Preservations of Silence in the Queer Archive

On a limited-edition vinyl recording, one can hear musician Drew Daniel of the group Matmos coming out to his parents via telephone. Daniel’s vulnerability is palpable from the trembling in his voice, though he gets right to the subject. Crucially however, we hear only Daniel’s side of the conversation. In the gaps when his parents are speaking, we hear no voices at all, allowing the ambient sound of Daniel’s room to come into play. When Daniel is not talking, there is a consistent sound which I take to be him fumbling with some object near the microphone — an index of his nervousness, which is then transferred to the listener. This brief, touching recording ends with a sudden change of subject. Daniel is beginning to explain why he has chosen this moment to come out; then, hearing something on the other end of the line that we cannot, he asks his parents, “What is that sound?” The track ends here, and the needle moves to the center of the record.