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“Earth to You,” a short story from Portlander Sara Jaffe’s recent collection, Hurricane Envy, is about a twentysomething pressure point massage therapist who yearns to go electric. “She wishes she could explain about the sound she’s chasing,” Jaffe writes, “volume and treble, all crackle and spark.” Eyeing a beat-up Telecaster that looks loud in a pawn shop window, Helen imagines it’s capable of producing the same sounds that emanate from the house she goes out of her way to walk past—“volume, distortion, more shards than song.” It cuts deeper than simple “Noise,” she insists. Especially once it’s attached to West, the laconic and beguiling younger woman blaring her little “monster” of an amp through the neighborhood. It is embodied, avant-garde guitar music that radiates like the nerve endings Helen triggers in her clients. What does that sound like? Like the songs on the story’s companion album, with eight tracks by eight guitarists whom Jaffe asked to respond—sonically, perhaps somatically—to the story. Saturday at Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (7pm, donations encouraged), half of them—Ilyas Ahmed, Marisa Anderson, Jenny Hoyston, and Tara Jane O’Neil—are playing their compositions and Jaffe is reading from the story.

Jaffe teaches writing at Pacific Northwest College of Art today. But from 1999 to 2004, she played guitar in the “post-punk, dance-damaged” band Erase Errata, a much-loved electro–riot grrrl outfit from San Francisco that toured with Le Tigre. The early albums on which Jaffe played (the band lasted till 2014) have a sound that’s equal parts post-disco and austere experiments. There’s a glitchy Devo wiggle; atonal, arrhythmic. Though the tracks on Earth to You, the album, are more art projects than riot grrrl bops, they clearly come from a similar place, searching out that nervy electricity Jaffe’s massage therapist is groping toward.

Jaffe’s writing similarly isolates simple notes from life and amplifies them into estrangement. “She assembles minor details into taut, poignant, uncanny tapestries,” Leni Zumas recently wrote of Jaffe in Electric Literature. “[S]he collects what is furtive and ever-so-slightly strange.” Eventually, the massage therapist’s motivations are called into question. She’s stuck on the textures of this sound, on its aesthetics and affect. She can’t even name the sound she’s chasing, or what kind of music she wants to play. Her guitar teacher decides Helen doesn’t want to learn guitar; she either wants to sleep with West or wants to be her. Surprising herself somewhat, Helen decides neither conclusion is quite true. Alone in her room, finally in possession of the loud-looking guitar from the pawn shop window, as well as a drumstick, a chopstick, a ruler, and a hammer, she creates a sound all her own that scratches her existential itch. 

More things to do this week

Elsewhere...

• Reboot novelist Justin Taylor’s extensive literary profile of Geek Love author Katherine Dunn, which bears the appropriately carnal title “You Are Who Eats You.” (N+1)
• University of Oregon professor Leif Karlstrom’s Volcano Listening Project, made from field recordings and instrumental interpretations of seismograph data. (OPB)