Pure Ecstasy – “Alexandria” from Elise Oh on Vimeo.
Back in Art History 101, I remember being slightly distressed when my professor pulled up a slide of Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa in the Santa Maria della Vittoria and I detected a strange twist of agony in the figure’s marble expression. According to my textbook, the statue is a representation of a 16th century Italian nun who experienced a combination of spiritual epiphany and bodily pleasure when she was visited by an angel and stabbed in the heart with a long golden rod. The French postmodernists like to read it it as a cloaked allusion to the female orgasm, which it may very well be, but I am unable to get past the fact that Saint Teresa doesn’t really look all that ecstatic at all. In fact, to judge from the nun’s own journals, I think it is fair to say that she was unable to experience all that ecstasy without simultaneously experiencing an equal amount of pain — or, perhaps, that the two are actually one and the same thing.
The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it. The soul is satisfied now with nothing less than God. The pain is not bodily, but spiritual; though the body has its share in it.
So what does Saint Teresa have to do with Pure Ecstasy playing a set at a Tortilla Factory in Bushwick? Not all that much; though I think you will find, in this glorious video by PIXELHORSE, something lurking beneath all those those blazy afternoon bliss vibes resembling ecstasy’s oh so bittersweet underside. And it’s not just the way Nate Grace’s face contorts when he sings, the scorched caresses of guitar, the debilitating throbs of bass; it’s the way Pure Ecstasy’s songs make us feel. Bypassing all the art historical jargon and cutting straight to the meat, “Alexandria” just hurts so damn good.
