The soundtrack of my rope bondage (2021)

I often describe my rope bondage as a sad love story, where we witness a hidden desire slowly being reviled. There is rawness and vulnerability. Another way of seeing it, or maybe more correctly hearing, is that my soundtrack plays in the minor scales. My tying style has three essential roles: the person tying, the one being tied, and the one witnessing. Music adds a fourth, the one leading. I often find it complicated to demonstrate rope bondage because people risk copying our emotional expressions rather than expressing themselves. Yet, I still do the demonstrations because it’s worth it. The non-verbal message is so powerful. And music is a little bit the same for me because it dictates the scene’s mood.

Am I sad because I listen to sad music, or do I listen to sad music because I’m sad?

I have a playlist of two handfuls of records that I play over and over again because they put the finger on the mood that I wish to explore. Or do I want to explore that mood because I keep playing them repeatedly? However, they are like a powerful spell, bounding me into the emotional landscape of bondage. I remember the first times teaching in front of a hundred people, and how when the first familiar notes land, my body drops into the space, my hand sinks deep into my partner’s skin, and my heart is torn wide open. I trust that the people will feel me because I have felt it so many times before. I’ve danced so many times before.

The first notes are lingering in anticipation, like a call to slow down and feel more. As the melody develops, I prefer dream-like reparative patterns because my rope bondage is without an end. It is a slow spiral downwards. Sometimes there is a feeling of a circus or carnival, a piano that is slightly off. It adds surrealism and humour. And then, from time to time, a single instrument breaks off, floating above everything, like a beacon of hope because this bondage is, in the end, an expression of life. It sounds cheesy, I know, but it works, and I like it.

I have many times experimented with tying to radically different types of music. Like Japanese shakuhachi flutes, minimalistic industrial techno, or something just funny, like The Mars Volta or Sonic Youth. But I always come back to my northern contemporary composers, maybe because they reflect the Scandinavian melancholy, which I also think is expressed through my rope bondage. Someone once said to me that the Swedish flag should be black, white and green, instead of blue and yellow, because it’s the colours of the birch tree and the colours that always are around. In the evergreen trees, in the long dark winter nights, and stary white snow. This greyish colour schema with a touch of nature is the feeling of my rope bondage. And therefore also what is reflected in its soundtrack.

There is a Japanese expression of Wabi-Sabi that I have written about many times before. It’s the appreciation of decaying imperfection. And it’s a polarity that I think often is symbolically acted out in bondage, between living and dying. Hanging in a challenging rope suspension is limited in time, as the endurance, strength, and breath slow fade away. Still, the surrender to the situation is such an immense force, such an expression of life in the act of metaphorically dying. I think that is why people feel strong and beautiful in bondage, even if the tie is, so to say, horrible. One of the best examples of this feeling is Olafur Arnalds interpreting Chopin; especially a passage from Chopins Nocturne in C Sharp Minor flows into Arnalds Reminiscence where a violin lingers as the last dying breaths before the piano lifts everything and carries it away.

In a way, I don’t even think there needs to be an entire soundtrack for a rope bondage session, but that it is enough with one song, like the overture, to set the mood. The rest is in the reverb, and the echoes carry through the session and into the future. I can remember a rope performance in Berlin some years ago; it was a loud nightclub environment filled with chatty people. So the session started loudly, musically, which pulled everyone’s attention. As people gravitated closer and closer, silently being absorbed by the intensity, the music slowly faded away, so in the end, all we could hear was the breathing and moaning. The music was gone, but the seed it planted remained. However, the best experience is tying together with a live musician. Then both music and rope bondage can lead and inspire each other. After all, the pre-recorded soundtrack will only dictate because it can never adapt. So if you have the chance to attend an event with live music, I highly recommend it.