For a young (or at least inexperienced) Western gay man, few places hold the combination of loaded history, excitement, and terror like the bathhouse. These hallowed public sex spaces have survived decades of on-and-off-again state targeting, and are often associated with a previous generation of gay men but always fetishized by an underdog contingent of the next. They’re places where people explicitly go to have sex while coyly pretending that’s not why they’re there—maybe they sit on gym equipment covered in cobwebs, or halfheartedly take a shower even though they did all their preparation beforehand. The lines of consent can become blurred, so you might have one of the best hookups of your life, or maybe get chased around and cornered by someone you really don’t want to have sex with. Or maybe nothing at all happens. At a time of resurgent interest in cruising so mainstreamed that there are New Yorker articles written by nonparticipants, it’s not surprising that the bathhouse has become a focus of interest in gay culture: Here’s an analog space where cruising is—if not officially legal—not only condoned, but encouraged.
An idea like this—these are ways our ancestors interacted, and ways that we can be in touch with them, too—has a way of taking up space in the collective consciousness, even for those interested in theory, but not in practice. Films, books, and of course, music follow, and there have been at least two albums of steamy electronic music inspired by the experience of lingering at the bathhouse in recent years. Sound Bath, the debut LP from San Francisco artist coatshek, aka Sheki Cicelsky, takes this mission most literally: a start-to-finish sex jam designed for active bathhouse sessions, pitched at 107 BPM as the “optimal speed for sauna sex.” It was first released last year as a continuous mix for Soundbath, a series of DJ sets designed for—you guessed it—sauna sex, courtesy of dance music-adjacent poppers brand Double Scorpio. But with Double Scorpio’s downfall as part of a recent clampdown on the grey-area drug, Sound Bath existed in limbo, a casualty of a culture war targeting queer people of all stripes.
Who better to rescue Sound Bath than Dark Entries, a Bay Area-based label that’s done more than probably any other entity in recent memory to highlight the queer history of electronic music? Josh Cheon’s imprint has made its name unearthing and reissuing music from obscure corners of this world, most famously Patrick Cowley’s gay porn soundtracks, compiled into albums that feel like transmissions from a lost, futuristic 1980s. In its own way, Sound Bath is a forgotten relic deserving of posterity, and so it gets a vinyl pressing split into individual tracks. Taken as an album and not a DJ mix, Sound Bath is a timeless exercise in DIY ambient techno. Made with a guitar, a few synths and a drum machine, it sounds equally like it could have been released in 1994 or now—which is its greatest strength.
Though it does have a clammy atmosphere, Sound Bath isn’t just a “bathhouse album.” You certainly don’t have to be a Gay History major, or even promiscuous, to get down with it. Beginning with “Softest,” which feels like a particularly gentle Autechre track from Incunabula, Sound Bath highlights the gentle, welcoming side of this kind of electronic music. Like its title implies, it’s relaxing, almost comforting, even when things start to get steamy. With drums circling around, but rarely hammering out, its 107 BPM beat, the LP is almost tantric in its commitment to the rhythm, and it changes positions frequently enough so it never gets stiff or hits the same spot for too long.
If you want to use your imagination, though, there are plenty of bathhouse characteristics here. Reverb-soaked hi-hats spray sweat and condensation, strange sounds ring out into the darkness, and voices mutter and whisper around you. The mood changes to mirror the feeling of getting lost in the darker corners, culminating in the eerie “The Feelings,” where the pitter-patter drums start to feel a little paranoid, and Cicelsky speaks directly into your ear. It’s either a suave seduction or a sinister turn—it’s all in the eye of the beholder, or at least the bathhouser.
After “The Feelings,” Sound Bath takes a more expressive turn, less seedy and more euphoric. “Labyrinth” is a stunning dub techno track where you can concretely hear Cicelsky’s guitar unfurl like wisps of smoke. A muffled rhythm floats across the soundscape like flashing lights that feel a bit too intense after a heroic huff of poppers. And the closing “Eternal Lovers” touches on Moby levels of pathos, blanketing its skippy beat with long, sustained notes until the whole thing dissolves into a blissed-out exhale that’s either the tingly aftermath of la petite mort, or just the relief of getting through something.
Feelings is the key word here: Sound Bath is one of the more emotional dance music albums of the year, either because of or in spite of its origins. You can assign all kinds of skeevy, sexy feelings to it, but you can also just appreciate it as a beautifully sculpted techno record that highlights the warmth and melody of the genre at its various peaks: late-’80s Detroit, early ’90s UK, mid-to-late-’90s Europe. It doesn’t sound at all like a guy with a guitar strapped to his chest, but it does sound like someone made it with their own hands, the music moving and evolving in real time rather than looping on a screen.
This is physical electronic music made for physical activities, carrying a heavy history without being weighed down by it. Sound Bath knows that dance music, like fucking in a bathhouse, is as serious as you want it to be, a simple thrill as much as something to intellectualize. Like those places hidden in plain sight for decades, the album is a welcoming, and occasionally uncanny, place for people to project their hopes, dreams and desires—or just bodily fluids—onto. It’s a big-hearted record that invites everyone to experience its pleasures, even if just vicariously.
