A Full Body Experience: Unhinged Fest, August 2025

I was talking with my friend Monica, and she told me that feeling music in one's whole body (frisson) is not an experience everyone has. While it's a common emotional human experience, it's not universal. I was surprised to hear this because I can't imagine hearing certain songs without the waves of chills and goosebumps that I feel on my skin. Nor can I imagine hearing a moving piece of music and not well up with tears. My younger sister, Alex, sang in a high school choir at Dreyfoos School of the Arts in Florida. She was there for fine art, actually. She takes after my grandfather. But she also has a beautiful singing voice, so she joined the choir for fun.

Her choir went to a national competition in DC and sang Frobisher Bay. A weighted, whispering song by James Gordon about whaling in the Canadian Arctic. They won this competition. They were a junior choir, and they won against competitors from all high school grades across the country. After the competition, my mother and sister came back with a recording to share. I remember Alex describing the look on the conductor's face when they finished their perfect performance. She said she knew they had "done it" by the way he quietly smiled as they ended the last phrase. For me, there was so much there. Singing that song with the emotion and precision it deserves, the subtle acknowledgment of their mentor, which held enormous weight, and the roar of applause that rose from the audience at the end of the recording. I remember how proud I was of my sister, and I remember how proud she was that the song moved the audience and their teacher. That night, they got the only standing ovation.

I get tearful every time I hear this song. Not only because I have a personal connection to it, but because it's haunting, chilling, and soul-moving.

There are so many varied pieces of music that overtake my body. I played electric bass for like five minutes as a teenager in a garage band. I don't really have an ear for it. I could never hear what key we were in or anything like that, so I wore short skirts and played whatever our gifted guitarist told me to play. Shout-out to Fro wherever you are. I did take lessons, though, and one of the pieces I learned was Bach's Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major - the prelude. I learned from the Yo-Yo Ma version. It struck me, dead.

I worked so hard to learn that piece because when I played it, or heard it, I could not stay still. It moves the whole body. It's like a rapture. I felt like I died, and was resurrected every time I practiced. I think I was about 16 at the time and I barely knew that kind of pleasure experience, but I was learning. The "skin orgasms" that music brought, were my first experience of an overwhelming pleasure sensation, and of course, not my last.

This experience with Bach and Yo-Yo Ma was sort of secret at that time. My garage band wasn't playing classical, I wasn't going to tell them. Looking back, it could be that part of the intoxication came from the fact that it was secretive, and beautiful. Maybe it's the scorpion in me that covets the secret worlds. I eventually moved on from trying to be in a band, and gave up the bass. But I have the Yo-Yo Ma version in my music rotation and to this day, I can't sit still, and I die.

Ok, so back to heavy metal.

Monica told me I have to go to metal and punk shows because those bands are emotional and they don't give a fuck.

I realized, after going to the Unhinged lineup in August, that what she meant was they don't give a fuck about following any rules or expectations. This was great because they weren't afraid to break the flow and take my Normalize Mental Health Support in Music T shirt from me in the front row, and wear it on stage; thanks J Bannon. I was dodging crowd surfers and mindfully staying a few people deep from the pits that were breaking out all over the floor. I remember ducking boots and pushing away from swings thinking, I could never have foreseen this for my 40s. Thankfully, I got a crash course in mosh pit etiquette and what to especially watch out for, from Monica, who is quite experienced in the volcanoes of deep seeded rage and physical brutality on venue floors. Childhood trauma and an Aries moon will do it every time.

The other thing I realized at this show was that this is a different kind of full body experience. I was too close to the speakers and I could feel the thundering vibrations bounce off my rib cage and rattle down into my hips joints. I swear I almost felt my feet leave the floor. The sound was a tidal wave, or a wall. There were moments when I closed my eyes and it all turned into a primordial hum hammering in my head. The sound of human screaming is unsettling for humans, in general. The screams coming from the stage were no less so, carrying feelings into the room like a blowtorch. She was right. It was emotional.

There seems to be a lot of vulnerability in guttural sounds. Something about moving back to a preverbal, animalistic communication. When I am working with clients, I talk about the raw power of infant rage. This is an often overlooked force. If you have ever seen and infant screaming, whole body red, enraged that the caretaking presence isn't appearing fast enough, you might know what I mean. Infants, as small, innocent, beings, are not often associated with this kind of powerful reaction. When I have experienced adults who have tapped into this primal state, it never ceases to amaze me. What I hear is maybe the vulnerability of feeling helplessness or despair in the huge and intimidating form of a howling, grown adult in that rage. In all contexts that I have experienced this, including metal shows, there is really nothing else like it.

To be honest, when I was in Denver to see Nine Inch Nails (a future post), I went to a little venue called HQ that had some small touring metal bands and it was as intense, if not more, than the bands I saw this night. Stay Tuned.

I walked out after the show was over and had to reset a little bit. I sat next to the venue, and leaned back against the wall looking into the hazy night sky. The air was warm in August. The sounds of the kids walking out into the streets was reminiscent of the years I've lived in bigger cities and did bigger city things. As I tried to put my emotional self back together, I could feel reverberations in my bones. I was happy that I had a two hour drive back to my house in the mountains to digest all of the energy I was swimming in through the show. I finally got up to find my car and tried to hear myself think over the ringing and deafening in my ears. I felt bad for my eardrums and hoped they would recover, like I hoped the rest of me would recover.

Earplugs, I know.

For anyone who wants the delicious swoooon.

This is the whole suite. In this post I was referring to the prelude at the beginning before his first significant pause.