ihung.org

Since there has been a lot of confusion surrounding the relationships between ihung, Only Flesh, and Modified Soul, which was furthered by some (unintentionally) erroneous information in an earlier post, it’s only right to clarify it all.

Only Flesh has been a performance art, body art, rock & roll act for, well, longer than I really remember. I remember seeing them at 1470s in Dayton, Ohio back around 2000 and during the show, Rev did some crazy bloodletting and bleeding on stage, the likes of which I’d never seen in person. This was before I’d done my first suspension or flesh pull, so I was blown away. I’d had some previous exposure to body art as performance art, but it always seemed distant since my knowledge was primarily from reading about Stelarc, Ron Athey, Bob Flanagan, and the like. Several years later, Rev approached ihung to do his first suspension, which began our working relationship.

Modified Soul came around as a shop around 2004 (I think), and it quickly became a hub of suspension activity in Columbus. The founder, Dave, had been involved with suspensions for several years at the time, having worked alongside members of CoRE and been a body piercer for a long while. Dave and I became fast friends and worked together quite a lot, although in the beginning, we remained separate suspension groups. His group was called Modified Soul (also the name of his piercing shop) and consisted of a handful of awesome members, and when we started discussing legality and all that that entails, we realized that doing suspensions under the name of the shop might not be the best move so far as the law is concerned. We discussed it with members of ihung and Modified Soul before agreeing to unify under the name ihung. This was a tremendous day for both groups and I’m certain that I speak for all those involved in saying that it’s brought us all together for the best and pushed all of us to being better practitioners.

This unification wasn’t without it’s hardships though; Dave had been working with Only Flesh to facilitate Rev Lower’s suspension/body mod ideas for Only Flesh shows, whereas ihung had taken a staunch “no shows” stand. Now that Modified Soul and ihung were one and the same, we had to figure out how this would work out. Only Flesh’s suspension shows are performed and planned, and executed by Only Flesh, whose members largely overlap with ihung’s. Rev Lower is the creative mastermind behind the shows, but that’s not all they do. Ever since the early days of Rev’s suspension career, Only Flesh has also facilitated private suspensions of their own for those who are interested. Often times, these suspensions involve members of Only Flesh, ihung and Nu Ethix, and many other groups! One can easily see how it gets confusing.

The overlap of members, constantly working together, and the usual gossip and miscommunication that happen in the modified community, it all gets complicated. Thus, this post came about to try to make some sense of it all, and to clarify our relationships. Simply put, Only Flesh is their own, unique and highly talented entity, which rarely gets the credit they deserve because most people (falsely) believe that they are ihung, and my previous post really didn’t do much towards giving Only Flesh their proper recognition. Which means, next time you see Rev Lower, let him know how awesome Only Flesh is! So, I wanted to take the opportunity to publicly apologize to Rev Lower for previously misrepresenting him and Only Flesh as well as to thank them for being awesome to work with.

I finally got around to printing out some ihung stickers to give out Dallas SusCon, so if you are going to be there, hit me up and I’ll give you some. We should have some available afterwards to hand out wherever as well.
edit: I completely forgot to thank Dave and Marah for creating the image and making it printable, and Guerilla Printing for getting them to me so quickly!

UPDATE : Just wanted to note that this post has caused a lot of confusion, so I’ve created a new post which clarifies this relationship and gives all credit where it is due. My apologies to Rev. Lower for causing any issues as I only meant to showcase his creativity and success with this post.

When ihung first got involved with performance suspensions and flesh pulls, back in 2002 or so, we more or less immediately were in contact with Only Flesh. Before we really started working with them, we sort of worked alongside them, in that we would be booked for similar shows, doing similar body modification acts, but would perform very separately. In fact, the Ohio suspension community was so divided that at these shows, we wouldn’t share gear or even assist one another in hook insertion, rigging, cleanup, or anything at all. We operated as two completely independent groups. There were some strong opinions and drama involved in all of this, particularly in regards to performances, which led ihung to back out of public performance and stick only to private, more ritual based suspensions.

Now, as anyone who follows us knows, we now work regularly with Only Flesh to facilitate the suspension side of their shows. This is due to Dave’s friendship with Rev Lower (driving force behind Only Flesh) and my friendship with Dave. See, when Modified Soul was still up and running, Dave was responsible for handling the suspension side of Only Flesh, while Rev and the band concentrated on the music and on performing asked by Rev Lower to assist in executing Rev’s body art plans for their shows. This helped to make certain that their shows go off as safe and clean as possible.

Our involvement with Only Flesh has also allowed us to try out some crazy ideas for shows. Rev is a amazingly creative and comes up with wonderful ideas for shows, which are then planned out with multiple team members so they they are handled safely but still wildly entertaining wonderful sport when it comes to these ideas and often endures high levels of insanity (although always handled with the utmost safety) for the sake of putting on a great show. One such show, Rev wanted to zipline down onto the stage from the 2nd floor of the venue. Once we were onsite, it became clear that this wasn’t really possible to do 100% and if we did it, it would only be like 2 seconds of him flying and most people would probably miss it. Instead, Rev we came up with a way to start him on the floor in the back of the crowd, lift him to the ceiling, have him cut the rigging above him and swing down to hang below the next I-beam, raise up, cut, drop, repeat, about 5 or six times before making it to the stage. The rigging was quite difficult and it required a few dry runs to get right and we really had to consider what gear was proper to use for it. We ended up using 1200 pound MBS cord to rig him to the ceiling, tied to carabiners, with the main structural rigging rope threaded through each carabiner. He was equipped with an Aerojack Knife to cut the cord and not risk cutting his main rigging line. We knew that the visual effect would be pretty intense, but what we didn’t realize is that once the cord had weight on them and were severed, they made an amazingly loud noise which only added to overall performance.

This post is largely celebrate Only Flesh getting an actual record deal, with a new album on it’s way as well as a DVD of live videos and much more. Secondly it’s here as a reminder that we, as a community, need to continue to come together, putting aside our differences and work together to make the suspension community even stronger, largely with events like Dallas Practitioner’s SusCon!