Nastya Valentine Dives Deep into "Hentai & Crack Vol 1", a Visual Album Recorded in Her Tesla
We’ve appreciated Nastya Valentine and her work for some time now, as many WMF readers may remember. In recent months we’ve periodically chatted offline with Nastya about a project she’s been developing, involving music that she recorded in her Tesla. We’d listened to the 2020 demos for this project —titled Hentai & Crack Vol 1— and the concept (as well as her own descriptions) piqued our interest. When we heard that the audio-visual work is to be screened and performed at Highways on February 3 for the first time ever as part of the upcoming Celeste X-curated 1-900-Bodies on the Line event, we checked in to see if Nastya would be willing do a deep dive into Hentai & Crack Vol 1 for us. She graciously obliged, and we’re delighted to share the following exclusive in-depth insights into Hentai & Crack Vol 1, directly from Nastya herself.
I made this album in my Tesla while wearing lingerie.
Hentai & Crack is a visual album I produced in 2020-2023 out of my garage. This turns the title “garage band” into a parody of luxury. With multiple volumes set to come out - Vol 1, Vol 2, and Hentai Deluxe, it is a trilogy replicating my LA-based obsession with dystopian self image and cybersocial posturing. A caricature of privilege, or as the kids say these days, a flex.
I am discussing here Hentai & Crack Vol 1 specifically, which began in 2020 and is getting resurrected now in 2023 — although as a fluid project, all volumes are overall designed to kind of blend together.
Hentai and Crack Vol 1 screenshot, courtesy Nastya Valentine
Conceptually, I wanted to make this album for personal entertainment and dealing with the trauma of the initial stages of the pandemic. Considering the disjointed elements of my online image, it was the gimmickiest thing I could do to satirize myself. Make an album in my Tesla scantily clad. It sells itself. The way people online knew me was so far removed from my reality, that I wanted to cater to a very veiled social image of who “Nastya Valentine” is. A faker, more produced sound than my previous emotional guitar music.
Compositionally, H&C is all over the place. I made these tracks very freeform, not adhering to any genre or particular sonic organization. There are walls of sound, dilating synth lines, drowned out vocals, and emotional guitar music. I don’t believe in genre worship (only goddess worship), though I do like to describe it as a shoegazy dream-pop/camgirl emo. I love heavily layered music with an ethereal vibe; as a teen I listened to a lot of Beach House and Animal Collective, which informed the way I structure harmonies and melodies. I feel inspired by sexy vocalists like Britney, Prince, Lil Kim, Janet, Christina, all the divas… It helps creating a character for the stage, although the separation between reality and fantasy can often times be a sleep paralysis of blurry urges.
Hentai and Crack Vol 1 screenshot, courtesy Nastya Valentine
The lyrics allude to an abstract and horrifying erotic fantasy; I am usually much more of a realism writer with poetic straighforward song lyrics, although for this piece I drew inspiration from my dreams and nightmares which would not be out of place in a David Lynch or Gaspar Noe film. Still, masterpiece lines like “I cry all night thinking about you” harken back to the days of emo legends Bright Eyes and Elliott Smith. (But horny). "Every Kiss Begins With K" tells a tale about falling in love on ketamine; it also references "you're my butterfly sugar baby" from Crazy Town's iconic 2000's jam. When I wrote that song, I wanted to sonically exude butterflies. The kind you get in your stomach while falling in love on ketamine.
The aesthetic elements of the album are very important - I make most of my music with visuals in mind, and having synesthesia gives me a vibrant assortment of textures to work with. To me, music and visuals are married. I wanted this album to sound like an alien sex goddess’s acid trip. Something is “off” about it, but you still watch and listen because it’s sexy. A digital nymph crying in her bedroom, a glitching fembot in a pastoral landscape. The imagery is there to allure you, while simultaneously having a jarring effect. Overlays of my body, ruthless self-objectification, cat pictures, memes, anime gifs, rude internet comments about me from haters, Hentai images, pixellated collages, and other crap from the internet all intersect in this video. It is a digital abyss that stares back. This piece is so 2020’s, yet from another dimension. A time warp. 2023-2003, by way of 2069. Bear in mind that this visual content is borderline nsfw -- but honestly what isn't these days? Have you seen instagram lately? Courtney Love once said "every girl in LA stripped to buy amps and pedals." Ah, a tale as old as time. It is happening again.
The thots are not what they seem. This album catalyzed my OnlyFans page and the livestreamed production of Hentai & Crack was how I originally started, before OF became my job. Every day in early 2020 pandemic times, I would livestream myself in my Tesla recording this on my page, with the allure of additional spicy contents. Thus, my art and my body collided. I had prior experience camming but I didn’t have the discipline to consistently stream daily; OnlyFans allowed me a more time-efficient platform of expression that dovetailed creativity with sexual empowerment. 2020 was a turning point when being a fantasy became my reality, and to this day my full time job, but every girl who starts an OF becomes such a memeable punchline so I played into that to my viewers. Self-objectification: it’s praxis, sis. To me, it’s so much more than even that. It’s a vindication of every man, fuckboy, and asshole who had ever rejected me. To be hot, and to make money off of things I was mercilessly bullied for when I was younger, is everything. It’s retribution. Hentai & Crack thematically touches on that autobiographical element by exaggerating myself as a goddess of revenge, with track titles like “Opiate Destroyer” “Hot Girl Suffer” and “Erotomania”. Underneath the feminine mirage there is a trauma, a longing, a fixation. A spindle, a darkness, a fever, a necklace.
Hentai and Crack Vol 1 screenshot, courtesy Nastya Valentine
There is a quote attributed to Oscar Wilde which goes like “everything in the world is all about sex; except for sex, which is all about power.” Our sex-power pipeline is almost tangible, and to me, has always been so fascinating. Can you guess my zodiac sign?
The deep dive does not end at music; my projects all blend into one another and work within the Nastya Valentine Enterprises umbrella. Alongside my music projects, I am currently writing a book called Cyberhorny: Navigating A Sexual Dystopia, which is a mirror of our cybersex-obsessed society that pulls open the curtain on the world of online sex work. Some of my concurrent writings (about Artificial intelligence and sexuality; politics of online dystopia ; and the like..) are available on my blog website cyber-horny.com. Even Hentai & Crack is a wink to the ridiculousness of what I do as a cyber participant. By satirizing myself, I had carved out a niche. Monetizing my trauma and weaponizing my pain has allowed me to take my darkness and alchemize it into joy. Within capitalism there is no ethical consumption. Our society creates more misery than joy, we all know this well. This entire opus is an effort to support myself in this cold, heartless, and unforgiving system while retaining my integrity and vision, as well as creating something entertaining for my viewers. It appears as though I have crashed my Tesla at the intersection of misery and horniness, and Hentai & Crack came out.
To this day, H&C is one of my favorite works of art I’ve ever made. It was just so organic and unfiltered and for lack of a better word, special to me. I get sentimental about ridiculous things. I love seals. I exert a lot of mental energy into destroying the stigma around what I do for a living. Demystifying a misunderstood line of work is no easy feat, and parasocial relationships are such an unexplored terrain, but making art about it is a start. My OF page is run with authenticity that presents as a mirage. I lure with hotness, but beneath the surface is a melodrama as dark as it is racy. It’s sexistential — who am I really? This fragmentation of the persona, and shattered cosplaying of the self, reflects in the erratic soundscapes of the music I make. Hentai & Crack’s hentai tracks all sound quite different, more like a psychedelic collage than an album that weaves seamlessly. There is no single; all the songs have equal weight. That’s not to say there’s no method to the madness — the mix of lowfi and higher end production is deliberate. It’s a nexus of sexus. It’s a moment in time.
We document essentially 24/7 of our lives online. We produce ourselves and we doctor our features and we curate what we want everyone to see. And don’t get me started on the AI’s producing us, banning us, algorithming us. It is no longer a far fetched concept: the singularly is here and we live in the simulation. One of my songs contains the lyric “a shrine to the simulation” and maybe that’s what H&C really is.
A few of the H&C songs were performed at Cyber Castle, one in a series of Castle art shows that I put together, but I haven’t performed the whole album fully live until now. Ironically, the album was deleted from OF last year because of a new AI filtering system that they installed, that registered overlays of my body as “multiple unverified participants”. I then learned that OF has no human customer service team, only copy-and-paste responses by autofilters, which is something about the platform that I actually don’t like: for something that allegedly champions guest-to-model interaction, there’s especially no customer service. How strange, right? I was honestly very heart broken when it was deleted, because I had no way of pleading my case and the deleted file was my baby. This performance will give it justice and let me move on. Because it was, truly, a grief! But work is work. Sex work is work. For my neurodivergent hot ass, working from home safely while creating art is a godsend. It’s not for everyone, it’s a much tougher job both physically and psychologically than people may assume. Hentai & Crack is a moment for all emo cam girls out there. There are so many myths and wrongful accusations about us, people will always judge, but I personally enjoy the work we do. And in any case, in the surveillance state, we are all camgirls. If you can’t beat capitalism, have sex with it.
The first volume of Hentai & Crack will be screened and performed for the first time at Highways on Feb 3rd at a film and music night curated by Celeste X, called 1-900-Bodies on the Line. I look forward to it. See you there, horny chitches, cuz it will be a chussy slay like no other.
Polaroids and video: WMF
