Erica Cheung: Hi Nina! To start us off, can you give us an overview of Bruxer—what is it, how does one use it, and what will one hear if they tune in? 

Nina Sarnelle: Bruxer is a sculptural device that transmits audio, but it works differently than your average Bluetooth speaker. Speakers produce sound waves that travel through the air, vibrating air particles that eventually reach your ears. As the sound waves vibrate your ear drums, your brain interprets this movement as sound. Alternatively, Bruxer uses a technique called bone conduction, in which a transducer (the moving part inside the speaker) is pressed up against your skull in order to vibrate your ear drum directly. With Bruxer, we tap into the skull through the teeth. To use Bruxer, you bite down on the gummy silicone transducer and cover your ears to block out competing sound. Only you will hear the audio track while making contact, other people around you won’t be able to hear it.

EC: Bruxer’s silicon mouthpiece elicits a strong reaction from me – I’m drawn to it, but it also makes me feel squirrely. Where did the idea for this kind of participatory playback device come from? Why ask people to listen in this embodied way—through bone conduction via the mouth!—as opposed to listening via a speaker or headphones? 

NS: Bone conduction is actually something my collaborator Scott Andrew & I talked about using years ago as part of a live music performance. We were working with these cheap bone conduction toothbrushes called Tooth Tunes that would play a Justin Bieber song or Hannah Montana song to entice children to brush their teeth. I always thought that was funny because the only way you can hear the song is if you bite down on the brush, which is exactly what you don’t want kids to do while brushing their teeth… But maybe that’s why these never really took off. After some tinkering, Scott & I were able to connect a toothbrush to a mixer to pipe live sound into the toothbrush. But getting 50 toothbrushes running reliably in a live situation so each audience member could have their own audio device in their mouth still felt like a giant challenge. Just think of all the cables! Eek. Before we could get much further in our tests, the $7 toothbrush deal we were relying on doubled in price and we just dropped the whole thing.

Nearly 10 years later, you can purchase bone conduction headphones that work quite well, and I decided to look back at this technology from my current perspective. For Bruxer, I used bone conduction transducers and a small circuit board audio player, with a bit of soldering help from friends (thank you Ian Charnas & Harvey Moon!). I experimented with a bunch of materials to make the mouthpiece and landed on this aesthetically, but also because I was able to use a food-grade silicone that’s safe to bite on. It reminds me of a giant wad of chewed gum or some kind of hyper-synthetic candy, but also of something bodily, especially as it enters the mouth—an unidentified internal organ, or a lump of cancer removed from your body that the surgeon let you keep. In true Cronenberg style, the mouthpiece is designed to be both seductive and repulsive.

EC: Bruxer is part of a larger, nine-track album project you’ve been working on called Mouth Noise. Tell us more about the audio production choices behind Bruxer. The music underneath your vocals reads to me as synth-y, New Age-like, and almost soothing (but feel free to disagree with these characterizations). I'm curious why you went down this route, as opposed to another genre or sound. 

NS: The music for Bruxer is really aligned with Mouth Noise, so in a way I didn’t think too hard about that choice. But of course, it does make reference to self-actualization tapes, guided meditations and affirmation practices—these audio tracks that became popular in the 80’s and are still used for today relaxation, self-improvement, enlightenment… There are so many contemporary versions of this, but I find subliminals to be one of the most curious genres, where affirmations are often spoken quietly under music to help you rapidly manifest money, love, beauty, etc. I wanted to present the Bruxer composition in a way that imitates these forms but then takes some unexpected turns, bringing in language you would likely never hear on a self-help recording. 

EC: The vocal script for Bruxer collages together language pulled from wellness and self-improvement media. Tell us about the process of sifting through all this content—the YouTube exercise videos, the business seminars, the affirmations, etc. How did you go about your search? How did you pick what kind of language you wanted to include? 

NS: It all started with this phenomenon of sound that plays inside your head. I was curious how and if these thoughts might get mixed up with your own. There’s an incredible intimacy, a personal quality to this experience. But there’s also something sinister in the implanting of words you did not come up with yourself. This is why I decided to use the “I” statement as a repetitive format. When you hear a voice in your skull saying, “I am in charge here,” exactly whose voice is that?  

In the last 5 years I’ve started following exercise videos to do HIIT workouts in the mornings. As much as I procrastinate and dread it, I find this short, exhaustive exercise to be really helpful as a ritual for starting the day, keeping me active and focused. However, I’ve never found a YouTube trainer with whom I feel ideologically or politically aligned. In principle, I don’t believe I need to change anything about myself. I’m not trying to lose weight or reshape my body or ‘do it for my family’ or any of the other goals or intentions that I’m told I need to set. While I am generally convinced of the benefits to my physical health, I worry that listening to this kind of language every day is actually bad for my mental health. I reject the ableist notion that an individual’s worth is tied to their achievement and contributions. But I also feel deep neurochemical satisfaction when I achieve and contribute. I believe that self-improvement ideology is a psycho-social manifestation of capitalism used to prevent the oppressed from organizing toward collective liberation. But I’m still out there on the spin bike every morning pushing myself until I collapse. 

So, these contradictions between what I think I believe, and what I subconsciously practice and feel, formed the shaky terrain from which the Bruxer poem began to emerge. Any therapist or coach will tell you that what you tell yourself about yourself is important. I agree that this self-talk matters, and it can change both your reality and material circumstances. But this language has also been socially conditioned, fed to you and workshopped by myriad sources from your parents, your teachers (religious & academic), the swirling tides of mass media, the persistent downpour of social media, as well as your friends and personal networks. At times I distrust the authenticity of my own thoughts. So, I began collecting “I” statements from different contemporary contexts and placing them together to see what might be learned. How is this notion of ‘self’ constructed, especially through the Internet and social media?

EC: Tell us about the work’s title—Bruxer. 

NS: The word Bruxer describes a person with bruxism (teeth grinding), a common condition that I have, and you probably do as well. Like carpal tunnel syndrome and ADHD, I think of bruxism as a health problem quintessential to our time and place. It is certainly a ‘first-world problem,’ emerging as modern medicine turns its attention to trivial complaints of worn-down molars and morning jaw pain, but it also can indicate low-level anxiety that pervades our lives, and often only really becomes perceptible when we’re asleep. Some of us grind our teeth during the day, but nearly all of us do it at night. In this way, the Bruxer mouthpiece is also a bite plate, a night guard, entering the circumstance in which we are most open to suggestion. What happens when you fall asleep with Bruxer in your mouth?

EC: In addition to the Bruxer audio device and sound composition, you also produced a short film that features Bruxer being used. What was it like to translate Bruxer into the visual realm? 

NS: Part advertisement and part user manual, the video was conceived as a surreal introduction to the sculpture, but also a way to show how Bruxer works. With the recent memory of COVID lockdown, I was interested in depicting a kind of solipsism by confining the shoot to the horizontal fencing of a cis-hetero LA gentrifier household (one with great natural light and a pool and a meditation deck). Like all contemporary advertising, the video sells not just a product but a lifestyle. Unlike most advertising, I hope it also pushes you to consider if this is the life you really want. 

Bruxer is one part of a visual language I’m developing for my nine-track album, Mouth Noise. I recently used the same pink silicone to construct a costume that I will perform in, this time with a specific visual reference in mind: my esophagus. A quick digression to explain my relationship with my esophagus, which I have actually had the pleasure to meet over video chat during a gastro-endoscopy years ago. Since my early-twenties I’ve suffered from severe acid reflux or GERD (gastroesophageal reflux disease), which commonly emerges midlife and is experienced by most people as heartburn. For years I didn’t know what was causing these attacks in the middle of the night; they started with sudden nausea, then my throat closing off, my face swelling up, itchy, hot, pouring snot, and then 45 mins later, all symptoms would just disappear. Finally, in the back of an ambulance, a paramedic described for the first time what was going on. He told me what no doctors seemed to be able to identify: when stomach acid is allowed to creep up the esophagus high enough it can cause symptoms very similar to anaphylactic shock. The body encounters its own juices trying to escape and freaks out. 

I’m curious about this weird little confrontation with interiority, and how my whole system seems to over-react in response. This began a decades-long and tumultuous collaboration with my digestive track, that has grown to dictate everything from what/how/when I eat, to how I can exercise (I had been a runner but had to quit because too much bouncing) and sleep (sitting straight up in bed). For Mouth Noise, I designed this peristaltic sportswear as a way of commemorating this collaboration, celebrating the mysterious alterity of interiority, and bringing the inside out.

EC: Across Mouth Noise, you address a litany of hard-hitting issues: ecological collapse, white supremacy, technocolonialism, the brutality of the U.S. immigration system, the ritualized vernacular of social media and self-care... among others. What is the impulse behind aggregating all these contemporary concerns into album form? Why this album now? 

NS: Why this album now? Well partially because this album is finally done after a ridiculous number of years that I don’t need to publish to here :)  But, let me work on a better answer… 

In my art practice, I tend to make large-scale research projects that go deep on a particular subject. That subject is always changing because I am principally motivated by a desire to learn about things, and there’s always a new thing I want to learn about. If I’m honest about it, ‘learning things’ is one of the primary reasons I am an artist. But in my music, I allow myself even more meandering. I like the structure of a ‘song’ as a contained entity, in which I can build an entire world in sound, language, image and performance. And then it’s over and a new song can begin. I love the modularity of performing these songs, adding new ones as they are finished, rearranging them with each live show. More than other parts of my practice, this feels honestly like a ‘practice’ that evolves over time and follows my curiosity, my emotions and my rage. 

In a way, Mouth Noise is more personal than most of my work, because I am the only thing tying it all together. It is composed of the things I think about and write about, my improvisational music sessions, the things I catch on camera. Mouth Noise is less pre-figured and more intuitive than my other projects, which often require pre-conceptualizing in a pitch or proposal. It’s a collage, a diary, a rant, made of all the shit I’m thinking about—definitively anti-disciplinary, unfocused and anti-grant proposal. As you might imagine, this part of my practice doesn’t typically receive a lot of outside support. The personal vulnerability and solo production also make it the most difficult work for me to stand behind with confidence. That’s why it’s taken me so many years to get to this point.