Despite the decades that have passed since porn moved from cinema backrooms to the internet, the phrase “porn soundtrack” still conjures raunchy funk guitars and that “bom chicka wah wah” sound. In the ’70s, the porn movie genre was still taking shape, while box office successes like Behind the Green Door and Deep Throat provided a template focused on male pleasure first and foremost. Working within the industry and yet pushing for more positive depictions of female sexuality, the late Candice Vadalla moved from being in front of the camera to behind it, a pioneer in feminist filmmaking. “Women were curious and wanted to see if there were some sexy movies they could enjoy with their partner, and there was nothing out there for that,” she once said of her own foray into directing blue movies.
With her interest in body- and sex-positive activism, it makes sense that Royalle—who would adopt the stage name Candida Royalle—found a kindred spirit in Patrick Cowley. Having left the East Coast, both were 20-something transplants living in the sexually-unshackled playland of post-’60s San Francisco. In the early ’70s, Cowley provided soundtracks for Royalle’s street theater work with the Angels of Light (a spinoff of legendary troupe the Cockettes) as well as her performance projects, Warped Floors and White Trash Boom Boom.
The Candida Cosmica EP is a fascinating, too-brief compilation of Cowley and Royalle’s recordings spanning ’73 to ’75. Predating Royalle’s own porn career, it shows where female sexuality and gay pornography, which is to say feminism and disco, briefly inhabited a shared space. (Some dates are hazy, but Cosmica may be contemporaneous with Cowley’s own gay porn soundtracks.) A decade before Cowley ushered in the Hi-NRG sound and scored a 1982 chart hit with Sylvester’s “Do Ya Wanna Funk,” Royalle was his early champion, occasional lover, and muse. The exploratory relationship between the two friends informs the slowly unspooling synth excursions of the five tracks here.
Still a student at City College of San Francisco then, Cowley playfully repurposed equipment like the Serge modular synthesizer and Arp 2600 to electronically recreate Eden, using the primitive patches and filters to suggest gurgling streams and gentle air. Royalle occasionally lends her purrs and sighs, giving the synth-scapes a sense of beauty and wooziness. Only on the sultry closing “Tomato Song” does Royalle sing a proper song. She primarily provides an array of mewls, exhales, and murmurs that—through the lens of her subsequent career—scan now as libidinal. There’s a playfulness to her appearance on the title track, which Cowley then experiments with, converting Royalle into all manner of bird chirps, amphibian blips, wind howls, and the like. The track meanders, but delights, as Cowley’s electronics slyly turn Royalle into river, wind, woods, and then back to a nymph.
“Elementals” is noisier, with Cowley evoking his early electronic forbearers. Its erratic blips and buried snatches of movie dialogue are reminiscent of Vladimir Ussachevsky, Luciano Berio, and Morton Subotnick, as Cowley sorts through just how to make electronics and the human voice work together. “Tantum Ergo,” meanwhile, is underwater electronic abstraction that brings to mind Jürgen Müller’s Science of the Sea.
The nearly 12-minute “Shimmering (Where Am I?)” is the cosmic Quaalude at the center of it all, as Royalle harmonizes with Cowley’s undulating sinewaves, wondering aloud where she is. This parallels the sensuous strangeness of the Dark Entries label’s previously unearthed Cowley offerings. As “Shimmering” evolves, a tingling sensation feels at first physical, then mental, before the notion of a binary fades. Perhaps not as crucial as previous Cowley discoveries, Cosmica nevertheless intrigues, as Cowley uses his electronics to transform Royalle from flesh to a goddess, her every whisper echoing as if from some other dimension.
