Pleasure Machine Review: an unconventional apology in podcast form

In the nine-part fictional podcast series, “Pleasure Machine,” H starts with a meditation. It’s a letter, addressed to you. 

Behind the hum of a haunting choir of voices,  ”I know my voice is probably the last one you want to hear,” H begins.  “But, I’m speaking anyway. It’s what I do best, right?” 

Wrap your hands around yourself, H directs. Listeners are invited to partake in the techniques H, a queer non-binary creator, is famous for – a reknowned mentor for other LGBT people of color.  

Textured with buzzing phones, clinking glasses, and unexpected phone calls, H has curated an unconventional apology. It’s to their niece, Jojo.

H has crafted a mixtape of sounds and conversation picked up over months as pressure surmounted while juggling their artistic integrity and family needs– which led to decisions that crossed boundaries, and led to both identities spiraling.

As listeners relive that time, they’re brought into H’s world. With the enchanting slow drawl that they’re famous for, and their deeply caring sentiments: it’s hard to not see the error in their decisions, and feel empathy for their misjudgements.

Creative producer Emma Ore, director Tara Elliott, and writers Diane Exavier, May Treuhaft-Ali, and Phaedra Michelle Scott, craft a complicated story about the impact of intersecting identities on a range of characters with distinct relationships to their identities. The podcast shows the conflict between H’s responsibilities, and choices that led to remorse.

A web of phone calls, dinners, soundscapes, and meditations brings us through an immersive experience of the dimensions of H’s social world, and tells the story of the financial struggles and emotional pressures that lead H to sign over their artistic rights to Tech CEO Kane.

Each 15 to 22 minute episode leads H towards fatal mistakes. Conversations are peppered with protests from her sister that H shouldn’t be secretly recording private conversations, foreshadowing a central plot around journalistic boundaries, and the betrayal of this story.

But the fall from grace is inevitable from the start. As H toggles between the past and present, tape is layered with an inner dialogue of present narration that understands that they are walking into their own destruction. 

 H narrates a mix of regret, explanation, and naivety through satirical renditions. They introduce the “man” as the devil dressed in gold; he introduces himself as a cis-white guy. Prices are explained with the chimes of a cash register.

The layer of noises brings listeners into the art, rich with emotional depth to characters that makes it impossible to not to empathize. 

The series builds understanding of a range of LBGT identities with H at the center, as a public figure of the queer icon community of color.  H speaks to others struggling with their identities, and acts as an aunt to their niece, a high schooler at Brooklyn Tech, who’s growing into those identities too. Still, the show rarely confronts these questions head on, letting the character’s stories serve as explanation.

With each episode, the pressure of her niece’s anxiety mounts, and the dollar signs that came with the contract with the tech financier becomes more appealing. 

Phone calls turn into chats over meals. Glasses clink on a tipsy night at a ritzy cocktail bar with a client H mistook for a romantic connection. Then context clicks into place. As the podcast toggles in and out of the cocktails and H’s inner doubts, haunting music cues the sinking feeling. H has been duped. Further, they betray themself with their eroding boundaries.

The narratives weave into one that H hadn’t been able to see. Their hope had been twisted into a lever for access and manipulation. As they sign over their artistic identity, the existence of their boundaries eroded altogether. The image that they’d worked to hide from the internet was exposed, through the contract, in which, they had signed over everything.

In Pleasure Machine, the creative team from Colt Coeur gracefully illustrates a host of intimate themes– gender, identity, love, family, betrayal, and remorse– through a skillful integration of sounds and textures that intimately make it hard to not resonate.