Queering Guitar Noise, Reevaluating Punk Rock

Steve Waksman’s This Ain’t The Summer of Love (2009) critically examines the use of guitar noise in punk rock through the lenses of youthfulness, power and egalitarianism. Arguing punk and metal are defined along a continuum, in conjunction with and in opposition to each other, his thesis-driven historical project is predictably shaped by American hardcore. Though citing the importance of Lenny Kaye’s Nuggets compilation to carving out punk genealogy, Waksman under-acknowledges New York’s underground arts scene and its convergences with the gay community. This omission is unsurprising, as his guitar scholarship builds momentum through the “technophallus”: a neologism indebted to the gendered and sexual possibilities of 1970s guitar heroics, deployed to summarize aesthetic, political and ethical relationships with the instrument. Hardcore’s punk orthodoxy reproduces the technophallus’ heteromasculinist exclusions through DIY culture, suburban domesticated space and slam-dancing. This paper critiques the technophallus, and its inability to exhaustively capture performative possibilities on the electric guitar, by drawing an alternative history of punk which decentralizes hardcore. The guitarists of New York’s No Wave movement (e.g. China Burg, Lydia Lunch, Arto Lindsay) allow for the recontextualization of guitar noise as a queered (dis)orientation towards the guitar, part of a queered guitar history. Drawing on Jose Esteban Muñoz and Lee Edelman’s work with queer utopias, this paper discusses the noisiness of No Wave as queerly non-reproductive –– refusing guitar heroics’ genealogical project of canonism and legacy-making. By adopting a (dis)orienting approach to guitar technique, these guitarists detach themselves from established guitar vocabularies to create improvisational languages uninterested in standardization and reproduction. A queer theoretic approach will recover these lost narratives, facilitating a more rounded discussion of guitar history, along with a better understanding of contemporary developments such as boutique pedals with broadening sonic capabilities and mainstreamed indie music

Swab-Seq: A high-throughput platform for massively scaled up SARS-CoV-2 testing

ABSTRACT The rapid spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is due to the high rates of transmission by individuals who are asymptomatic at the time of transmission 1, 2 . Frequent, widespread testing of the asymptomatic population for SARS-CoV-2 is essential to suppress viral transmission. Despite increases in testing capacity, multiple challenges remain in deploying traditional reverse transcription and quantitative PCR (RT-qPCR) tests at the scale required for population screening of asymptomatic individuals. We have developed SwabSeq, a high-throughput testing platform for SARS-CoV-2 that uses next-generation sequencing as a readout. SwabSeq employs sample-specific molecular barcodes to enable thousands of samples to be combined and simultaneously analyzed for the presence or absence of SARS-CoV-2 in a single run. Importantly, SwabSeq incorporates an in vitro RNA standard that mimics the viral amplicon, but can be distinguished by sequencing. This standard allows for end-point rather than quantitative PCR, improves quantitation, reduces requirements for automation and sample-to-sample normalization, enables purification-free detection, and gives better ability to call true negatives. After setting up SwabSeq in a high-complexity CLIA laboratory, we performed more than 80,000 tests for COVID-19 in less than two months, confirming in a real world setting that SwabSeq inexpensively delivers highly sensitive and specific results at scale, with a turn-around of less than 24 hours. Our clinical laboratory uses SwabSeq to test both nasal and saliva samples without RNA extraction, while maintaining analytical sensitivity comparable to or better than traditional RT-qPCR tests. Moving forward, SwabSeq can rapidly scale up testing to mitigate devastating spread of novel pathogens

Massively scaled-up testing for SARS-CoV-2 RNA via next-generation sequencing of pooled and barcoded nasal and saliva samples.

Frequent and widespread testing of members of the population who are asymptomatic for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is essential for the mitigation of the transmission of the virus. Despite the recent increases in testing capacity, tests based on quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) assays cannot be easily deployed at the scale required for population-wide screening. Here, we show that next-generation sequencing of pooled samples tagged with sample-specific molecular barcodes enables the testing of thousands of nasal or saliva samples for SARS-CoV-2 RNA in a single run without the need for RNA extraction. The assay, which we named SwabSeq, incorporates a synthetic RNA standard that facilitates end-point quantification and the calling of true negatives, and that reduces the requirements for automation, purification and sample-to-sample normalization. We used SwabSeq to perform 80,000 tests, with an analytical sensitivity and specificity comparable to or better than traditional qPCR tests, in less than two months with turnaround times of less than 24 h. SwabSeq could be rapidly adapted for the detection of other pathogens

Swab-Seq: A high-throughput platform for massively scaled up SARS-CoV-2 testing

ABSTRACT The rapid spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is due to the high rates of transmission by individuals who are asymptomatic at the time of transmission 1, 2 . Frequent, widespread testing of the asymptomatic population for SARS-CoV-2 is essential to suppress viral transmission. Despite increases in testing capacity, multiple challenges remain in deploying traditional reverse transcription and quantitative PCR (RT-qPCR) tests at the scale required for population screening of asymptomatic individuals. We have developed SwabSeq, a high-throughput testing platform for SARS-CoV-2 that uses next-generation sequencing as a readout. SwabSeq employs sample-specific molecular barcodes to enable thousands of samples to be combined and simultaneously analyzed for the presence or absence of SARS-CoV-2 in a single run. Importantly, SwabSeq incorporates an in vitro RNA standard that mimics the viral amplicon, but can be distinguished by sequencing. This standard allows for end-point rather than quantitative PCR, improves quantitation, reduces requirements for automation and sample-to-sample normalization, enables purification-free detection, and gives better ability to call true negatives. After setting up SwabSeq in a high-complexity CLIA laboratory, we performed more than 80,000 tests for COVID-19 in less than two months, confirming in a real world setting that SwabSeq inexpensively delivers highly sensitive and specific results at scale, with a turn-around of less than 24 hours. Our clinical laboratory uses SwabSeq to test both nasal and saliva samples without RNA extraction, while maintaining analytical sensitivity comparable to or better than traditional RT-qPCR tests. Moving forward, SwabSeq can rapidly scale up testing to mitigate devastating spread of novel pathogens