-inducing music ill-suited to sex. For me, a potentially epic erotic offering like The Rite of Spring conjures the image of giant spaceships careening into battle and molting their metal carapaces.
Slow, moody jazz from the ’50s and ’60s will pad the room with a pillowy intimacy, but what do you play when you need to go faster? Hard bop just doesn’t cut it.
Judging by the LP jackets from the ’70s, Bolero should be a sure-fire aphrodisiac; but it has the same effect on me as rock, pop, or uptempo jazz, whose beat seems better suited to robots than to lovers abed in rhythmic flux.
Deftly-made mix CDs or tapes might help, but I can’t touch the mastery of club DJs who can subtly elongate an ever-accelerating tempo for an hour or more.
So where is my lust-inducing music?
While I like music that uses the sounds of sex, such as Luc Ferrari’s Unheimlich Schoen or Hafler Trio’s Masturbatorium, my favorite erotic music lurks between the sheets.
Alongside the sweaty clasping and slithering contorted penetration, fucking can be quite musical, not only with the steady press of skin, but in the ebb and flow of bodies moving in concert, the swoosh and ruffle of sheets, and maybe that tell-tale creak of a bed rasping like a violin strung with springs.
Fucking transforms language too; meaning as much or more than any words, the embedded yelps, coos, sighs, and grunts restore speech to music’s embrace.
Best of all, the sounds, like the love you make, are yours.
NEXT: The heroism of America’s TV critics (or at least one of ’em).
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