According to the experts in the field—namely Double Scorpio, purveyors of fine poppers until the recent FDA crackdown on the dubiously legal party drug—the optimal audio speed for sauna sex is 107 BPM. Within those parameters, Double Scorpio commissioned a series of mixes from DJs and producers, asking them to imagine the mix they’d like to hear in an imaginary queer bathhouse (presumably while enjoying their products).
Most of the participants used it as an excuse to throw their favorite classic house and disco jams together. But one participant, a San Francisco-based artist named Sheki Cicelsky, used the opportunity to fashion a completely new work: Sound Bath, a mix of all-original productions that doubles as his debut album under the name Coatshek. With the record now released on SF’s Dark Entries Records, he’ll celebrate with an album release show at Pallas Gallery on Geary Street on Sat/1.
Turning in a mix of all-original productions is an unconventional move, but Cicelsky is forthright about his reasons for delivering one of the strongest ambient techno albums of the year for a rather inconspicuous mix series “That’s just what I do,” he said. “I don’t DJ, I produce. I love jamming in my room for hours, coming up with new grooves and vibes and experimenting and exploring.”
Cicelsky started out studying classical guitar before discovering classic rock bands like Pink Floyd, who blew his mind as they did so many other young stoners. Once he came out of the closet and began going to clubs, the dance-music bug started to creep into his bones, but he was at a loss at how to integrate his fretboard skills into a rhythmic drum machine grid. That’s until he heard E2-E4, the guitar/synth improvisation released in 1982 by Ash Ra Tempel’s Manuel Gottsching (which would go on to be an unlikely club staple).
“As someone who was unsure where my skills fit in with the really new and exciting music I was being exposed to, that gave me the validation that I could do it too,” Cicelsky says. “I could use my skills as a more classically trained musician and bring them into the world of drum machines and synths.”
Cicelsky came to California from New York in 2015 to trim weed in Humboldt County, then shuttled down to San Francisco in 2018. He first connected with Double Scorpio while opening for psych-pop eccentric The Space Lady at San Francisco’s El Rio, and when he was tapped to contribute a mix to a series they were calling DS Soundbath, he found a new purpose for the stoned improvisations he’d been making in his spare time.
“My mom’s a high school art teacher, and she’d always say every dream has a deadline,” Cicelsky says. “That’s true about me. I’m one of those artists who can sit on something for a long time. Having that framework is the only reason why it’s out.”
Despite the austere parameters for the recording—107 BPM, a setup of just guitar and two synths—Sound Bath is one of the year’s most immersive listens. It’s a fine addition to the year’s expanding lineup of great ambient techno releases, which includes fellow San Franciscan Cahl Sel’s recent IDM throwback Traces and UK producer Call Super’s A Rhythm Protects One (also structured as a mix consisting of all-original productions.)
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“I was really trying to create the arc of a lovemaking session,” Cicelsky says. “Starting off slow, dipping into a more loopy territory, starting to get lost a little bit in each other. I guess I like my sex a little psychedelic.”
Sound Bath may have been consigned to obscurity if not for the efforts of Josh Cheon, head of San Francisco’s Dark Entries, which has done more than just about any other entity in the past decade to exalt the queer history of club music. “My boyfriend used to play it when we would hook up, and I’d always be like, what is this?” Cheon says. “I just thought it was a mix of songs, I didn’t know it was original material.”
Not long after Cheon reached out to Cicelsky about putting out the album on vinyl, Double Scorpio was raided by the FDA amid Secretary of Health Robert F. Kennedy’s ongoing crackdown on poppers, a drug of which he’d been publicly critical—including in his book “The Real Anthony Fauci,” which a New York Times article on the crackdown claims “contained 45 references to poppers, slyly connecting them to AIDS without outright blaming them for it.”
Many in the queer community see the crackdown as a repeat of age-old public health panics about gay people, and as such, Sound Bath took on a new meaning to both Cheon and Cicelsky after the Double Scorpio raid: a tribute not just to a long history of psychedelic bathhouse music, but to a piece of queer counterculture in danger of disappearing.
“I felt like we had to preserve the history and the essence of Double Scorpio,” Cheon says. “This mix is perfect for a bathhouse or for a cruising or sexy party. I’d made out to it for months without even knowing who it was or what it was.”
COATSHEK: SOUND BATHS RELEASE PARTY Sat/1, 6pm, Pallas Gallery, SF. More info here.
