Harez Rvnn1ng

Gothic works partly by suggesting lacunae in our knowledge and by unsettling our sense that we understand how the world works. The artists who took part in the musical subgenre known as Witch House adopted just this tactic. Like many such coinings, arguably including Goth itself, Witch House was originally a joke that became a more-or-less accurate descriptor, applied to a sort of hiphop or DJ-produced dance music that majored on the slow and downbeat, and distorted and uncertain sounds. Much of the imagery associated with it is occultic, but without the openness of bog-standard Satanism, drawing instead on the eerie and inexplicit, more Blair Witch than Rosemary's Baby. DJs usually employ pseudonyms but artists in this little corner of the music world went further, distorting their names with typographical symbols which made it harder for internet search engines to find them, so that their work had to spread more by word of mouth. Real identities weren’t always clear.

I probably stumbled across Gvcci Hvcci (the ‘v’s are pronounced as ‘u’s) thanks to a Youtube algorithm and it – she? he? they? – illustrate the point very well. The original eponymous set of tracks emerged in 2011, featuring an apparently female voice and some extremely violent lyrics about the abuse and exploitation of males that remind me oddly of some of Ms Galás’s imaginings. Nobody seems to know for certain who Gvcci Hvcci was, where the record came from, or what happened to the artist subsequently. A handful of tracks have come out in later years bearing the name Gvcci Hvcci, but it isn’t clear what relationship they actually bear to the original recording, and whoever it is who claims to be Gvcci Hvcci on Facebook and spends most of their time trying to flog t-shirts almost certainly isn’t the person who produced the music in the first place.

There seem to be three main theories about the artist’s identity:

1. Gvcci Hvcci was the project of a group of musicians including a DJ/producer who goes by the name of Maxwell Velocity. That collective is no longer involved but the name was then used by others.

2. Gvcci Hvcci was devised by a young DJ from Brooklyn NY called Christopher Glockson: the voice is his, digitally altered. He died suddenly aged 20 in July 2012, and subsequent tracks were made by others using the name.

3. Gvcci Hvcci was an unnamed woman whose music was produced for her by Velocity Productions. For personal reasons she put about the rumour that she had died, since when the name has been used by others, perhaps with permission, perhaps not. Some suggest the original singer was Kendra Malia, part of a Witch-House outfit called White Ring, and is now a young woman called Megan Vanmale. When Gvcci Hvcci tracks were performed live on a couple of occasions a female hiphop artist called Madeen Phresh did the vocals. Any videos of these events have since been taken down from Youtube and other places.

All these stories show the problems that arise when all available information comes from internet sources, and none of them authoritative – comments on Reddit and Youtube, free-edited statements on Last.fm and Facebook profiles. Anyone can lay claim to a name if nobody who actually knows the truth wants to step in and sort it out. None of the accounts seem completely convincing. The Max Velocity on Facebook appears to know the person currently calling themselves Gvcci Hvcci, but the concerns of both seem a long way from the style and content of the first few tracks, short, unsettling and uncomfortably violent. You can find rather moving pictures of Christopher Glockson with various mainly black-clad young friends at club nights in Brooklyn; he was gay and often applied the term ‘bitch’ to himself on Twitter, but to me the original vocal, while distorted, sounds definitely female and I wonder whether a late-teenage male, gay or not, could imagine himself into the mind of an angry young woman quite that deeply. Perhaps people prefer to imagine a male artist rather than face the discomfort of an extremely disagreeable sort of female fantasy: conversely I’d sooner that, than think I’m listening to a man making it up, which for me would leave a bad taste in the mouth. Or a worse one, anyway. Megan Vanmale, meanwhile, was a would-be Gothy model from Boston, or Vancouver, or somewhere, about 2010; the statements that link her to Gvcci Hvcci also name the EP on which the original tracks appeared as $wagged Out & $cuba Divin, but this was a five-year anniversary compilation of all the music in which the artist was alleged to have appeared, issued in 2016. She may be running the Facebook page and the Soundcloud account in Gvcci Hvcci’s name, but who knows. It could be anyone.

‘Bullet in the Head’ was one of the original Gvcci Hvcci tracks. ‘Back from the dead, I’m back from the dead’ sung whoever-it-was; ‘I’ll smoke that shit till my eyes turn red/ The only way to stop me is a bullet in the head’. The record cover (I don’t know if there ever was a vinyl record or just a digital release) shows, indistinctly, a naked woman, apparently dead, lying face down on a bed. The Gothic tropes of death and revivification become part of the narrative of the artist, allowing whoever’s using the name now to write on Facebook ‘I died again’ and others to respond ‘Shoulda stayed there bitch’ and similar helpful comments. After seven years, Gvcci Hvcci has attained something of the quality of an urban legend.

PJ Harvey has her own version of this, revolving around an eerie track from 1998 called ‘The Northwood’, included on the CD of her most commercially successful single, ‘A Perfect Day Elise’. Anything to do with going into the dark woods is spooky to start with, but this folk-inflected fragment has its own mysteries. It starts with a horrible squeak, its production quality is dreadful, and it tails off after less than two minutes: ‘I went into the deep Northwood/ Because a fire was in my head’. Most strikingly there is a male voice on the recording, credited to ‘James Lynch’. Nobody is sure who he was and rumour naturally fills the gaps: some say that James Lynch is a pseudonym for Harvey’s former partner Nick Cave, while others posit that the voice is in fact that of Harvey herself, lowered to sound male (the reverse of the motif in the Gvcci Hvcci stories). The vocal is odd, but I suspect that’s not the explanation. I tend to take the view that the song was probably recorded in the back room of a Dorset pub and the tape then discovered a couple of years later at the bottom of a holdall, and ‘James Lynch’ – if he isn’t the painter of the same name known for depictions of the Somerset and Dorset landscape – was just someone Harvey grabbed from the front of the pub to take part. Someone might let the truth slip one day.