I encourage you to listen to the album as you read for a more immersive experience
“change is immanent—arising from within situations, from events, from within the movements, actions and desires of bodies” (Lim, 2008: 63)
“My body’s liquid, I’m way more wicked than you thought / So sick and twisted, so hedonistic, oh my god” (Liquid, 0:27)
You know the way bass travels through a body of water? Ripples and waves emerge on the water’s surface. Together vibrations and liquid move in unanticipated and hypnotic ways, in rhythmic tension with each other. Stability and tranquillity melts away. The music-bass assemblage makes possible a harmony not of sound, but of movement.
Liquids, fluids, and all things drippy feature heavily throughout Ashnikko’s album. Whether that’s Ashnikko wanting their boyfriends to swap spit (I Want My Boyfriends To Kiss), men lining up because Ashnikko and COBRA are so wet (Wet Like), foaming at the mouth with lust (Microplastics), or the imagery of bodies mixing on a molecular level (Liquid), Smoochies (2025)is obsessed with things, particularly leaky bodies, flowing[1].
I want to explore the utility of liquidity in this album when thinking about pansexuality. Ashnikko’s latest album gives an insight into the ways that pansexuality, like all sexualities, can exist in processes of becoming—where new potentials are produced in relation with entities. Ashnikko’s pulsating, high-energy, needy, cheeky album knows what it wants (to be dripping in bodily fluids, to play with high femme domination in sex) and how to get it. Ashnikko identifies as pansexual, which is why I begin with pansexuality. But like my writings elsewhere, I am interested in using the label only insofar as it begins a conversation about desires in their thousands of forms. How might Ashnikko’s attention to liquid[2] experiment with desires and bodies coming together (pardon the pun) to produce new sexual potentials beyond identity categories?
“Itty bitty teeny tiny little slutty skirt / I like to put it on every time my heart hurts” (Itty Bitty, 0:07)
When Itty Bitty plays I have to sing the chorus lyrics through a clenched jaw and gritted teeth. I bop my head to the rhythm of Ashnikko’s lyrics. If I’m in public, I time each stomp to the beat as if I’m strutting in high heels that ride my thighs. I am compelled by its confidence. Perhaps because of the song’s unashamed attempt to rectify a hurt heart. Whether we think it’s right or wrong, the song speaks to a drive for sexual validation from others. Itty Bitty sings a tune of a kind of aggression enmeshed in desire—going out to seize sex, prove something to the person you just broke up with, and working to dominate people’s attention (I put my lip gloss in my boot, bitch / I am here to work (0:33)). Ashnikko needs to get across just how much they crave fluids (I’m like a bitch in heat, in the desert with a thirst (2:06)). The way they roll the word, succ-u-bus, through their mouth makes it sound like suck and bust while at same time as invoking the demonic figure who seduces men. When I listen to this song I am transported to the sensation of dancing at a sexy club night, dripping with sweat, hungry for a hook up.
Liquids are helpful signifiers of sex. Like sex in Western societies, bodily fluids are both things that must be cleaned up, hidden away, and yet are obsessed over and eroticised as symbols of untameable bodily responses[3]. Ashnikko leans into conjuring up images of excessive spilling fluids alongside explicit confessions of their desires. We might also consider the current age we are living through—postmodernity—as liquid; Bauman is one thinker among many who argues that stable structures and relationships have eroded through late stage capitalism[4]. I have written elsewhere on the limitations of this argument—a romanticisation of past ‘stable’ desires carries a negative moral claim to contemporary sexualities that are understood as ‘fluid’ or less stable. For some, pansexuality holds the political potential to recognise all desires as fluid[5]. However, my aim here is not to suggest that pansexuality is a more adequate sexuality, or is more capable than others at demonstrating the complex, multiple, and at times contradictory nature of sexualities. Instead, I want to work with liquid in Ashnikko’s album as a concept, as a tool, that enables an alternate way of thinking about the coming together of bodies, the multiplicities of desire, and the ways our bodies change in affective interactions.
“Oh / immanent” (Microplastics, 0:24)
I’ve had a few different conversations about the album since it was released. I recommended it to a friend who listened to it that day and became obsessed. “It’s SO hot”. Another friend came to me to recommend the album if I hadn’t listened to it already—they must have known it resonated with some kind of chaotic bisexual potential I love to love. Both conversations were filled with a giddy immaturity at how relatable the album is in satisfying something sexual in us.
Let’s begin to think away from sexualities as stable categories (heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, asexual). These categories can’t account for the ways that bodies contradict, subvert, and move across different sexual identity categories over a lifecourse, and the politics that results is one more concerned with recognition and validation of identities over the material (both economic and physical) possibilities available to bodies. How might we understand pansexuality not simply as a stable identity but as an ongoing process?
Deleuze understands desire as productive. Rather than desire being understood as lack, as what we don’t have but want, desire can instead be seen as enabling relations with other entities. Berlant summarises:
Focusing on the surface or topographical trajectories of the body, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Elizabeth Grosz, and others talk about the way the attachments that desire engenders constantly reorganize the body into a state(s) of “becoming,” which in turn radically reshape the body as an erotic zone, a zone of meaning, value, and power. (2012: 64)[6].
An assemblage—the coming together of multiple entities through affect—can change how we understand and move through the world, enacting a process of becoming. If we consider pansexuality not as a stable set of desires (attraction to all genders) but as an ongoing negotiation with bodies and experiences that open up or close down potentials, we can look to the ways pansexuality is always already destabilised, always becoming something else in relation to the many virtual possibilities at play. This is best laid out by Watson’s definition of bisexuality as an always shifting set of relations: “trans and woman and hormones and surgery and lesbian desire and dance partner and male lover” (2012: 95).
Thinking with pansexuality as an ongoing, immanent negotiation with other entities means we can consider the many other things that help constitute our desires: bodies coming together with other bodies, but also certain materials like leather, the use of makeup, or even vibrations in music. Becoming-liquid.
“sit on the DJ’s face and feel the beat / through my puss / I think I’m liking where this is going” (Full Frontal, 0:11)
“wet like / wet like / wet like / wet like / wet like / wet like / wet like me” (Wet Like, 0:39)
“I’ve been meaning to ask you something / It’s really been on my mind lately / Can we play mermaids? / Like, naked mermaids? / You know, mermaids with hole” (Liquid, 1:45)
I melt when I listen to Liquid. The bass and the lyrics and the tempo travel through me and together we move like a cyborg[7]. I cannot predict how I move but I know I want it, I know I like it. The heavy electronic beat as Ashnikko admits to being a hedonist and being “way more wicked than you thought” (1:30) taps into a visceral need to be close between bodies. It reminds of sexual encounters where a sense of sight gives way to a sense of touch and we writhe and our bodies knot together until we begin to lose track of who’s who and which hands are where. Until each body loses any semblance of impermeability. Until we become fluid. I enter a state of becoming-liquid listening to Liquid.
What political potentials become possible in Ashnikko’s becoming-liquid? Of course, when I refer to Ashnikko’s songs as becoming-liquid I don’t mean literally. Becoming-liquid refers to the relations that are enabled through thinking through liquid as a form or as a relation.
Through Ashnikko’s desires—getting finger fucked in the back of the club (Itty Bitty), feeling the bass through their puss (Full Frontal), dressing up in their itty bitty skirt, and instigating orgies with their multiple boyfriends (I Want My Boyfriends To Kiss)—Ashnikko learns from liquidity. Impressed and informed by their surroundings, they mix in to a space to experience the sensations and pleasures they seek. Sometimes this clouds their attention to other people’s needs which means rejection hurts all that more:
“I shaved my hairy toes for you / I’m a hobbit / And this is the thanks I get? / And this is the thanks I get? / And this is the thanks I get? / I wanna rip out your eyeballs / Put ’em on a necklace, that’s to die for / Dickless prick, he’s micro. (Chichinya, 0:36).
They not only recognise that our experiences shape our desires, but they enact a minoritarian experimentation through their desires, that is desires in resistance to normative sex and gender roles. The lines that open Liquid go:
I wanna wear your skin (does that scare you, like?) / I need to be closer than this (can we take it there?) / I wanna melt you down and take a swim (Hut 1 Hut 2) / I need you cellularly, let our molecules mix. (0:02)
In Smoochie Girl, this feeling is explored from their side:
Ooh, oh no, how scary / I haven’t felt this exposed (Uh) / I’m barely out of the woods / From the last time I was broken (Smoochie girl) / Just a sliver cuts me open (Go smoochie) (Smoochie Girl, 0:26)
Enacting minoritarian desires might well be scary—it’s an attempt to move beyond the recognised and legible (hetero/homo)normative desire. It’s opening up new possibilities that might have otherwise seemed inconceivable or irreprehensible. It’s a chance to experiment with new ways of thinking and being and doing pleasure—hedonism. Succumbing to the intoxicating beat. Succumbing to high femme domination. It’s brave for Ashnikko to be so honest about their craving to be closer than close. That might scare some away and make them feel emotionally and physically exposed. But Ashnikko is searching for those who are willing to entertain the relation. This minoritarian desire centres movement, connection, closeness, flow, mixing. Here, Ashnikko is not attempting to name or label any desire, but instead they recognise the very fleetingness of sexual encounters, the very intensity of desire, and the movement made possible in and through liquidity. We the listener feel this: maybe we resonate with a similar set of desires, perhaps we are reminded of Ashnikko’s lyrics in everyday fleeting encounters. Maybe we share the craziest and most heart-pounding moments of the album with friends. We might feel the music dominating us, topping us[8]. Or we might even hear the echoes of Ashnikko’s techno beats as we strut down the street. Becoming-liquid.
“My skin cleared when we broke up / What does that mean? / Now I’m back seat of the taxi / Making someone’s son take a pic of my thong out my black jeans / Now I grieve you, but I’m happy / I’m no longer paranoid / I don’t even get the flu anymore / What does that mean?” (Skin Cleared, 0:26)
Ashnikko bounces from location to location between songs and within songs like a haze. Break ups, lust, frustration, and attention drive their movements. Affects impel them in every encounter. Their desires are complex—Ashnikko wants to move on, emotionally and physically, but has written a song about this person. They are both grieving the loss of a relationship and stretching their healthy body now the negative impacts of their ex have disappeared. Now, they find themselves in the backseat of a taxi with another person. The line, “I feel like Snow White” (0:49) sticks out to me not for the lyrics but the sounds. Ashnikko sends a sensation through me that makes me want to sing.
Minoritarian processes like becoming-liquid are what Deleuze & Guattari understand as the political potential of desires. Acting on a molecular level, this radical relation produces new ways of engaging with other bodies that momentarily evades definitions or categories. Building communities and generating spaces where becoming-liquid—fostering relations sustained through movement—can enable us to experiment with the capabilities of our bodies. Becoming-liquid enacts a state of flow dripping from erotic encounters. Becoming-liquid centres the more-than-human in our desires; itty bitty skirts or vibrating basslines. Becoming-liquid splashes across spaces without care for their borders, diving like mermaids.
Thinking about pansexuality as a shifting set of relations allows us to stretch beyond the category of pansexuality and experiment with becoming something else. In Ashnikko’s case, it is found in becoming-liquid.
[1] I borrow the phrase from Margrit Shildrick’s (1997) Leaky Bodies and Boundaries. The intro is here: https://api.pageplace.de/preview/DT0400.9781136184550_A26309297/preview-9781136184550_A26309297.pdf
[2] I find that liquid plays an important and central role in the album as a whole. There might well be many concepts to tease from the album that spark political potential. Here I focus particularly on liquid.
[3] Shildrick again. Also Foucault’s work on The History of Sexuality volume one (1976) which argues that Victorian sexuality is often regarded as a sexually-repressed time period where sexuality was hidden. Foucault argues instead that the Victorian period was obsessed with sexuality—learning how to measure and quantify it through scientific tests, and ultimately discipline or police desires.
[4] I refer to the works of Zygmund Bauman here, who has written extensively on Liquid Modernity (2000), Liquid Love (2003) or Liquid Life (2005).
[5] Early bisexual political essays like Eadie’s (1993) essay “Towards a Bi/Sexual Politics” is a good example of this.
[6] Berlant (2012) Desire/Love. https://www.thing.net/~rdom/ucsd/3somesPlus/Berlant_Desire_Love_EBook.pdf
[7] Here I’m invoking Donna Haraway’s understanding of the cyborg from A Cyborg Manifesto: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents/undergraduates/modules/fictionnownarrativemediaandtheoryinthe21stcentury/manifestly_haraway_—-_a_cyborg_manifesto_science_technology_and_socialist-feminism_in_the_….pdf
[8] I’m inspired by Suzzanne Cusick’s (2006) great essay on the lesbian erotics of music, On a Lesbian Relationship with Music.
imaginaries 
Leave a comment