Tone Glow 016: Our Favorite Songs, January-April 2020
Tone Glow's writers highlight 30 songs from the first four months of 2020
A photo from our family vacation at Mili Mili island (L-R: Joshua Minsoo Kim, Sam Goldner, Mia Antoinette, Leah B. Levinson).
Something I’ve come to learn with Tone Glow is that I need to push back against my gut reactions, against received wisdom for what a successful music publication should look like. I’ll be frank: I was hesitant to include some of the songs that appear on the list below. “This is Tone Glow,” I thought, “we’re an experimental music newsletter.”
In that thinking came a realization that’s akin to ones I’ve had as a teacher: To adhere so strongly to established standards and expectations is to strip people of their personhood. In a classroom, for me to reject the way in which a student wants to learn—even if it’s unconventional or requires considerable work on my end to differentiate instruction accordingly—is to invalidate who they are. In a similar way, rejecting a music writer from writing about a song they love—or writing about a song at length—is to commit that same dehumanizing act.
Looking through all the blurbs we’ve written, I’m glad I allowed everything that was submitted. I’m so proud of my writers; I think you’ll find that a good chunk of them are writing at their very peak here. And it makes sense: this is music they love. The goal of Tone Glow has always been to highlight experimental music, but I realize now that that’s always been secondary. Tone Glow’s real goal has been to help writers and artists feel like actual, individual people.
As such, I’m happy to present 30 of our favorite songs of the year thus far, all released between January and April. There’s experimental music, but also pop and rock and rap. But even more than that, there’s 25 music writers. 25 humans. 25 people who have their own personalities and tastes and lives. We hope you get to know us better, even if just a little bit. —Joshua Minsoo Kim
Shots - “First Things First” (AMPLIFY 2020)
I love experimental music, but it often poses challenges to me in ways that I feel I’m too stupid to surmount. I don’t generally find music “challenging” in the sense that it hampers my enjoyment of it, but I do find that high concept things tend to go over my head or lose my interest. My critiques of experimental art are largely centered around my own experiences with them. If it sounds cool, I like it. If it makes me feel something, I like it. If I have to follow along with a score or look at a complicated diagram to understand the process it doesn’t automatically translate to a loss of interest, but it’s more likely. Field recordings have long been one of my favorite types of music because of their elegant simplicity. This is a moment in time; a snapshot of something that happened, that will never happen the same way again. There is usually no narrative to latch onto, unless you want to make one up for yourself.
Shots has a process to the music they make, but I don’t get the impression they particularly care if you know what it is. There are arguments to be made that they make field recordings, free improvisations, or compositions, but who really cares where it slots in? I find it validating to enjoy this music without having the slightest clue how it’s being made or why, and knowing that it doesn’t even matter. At first I found it tempting to listen closely and try to notice patterns or identify sounds, but what’s the point? I wasn’t getting any satisfaction out of that exercise. It just sounds neat. Relaxing my brain and allowing myself to enjoy it felt enough like a reward. At the risk of getting too analytical when my thesis here is that analysis is anathema, it feels like the point Shots is trying to make is that there is no point. John Cage made the argument that any sound is musical by writing a score for silence and letting the listener fill in the blanks by keeping their ears open to what’s around them. Shots is making the same argument in a more simple and less pretentious way: let’s just do stuff. If it’s musical to you, great; if it’s not, well, fuck it. —Shy Thompson
Purchase First Things First at Bandcamp.
Christian Mirande - “The Shark Presentation” (Anathema Archive)
“The Shark Presentation” is a tragedy in three acts. It begins with found sound from what seems to be a cassette made by a kid on vacation: “Steve just pulled a SHARK outta the ocean… HEY lil shark… and all the kids are holdin’ her, they’re takin’ pictures…” This clip transitions into a reading from Henry Beston’s book about Cape Cod, The Outermost House, in which Beston watches a school of herring struggle to escape a natural dam and writes, “I began to reflect on Nature’s eagerness to sow life everywhere, to fill the planet with it, to crowd with it the earth, the air, and the seas.” Finally, it ends with a list of oceanside sites in New Jersey, including Cape May, Tom’s River, Long Beach Island, Barnegat Bay.
On an album titled My Friend Went to Heaven on the Frankford El that has instructions for the administration of Naloxone for an opioid overdose in its liner notes, it’s difficult not to see connections in this textual kaleidoscope between these waterways, Beston’s comments on the proliferation of life, and the tragic loss of Mirande’s friend. Follow the Delaware River backwards from the beachgoing spots along the Jersey Shore—popular to both people and baby sharks—and you’ll run into the Schuylkill River. In its transit across Philadelphia, the Frankford El goes under the Schuylkill between the 30th and 15th Street stops. While we consider ourselves apart from nature’s spectacle, scooping up sharks for photo shoots, we’re also caught in what Beston describes as its incessant cycle of life begetting life, with no pause to help the struggling. Beston asks of his herring, “What bruising and slow-killing struggle will they not endure to accomplish the earth’s purpose?” Fair to ask ourselves the same question, or more to the point, to ask whose purpose we undertake our own slow-killing struggle for.
If this strikes you as dark, that’s because it is—this is a dark moment on a dark album. The track’s distortion and static and acousmatic sounds infuse these monologues with an odd sense of dread. For an optimistic ending, you might want to turn back to the source text. Though the excerpt on “The Shark Presentation” stops short of this scene, Beston’s herring do escape, vanishing “from sight like a reflection from a glass; I could not tell when they were gone or the manner of their going.” —Matthew Blackwell
Purchase My Friend Went to Heaven on the Frankford El at Bandcamp
Grimes - “Delete Forever” (4AD)
When I play this song, I feel like I just left someone important to go somewhere I shouldn’t. Grimes said that she wrote this song the night Lil Peep died, overwhelmed with the loss of everyone she knew that died from overdose. The banjo loop is melancholy but sweet, it makes me think about the reverential pain of folk music, especially when paired with that crying violin. I think the little ad-libs Grimes peppers throughout are clever—she maintains the nostalgia of folk while vaguely gesturing towards hip hop, Lil Peep’s genre of choice, keeping her drums loud and slamming with the banjo ever-present. “More lines on the mirror than a sonnet” is probably my favorite lyric of the year. It’s something you’d say if you were proud and ashamed.
I won’t pretend like this isn’t my favorite song of the year for entirely personal and emotional reasons. Addiction and mental health often get the black-and-white treatment, usually they’re boiled down to “that’s bad!” but it’s obviously more complicated than that. People wouldn’t stay the way they were if it didn’t feel good, if it weren’t easy. In some ways, this song motivates me to keep going to therapy (it used to be hard for me to go, a lot of my identity was based on the mental illness I have). Also, I really love Lil Peep. We’re both from the south shore of Long Island, and I think I understand his frustration with living here. I feel really emotionally connected to this song. I like it a lot. —Ashley Bardhan
Purchase Miss Anthropocene at Bandcamp.
Cindy Lee - “Heavy Metal”
If I have any reasons to be thankful for being born in Calgary, Alberta, one of them is surely the overlap between my formative music fan years and the existence of the band Women. The quartet formed by siblings Pat and Matt Flegel, the late guitarist Chris Reimer, and drummer Mike Wallace is responsible for creating one of the influential and widely imitated sounds of the past two decades. Faithful facsimiles of their spidery guitars, stately bass lines, and ghostly vocals delivered in a lo-fi haze became so commonplace among indie bands that they inspired me to jokingly coin the genre term ‘Flegel Rock.’ But if anyone reading this has yet to hear Women’s second and final album, Public Strain, please stop whatever you’re doing and throw it on immediately.
Following Women’s chaotic conclusion, Pat Flegel continued to produce music with a variety of projects and aliases—Androgynous Mind, Fels Naptha/Phil’s Knapsack—until settling around 2012 as Cindy Lee. Channeling decades of trauma and tragedy into an exploration of feminine identity (which may have been hidden in plain sight in the name of their best-known band since day one), Cindy Lee’s music crossfades between abrasive guitar noise and beautiful retro-styled pop, like a haunted girl group on stage at the Overlook Hotel.
What’s Tonight To Eternity, released on Valentine’s Day by Superior Viaduct sublabel W.25TH, is the first release in a planned 2020 trilogy from Cindy Lee, showcasing their most melodic and accessible songwriting to date. The album closes with the heartbreaking “Heavy Metal,” dedicated to the memory of Chris Reimer, who Flegel first met at age 13. With swooning strings and a gentle swaying tempo, the song includes lyrics that will move anyone who has lost a friend from their childhood: “When we were young / We would laugh / So carefree / The pain would circle over me / When you met me / Buried deep in my heart.” As listeners catch up with haunting, enveloping, and emotionally devastating songs like this that Flegel has been creating in semi-secrecy, their shadow simply grows larger. In the years to come, it wouldn’t surprise me to see Cindy Lee clones stepping out in sparkly dresses and stilettos of their own. —Jesse Locke
Purchase Whats Tonight to Eternity at Bandcamp.
070 Shake - “Terminal B” (GOOD Music / Def Jam)
“Terminal B” is a lesbian retro-futurist song about being in love for the second time. Most of the world learned of 070 Shake in 2018 after her phenomenal performance on ye’s “Ghost Town.” It's hard to overstate just how much her presence was felt during that moment: I still remember watching her dance during the stream, acting as free as its lyrics suggest, her vocals outshining anything else on the album. She’s just as incredible on “Terminal B,” carrying the depths of her emotions as she sings about the fear of falling in love again. It's clear she doesn't want it to happen, referring to her girlfriend as a “lockdown lover.” In the background, airy synths accentuate every emotional moment—they fall back to highlight her vulnerability, rise up again to meet her at her most powerful. At the climax, the instrumentation builds her up as she reveals why she's so scared of falling in love: the possibility of infidelity. But the stars align, and the synths fade back to let strings emerge, covering up any insecurities she’s divulging. —Alex Mayle
Purchase Modus Vivendi at 070 Shake’s website.
Andrew Weathers - “Northwest Escarpment” (Aural Canyon)
Familiar uncertainty hums on, guides you over dark roads, wind blows September air, the moment between summer and fall. A liminal space. You have always existed in liminal spaces. Somewhere between home and lost, roots unable to fully grab hold of clay soil, unable to be carried, windblown over the sands. Comfort in the familiarity of being adrift; endless road, open highway, this time, will it lead you home?
Sonoran salt gives way to damp mists, obscures the horizon; let it envelop you, after all, you have always found serenity in the endless cessations between indecision and clarity.
Summer rains not yet willing to fall over parched creosote; ocotillo bloomed too early, barely seen against black mountains and dark skies. There is solace in the still of the desert but only when you are in motion. Phantom shadows float across headlights, disappear into the Plomosas. They are the ghosts of past promises to yourself, set free to guide wordless prayers, new paths. July rains can still move over mountains. —Mia Antoinette
Purchase Dreams and Visions from the Llano Estacado at Bandcamp.
Noel Brass Jr. - “The universe at 2 a.m.” (self-released)
There’s a mixture of buzzing synthesizers and electric piano here—in them I hear shades of Vangelis, John Carpenter, Bob James. As the song progresses, its wandering flow is like a middle-of-the-night stroll or a scribbling of poetry, its tremolos reminding me of night drives under city lights, gliding endlessly in no particular direction. The synths lend it all a future-noir air, with views of bold Art Deco buildings climbing up our starry sky. Noel’s effortless jazz-funk melodies are peppered in to add a relaxed feel: a window into a much-needed world, one that’s fallen into quiet introspection. —Jeff Brown
Purchase “The universe at 2 a.m.” at Bandcamp.
Matt Evans - “Spinning Blossoms” (Whatever’s Clever)
Percussionist and composer Matt Evans forms a funky, undulating atmosphere on “Spinning Blossoms.” The piece comes from Evans’s debut solo album, New Topographics, which explores the points at which digital and acoustic sound intertwine. Each song on the record is hypnotic, but “Spinning Blossoms” stands out for its mesmerizing combination of pulsating rhythm and oscillating electronics. Warbling echoes contrast with percussive crunches and groovy glitches, uniting to form a surrealist musical realm. In some ways, it calls to mind the nostalgia of an earlier internet, where miniature themes colored everything from logging on to receiving mail, but the bright and crisp production style makes the vibrant melodies feel modern. The accompanying music video, however, plays into reminiscence by leaning into lo-fi aesthetics—muted colors, grainy film, and harsh juxtapositions—that fully absorb you into a preliminary era of digital consumption. Perhaps the song’s biggest success lies in its ability to combine seemingly disparate elements into one succinct package that’s as danceable as it is heady. “Spinning Blossoms” is a vivid swath of sound, providing both food for thought and a pulse worth tapping your toes to. —Vanessa Ague
Purchase New Topographics at Bandcamp.
Anna B Savage - “Chelsea Hotel #3” (City Slang)
The critical utilization of the term “masturbatory” is almost always derogatory—a metaphorical summary of a subject’s overindulgence and pretension. But Anna B. Savage’s “Chelsea Hotel #3” is one of the most masturbatory songs I’ve heard this year, literally. Mixing the high and lowbrow over a trembling acoustic guitar—one that mirrors the song’s namesake—Savage’s intimate lyrics recall her sexual insecurities and awakenings, resolving to prioritize herself and her satisfaction, and to let go of thinking of herself as a secondary, passive object. As Savage’s personal confidence and pleasure grow over the course of the narrative, so does her vocal delivery—a whisper that swells into a howl. In just over five minutes, the instrumentally bare and vulnerable track fits in moments of affecting vocal harmonies, triumphant climaxes, and hilarious references to Y Tu Mamá También and Dr. Frank-N-Furter, all the while forwarding themes of autonomy and empowerment. —Evan Welsh
Purchase “Chelsea Hotel #3” at Bandcamp.
Kelly Rowland - “Coffee” (KTR)
“Coffee” is for cuddling and teasing, for kisses on foreheads and quick dirty fucks. “No time to waste,” Rowland sings, and if you listen with that same urgency, synthesized steel drums can bring you a paradise that exists between bodies, in the steady gaze of locked eyes. Every other line’s a double entendre, direct and sly, cute and coy. Her ad-libs and vocal rhythms crest like waves over percussion—you can sense the tactility, the movement; it’s like fingers grazing against skin, every whorl imprinted. Best of all, it treats sex as invigorating and nothing-at-all—as essential and ordinary as a cup of joe. At two minutes, you feel the depth of its warmth, the pain of its brevity, the charm of its fleeting joy: it’s amuse-bouche and dessert all at once. —Joshua Minsoo Kim
Playboi Carti - “@ Meh” (AWGE / Interscope)
The highest-rated comment on “@ MEH,” from YouTube account cain webster, says: “at this point, the instrumental is rapping and he’s the beat.” Maybe that’s obvious—sure, maybe it’s partially a joke—but cain webster instantly unlocked why I found “@ MEH” so fucking good. Where the beat typically forms the rhythmic core around which everything else revolves, Carti’s sparse, pitched-up vocals mark out regular blocks of time; versus the dense outpouring of words in songs like Megan Thee Stallion’s “Cash Shit” or Lil Herb & Lil Bibby’s “Kill Shit,” Carti basically arrives every two bars on the dot, touching down briefly before vanishing again, while Jetsonmade, Neeko Baby and Deskhop’s beat splinters freely from the timeline, streaming in all directions, interlocking with and detaching from Carti’s words: ecstatic rhythm.
With the ‘role reversal’ of beat and instrumental, all the elements—usually stacked, layered, separated—are flattened and abstracted onto one plane of existence: Carti’s vocals and the producers’ synths are formed from the same material; the beat isn’t just a vehicle for Carti’s words—the two play off each other, at times wrestling, at others dancing.
This established, I hear strands of the most radical and transcendent electro, techno, footwork and jungle here: in the lightning-bolt arpeggios, I hear Drexciya’s “Digital Tsunami,” Octave One’s “Blackwater,” DJ Stingray’s “Serotonin”; in the expert, scientific rhythmic sensibility and construction, I hear Dillinja’s “Sky” and Robert Hood’s “Museum”; in the emphasis on sharp, fragmented loops that adhere to a rigid pulse as much as they burst out of it and show how much life can exist between two ticks of a metronome, I hear Jeff Mills’s “Casa” and Underground Resistance’s “Transition.” When Carti switches it up, even slightly, the repetition at the core of “@ MEH” is such that the beat deceptively seems to slow down or speed up—contract or expand—even though it’s objectively marching forward at the same tempo.
The ‘chipmunk’ effect on Carti’s voice—typically reserved for the beat—also directly recalls the sample-based vocal chops at the core of the best club music; as tracks like DJ Rashad’s “Let It Go” and Jlin’s “Unknown Tongues” prove, few things are as thrilling as a single, perfect vocal refrain—the stable core of a whirlwind of percussion and color—constantly, repeatedly recontextualized. Similarly, with every subtle vocal shift, Carti gives a new glance at, a different angle of, the monolith.
More than anything, this is pure body music—the bass kicks in within two seconds and never lets up; pure rhythm—rather than fracturing rhythm, it works within its bounds, bringing it to the greatest possible intensity; and pure abstraction—not only are beat and vocals flattened into each other, but adlib and line, chorus and verse are too. Carti is revolutionizing the form by stripping it down to its most essential elements—everything is reduced to the barest gesture, sharpened for impact.
People, often in bad faith, make a ruckus over Carti’s vocal style; but how many musicians are making us think about language on such a deep level (from YouTube: ‘he’s speaking five languages at once’ / ‘he’s rapping in cursive’ / ‘He was tired of people copying him so he made his own language’), pissing tons of people off in the process, and constantly pushing limits, without ever becoming a novelty or gimmick? If I sound excited, it’s because I am—“@ MEH” is on another level, and gathers so much of what I love about music in one place. Carti knows he’s that good; it only takes one listen to “@ MEH”—lyrics included!—to hear the utter confidence in himself and the vision: everyone else just talks shit. —Sunik Kim
Charli XCX - “Forever” (Atlantic / Asylum)
No major-league pop artist was as prepared for our new indoor reality as Charli XCX. For Charli, the internet has always been a fertile breeding ground for creative reinvention: a place where mainstream and niche culture can be folded together, where pop music meant for stadiums can seamlessly collide with unusual genres suited for home listening, and where controversial sounds (like those purveyed by PC Music and 100 gecs) are understood and welcomed with open arms. At the blink of an eye, Charli immediately transitioned from filling clubs to filling Zoom parties, dropping music videos and online festival sets that, in all their optimism and confidence, seemed to scream: We are going to be okay.
Quarantine has only brought the sentimental qualities of Charli’s music to the forefront, with songs hinging on such simple statements as “I’ll love you forever” and “I like everything about you.” It’s as if all the thorny complications of relationships Charli has dealt with before—the line between bad-bitch theatrics and open-hearted vulnerability, between surface-level sex and deep emotional commitment—have completely dissolved in the face of a global wound. Listening to “Forever” feels like centering oneself while everything else seems to collapse. Its effect is therapeutic, the kind of hopeful, open-hearted promise of unconditional love you only hear in pop songs, promising eternity while only lasting a couple minutes.
But there’s darkness beneath the surface. When taken with the music video, which consists entirely of rapid cuts of fan-submitted footage (a concept that could easily come off as gimmicky, but in Charli’s hands becomes dreamlike), “Forever” reveals itself as a unique kind of love song: one that’s saying goodbye. Charli sings about ghosts, aging, “Cold just like December”—even the very first line of the song mentions suicide. Cars have often taken on a deeper meaning in Charli’s work, whether as a symbol of reckless freedom, maturity and reinvention, or the kind of perfect moments that happen more in our imaginations than in real life. In “Forever,” though, they become more like the scar of a bittersweet memory. “You and I drove for miles,” Charli reminisces wistfully, before admitting that she’s finally driven the car off the road. Before, this would’ve just felt like best-night-ever shenanigans; but on “Forever,” she sings as if it really is going to be the last time.
The coat of static that covers the track creates a sensation that the song itself is sinking as Charli dreams of growing old one day and looking through photos, having memories of experiences that she’s actually living right now. Even if it seems simple, “Forever” is a layered slice of pop as per usual from Charli, a song as easy to dance to as it is to cry to, and a reassurance that, yes, even if things aren’t going to be okay, “I’ll love you forever.” —Sam Goldner
Oranssi Pazuzu - “Uusi Teknokratia” (Nuclear Blast)
Black metal, in theory the most puritan genre in metal, can still offer exciting music when it evolves naturally without losing sight of its basic premise of sounding evil. We can argue that in order to retain that spine-chilling feel, it needs to reinvent itself to avoid being predictable, which can be achieved by focusing on the extreme nature of the genre (the notion of extreme can be applied to musical structure, for example) or by incorporating new elements that are nonetheless present in its DNA even if they don’t seem evident at first.
Oranssi Pazuzu have chosen to integrate elements of psychedelic rock into their black metal template, and on their most recent album this formula gets enriched by new elements taken from a genre that again may seem unrelated to some, but in hindsight shares common traits: classical minimalism, the type practiced by Glass and Reich, here used to great effect, blending nicely with their sound and making the listening experience all the more visceral. It’s a relatively long song at seven plus minutes, and quite harrowing in that unique black metal feel, but it never gets tiresome due to the flow of the music. It’s a perfect combination of ferocity and craft, my favorite song of this very nasty year. —Gil Sansón
Purchase Mestarin Kynsi at Bandcamp.
CNDSD - “Exhale Azala” (SUBREAL)
The Mexico City-based artist Malitzin Cortes makes shockingly naturalistic sounds from algorithmic protocols. Cortes, who performs as CNDSD, uses audio programming languages like SuperCollider to compose electronic music that transcends any limits set forth by analog performance. “Exhale Azala,” a particularly buzzing track from her latest EP In Tongues, opens with rounded percussion that recalls the extraordinary precision and speed of a woodpecker, intoxicating in its exacting pace. Over the course of six minutes, she layers electronic harp sounds, transcending in recursively tighter cycles. Those harps smooth over an inflection point, in which the drums lose their wooden quality and become altogether hollow, revealing the track’s sparse, shuddering core. The rhythm fades like echoing aftershocks, a metallic, ambient closure that feels worlds away from the introduction’s warm, rapacious beat. It’s dazzling how inviting this all sounds: an IDM thought experiment that never loses its heart. —Arielle Gordon
Purchase In Tongues at Bandcamp.
Against All Logic - “If You Can’t Do It Good, Do It Hard” (Other People)
The draw is the appearance of no wave icon Lydia Lunch, and her part doesn’t begin until two-thirds into the song, so it’s up to Nicolas Jaar to keep your ears occupied. He does just that: the playful call-and-response of the twitchy ‘riff’ and robotic buzz, the deep tribal boom of the drum, both building towards Lunch’s appearance. Lydia’s part goes like this: “Because you can’t beat ’em, kill ’em / if you can’t kill ’em, fuck ’em / if you can’t fuck ’em, kill ’em,” delivered in the seethe of XTRMNTR-era Bobby Gillespie, and before you point out the circular logic here, it’s important to point out Lydia Lunch doesn’t give a fuck. Nicolas Jaar brings back the beat to a different mantra of equal power: “If you can’t do it good, do it hard,” and he proceeds to do it good and hard for the rest of the song. So much outsider house and industrial techno pull from no wave’s anti-everything aesthetic, and here Jaar returns to ground zero. Teenage Jesus and the Jerks set to house music—I bet no one in 1980 could’ve predicted this. —Marshall Gu
Purchase 2017-2019 at Bandcamp.
Carl Stone - “Au Jus” (Unseen Worlds)
Apart from John Oswald or DJ Premier, perhaps no other composer-collagists have mastered the aesthetics of the chop quite like Carl Stone. Under his pioneering scalpel, waveforms from all walks are stretched to taffy, vivisected, combined to form exquisite corpses. Until now, the challenge I’ve had with even his strongest work has always been duration; in the pieces collected for his Unseen Worlds retrospectives, the material he works with takes its sweet time to be squeezed out, to arrive at the juice. This three-minute single was a very pleasant surprise; what was once ostensibly a “tropical” house-pop snoozer plucked from the Spotify “Mood Booster” playlist is dissected into a deeply weird, bona fide banger. The result is delicious, no doubt the closest he has ever come to entering the club and taking over the decks. I want more where this came from. —Nick Zanca
Purchase Au Jus / The Jugged Hare at Bandcamp.
Yungster Jack + David Shawty - “Pressure” (nitemare inc.)
If someone funded a lab specifically to concoct the most Gen Z song possible, they’d be very angry that Yungster Jack and David Shawty already beat them to the punch. For something this jarring and unconventional to shoot up the TikTok charts speaks to how utterly unconcerned this generation’s teens are of tradition and normalcy. Yes, we had our analogues like Mindless Self Indulgence, but “Pressure” makes that scenester rap-rock hybrid look trite and dusty. It’s hard to fathom what the creative process looked like for making this, yet it’s probably child’s play for 20 year olds raised on Soundcloud and Yung Lean. The Genius lyrics even add all the stutters to the transcription because it’s so vital to understanding how the song operates, as if it could even be captured by words on a screen. “Pressure” is a paradigm shift past 100 Gecs and Drain Gang’s beginner steps of transforming glitch and rap into something with true pop teeth. It fashions itself as the self-assured conqueror by which future sounds are to be measured by. Your move, millennials. —Eli Schoop
10k.Caash - “Flip Flop” (Def Jam)
It bursts open like candy, a likeness it readily provides: “gumball, butter drop, she get freaky for a lollipop.” Blown-out bubblegum sparking my ears. Here, the young MC and dance innovator (having made some of the loudest claims to “the whoa”) drops any semblance of hardcore posturing for something more buoyant. It follows the format of his Kenny Beats-produced breakout “Aloha” to a T but subs out the horny menace persona for a play at naiveté, albeit horny naiveté nonetheless. His lifted tenor never breaks but rises to something close to breaking, a shout that is, to me, melodic and energizing. If Sheck Wes’s “bitch” ad-libs were the cathartic punk plosives they were esteemed to be, out of 10k.Caash’s mouth the word arrives like a tenet espoused from a young Ian MacKaye: dewy-eyed, rambunctious, and clean enough to eat off of. It’s simple, crystalline, and sickly sweet, it cracks like pop rocks and rots the teeth. —Leah B. Levinson
Listen to Planet Swajjur at YouTube.
JPEGMAFIA - “BALD!” (EQT)
You can say you’re tired of JPEGMAFIA, the perpetual, 4chan edgy-rap obsession—a long lineage stemming from Death Grips, Lil Ugly Mane, Odd Future, and any slightly deviant image that gets white boys wet from anticipation. The JPEGMAFIA backlash is real, and it makes sense. He’s adversarial to critics, cocky as fuck, and revels in that fighting mentality. But, I mean, thank fucking god. Who can be fun and like critics anyway? And with tracks this good? “BALD!” is a pure victory lap after the glee given by All My Heroes Are Cornballs, dishing Ridge Racer euphoria at breakneck speed. JPEG stands at the top of the podium with no recollection of when he wasn’t this on. It’s a coronation for a figure determined to talk shit and make bangers. —Eli Schoop
The Roots - “Break You Off (feat. Musiq)” (Geffen / Universal)
The Roots’s Phrenology got the reissue treatment back in January, which means record nerds like me no longer have to shell out $70 to spin the couple tracks we need for DJ sets. “The Seed 2.0” was the first Roots song I heard, but the first album of theirs I loved was Things Fall Apart, which I heard for the first time right around when Game Theory was out, a record that blew my mind. Phrenology as a whole came a bit later to me. Approaching the cuts on Phrenology at thirty years old as opposed to sixteen is a trip, especially since I never listened to jazz in High School. It’s hard to compare the way I hear hip hop then versus now, when I’m able to pull knowledge and references from a much wider net. I forgot how long “Break You Off” was—in fact, I forgot that it had a swelling two-and-a-half minute string-section closer in a different key. Musiq Soulchild’s honey-coated croon during the refrain is infectious, and that’s what I remembered before even setting the needle down—the kind of chorus that gets lodged in your mind at random intervals. “Break You Off” is such a sexy, sleazy song done in the most tasteful way—a deep groove, cascading low woodwinds, punctuating guitar and keyboard. With recent features for rappers with a foot in street rap like Benny the Butcher, Freddie Gibbs, Eminem (sorry to bring him up), and Roc Marciano, Black Thought is one of today’s most versatile and best emcees, but on “Break You Off,” he’s Don Juan, convincing his lover to break things off with her boyfriend. I can’t say I’m on the side of cheating, but even when someone’s getting caught in the romantic crossfire, he sounds so damn good, romantic, poetic, and—above all—sharp. —Jordan Reyes
Kate NV - “Marafon 15” (RVNG Intl.)
All I know for sure is that I do not write music—it just happens to me.
—Kate Shilonosova, interview with Tank Magazine to promote her 2018 ambient album, для FOR.
I am just an instrument.
—Kate Shilonosova, eight months later, during a videotaped conversation with Thomas Venker for Kaput.
Shilonosova’s output indeed channels something superhuman, otherworldly. As a member of Moscow Scratch Orchestra, she was inspired by the collaborative ethos of Cornelius Cardew’s transgressive creations. With Glintshake, a deliciously mathy Moscow avant punk outfit, she plays a fierce frontwoman, assertive and ironic, in the style of French Vanilla’s Sally Spitz or Gauche’s Daniele Yandel. For Decisive Pink, her collab with Dirty Projectors’s Angel Deradoorian, she’s a breathless new waver, somewhere between Debby Harry and Julee Cruise. But in her solo ventures as Kate NV, she revels in loneliness, invoking the eponymous character from the Sailor Moon manga series, who becomes a great warrior only when she learns to be at peace with solitude.
And even Kate NV isn’t a single entity. There’s the jubilant city pop stan of Binasu, her debut. There’s the contemplative minimalist of для FOR, lost in a world of novel timbres and textures. And now, there’s a new NV, one who has synthesized all the elements of her past—both solo and collaborative—into Room for the Moon, her best album yet. Shilonosova has said that, after the knob-twisting, paralytic state in which she recorded для FOR, she wanted to make a more physical album. She’s also brought three musicians in to compliment her drum machine and the Buchla synthesizer she uses to mirror human imperfections.
Lead single “Sayonara” is a clear homage to Japan, but it’s more along the lines of ’70s Sakamoto than ’80s Hosono or Yamashita. And her second and newest single, “Marafon 15,” is another beast entirely. Bassist Jenya Gorbunov plays a 2-bar post-punk groove with new wave effects that repeats for the track’s duration. While the whole song stays in 6/4, Gorbunov moves in and out of sync. She plays the root on the one to start the riff, but hits a long harmonic minor seventh on the one in the next measure, creating momentary confusion as she speeds up to get back in time to repeat from the start. It’s jarring at first, but as the song moves on and other instruments enter, it merges seamlessly into the rest of the landscape. As promised, NV’s Buchla plays in parallel—though off rhythm—to her voice, which remains rigidly in time. “Слова теряют звук теряют цвет / Летят по небу, кто теперь вернет,” she sings (“Words lose their sound, their color / Fly across the sky, who will return them now?”) Within her lush sonic palate, phrases lose their meaning, subsumed by the fragmented noises around them, human voices in a dense jungle. Yet they aren’t lost entirely: they float slightly above the mix, tracked in harmony, a call and response between NV and her other selves. —Raphael Helfand
Purchase Room for the Moon at Bandcamp.
Use No Hooks - “Do the Job” (Chapter Music)
From the moment I heard “Do the Job” on Can’t Stop It! Volume 2, a compilation of Australian post-punk obscurities released by Chapter Music in 2007, I was smitten. I’d play this earworm on repeat in the car, at work, whenever and wherever opportunity presented itself. For 13 years, this one tune was pretty much the only public evidence that Use No Hooks ever existed. They came out of the Little Bands scene in late ’70s/early ’80s Melbourne, a scene defined by ad-hoc punk/noise groups that would play a couple of shows and then blip out of existence. What a shame if “Do the Job” really was all that this little band left behind.
At some point, I read an interview with a band member who casually mentioned that he had a bunch of Use No Hooks songs languishing on tapes somewhere at his house and I thought, “Well, UNH is too obscure for anyone to care about enough to find and release those tapes. Guess I’ll never get to hear them.” And then in March: Blammo! Surprise, this album appeared! The whole thing is good, but “Do the Job” is the clear highlight. It hits every button for me: outsider new/no wave sharp angles with slinky go-go grooves and a raucous party atmosphere. Imagine the awkward exuberance of early Talking Heads or Konk crossed with the disco insistence of Trouble Funk or E.U, as played by members of feral no-wave monsters Primitive Calculators (with whom UNH shared some members).
It sounds as if the song has been remixed or remastered from the 2007 version; the chorus of overlapping call-and-response voices is more legible and the instrumental sounds overall are clearer and more separated. I think I prefer the muddier sound, but it could just be that I listened to that one so damn many times that it’s too familiar. But if this thing doesn’t make you get up and dance, there’s something wrong with your speakers. Maybe you forgot to hit “play.” —Howard Stelzer
Purcahse The Job at Bandcamp.
Angelica Garcia - “Lucifer Waiting” (Spacebomb)
Angelica Garcia practices an unsubtle sort of L.A. witchcraft on the bumptious and juicy “Lucifer Waiting,” a highlight from her vibrant February release Cha Cha Palace. Hypnotic and kaleidoscopic at the same time, “Lucifer Rising” is a lush piece of pop dripping with ideas (good ones) plucked from a record ripe such numbers; yet “Lucifer Waiting” also has some dark-eyed slyness to it, not least of all because Garcia is keeping one eye on the devil at all times as she fearlessly yips and howls and enunciates with bone-rattling intensity over a heavy beat that echoes like a heart pounding with fear. Temptation (and fault lines) are everywhere in Garcia’s world, but this seance is a bright one despite the ever-present dangers. This is music made to awaken the senses with or without your permission, like a magic spell that’s taken effect before you know it’s been cast, conjuring up the glittering and golden vision of Los Angeles from the east side of the 110 freeway that reverberates in Garcia’s soul. Before the incantation is over you smell the citrus in the air, see the pavement glittering in the sun, Lucifer waiting in the corner. —Mariana Timony
Purchase Cha Cha Palace at Bandcamp.
Orchestra Baobab - “Mouhamadou Bamba” (Syllart)
For a long time, Orchestra Baobab’s Mouhamadou Bamba was impossible for Western audiences to hear in its original form. After its first publication in 1981, the material was subsequently rereleased on compilations and a bizarre reissue that featured tracks from a second album. What’s more, the tracklisting was out of order and “Yen Saay,” the closing track, was completely omitted. These attempts at releasing the group’s material were likely driven by European appetite for “world music” and the exoticization of non-Western traditional culture. Say what you will about the prevailing models of today’s reissue culture, but the album finally being reissued in its intended form is an indication of very important progress having been made in the past 40 years.
Orchestra Baobab, or Baobab-Gouye-Gui de Dakar, was probably the biggest name in ’70s Senegal and, by extension, the entirety of West Africa. Established as the house band of Baobab Club in Dakar, the group featured a successful all-star lineup, their widespread popularity no doubt assisted by the group singing in Wolof, Senegambia’s lingua franca. When Mouhamadou Bamba was released, the club had just shut its doors a year before, and the group was touring the region extensively. It would only be a few years until the more contemporary mbalax pop music, spearheaded by Youssou N’Dour (who is still incredibly popular today), would overtake and dethrone the more restrained dance music of Orchestra Baobab.
The closest points of reference for Mouhamadou Bamba are the group’s previous albums and the music of Senegalese contemporaries, which were born out of a circular exchange of ideas: Afro-Cuban jazz, once shaped by African musical elements, later made its way back to West Africa and then further mingled with the rhythms of local music traditions. On the album’s title track, the group entirely eschews the influences that the earlier material was largely indebted to; the Latin rhythms and jazz instrumentation that would normally serve as the building blocks of the music of the diaspora are nowhere to be heard, and the sun-drenched joy of Wolof traditional music is wholly absent.
Instead, the restrained rhythm section creates a melancholic canvas of psychedelic repetition, where a reggae-like bass line comes together with a jangly rhythm guitar that quietly plays tiny chords, softly engulfing everything in a shimmer of gold. Meanwhile, the lead guitar plays short minor-key passages, as if conversing with the vocalist, until breaking into a mesmerizing psych-rock solo. The guitar’s thin tone, combined with a gentle wah effect, makes it sound almost vulnerable, serving as the perfect complement to Thione Seck’s wistful singing voice. Considering the time and place the piece was recorded in, many things about it are quite unusual, but it ended up becoming one of Orchestra Baobab’s most well-known songs. Even 40 years later, it’s still easy to appreciate what’s so special about it. —Oskari Tuure
Purchase Mouhamadou Bamba at the Syllart Records website.
Gerycz / Powers / Rolin - “Cracked Steps” (Garden Portal)
“Cracked Steps” is the first song on Beacon, a collaboration of improvisational acoustic music by Ohio musicians Jen Powers (hammered dulcimer), Matthew Rolin (guitar), and Jayson Gerycz (percussion; recording, mixing). “Cracked Steps” is hypnotic and dreamy, featuring bewitching, fast fingers and mallets that create an immediate, alluring mood. Rolin’s lithe pattern picking provides tempo as much as Gerycz’s percussion. Powers bows her dulcimer into a yawning, high drone across the final five minutes, building on Gerycz’s gentle and subtle rhythms and singing bowl, never taking more space than necessary. The song crescendos tastefully without lapsing into over-dramatic or epic territory before the trio quickly and respectfully bow out. —Jordan Reyes
Purchase Beacon at Bandcamp.
Dewa Alit & Gamelan Salukat - “Genetic” (Black Truffle)
We have exhausted our most precious idioms. If you spent enough time in the past few years trawling any retailer or resource concerned with headphone escapism, it’s safe to assume you’ve experienced a rotating flux of that same small fistful of sound palettes—pipe organ meditations, workouts for archaic electronics, encounters with various strains of Eastern music often diluted and processed for Western ears. Unless one possesses enough patience to dig through it all, this saturation renders an extraction of enchantment from presumed ephemera impossible.
It would be a shame if listeners were to breeze past Genetic for that reason; not only is it the crispiest gamelan recording that I’ve ever heard, but transcendental surprise hangs high from the first cluster struck. As the piece shifts from glacially-paced bell tones to rapid-fire harmolodics, it starts feeling less like an ethnographic document and more like a wall of pure acoustic glitch. In the liner notes, Dewa Alit says that he approaches the principles of Balinese gamelan not as something fixed, but as a structure to be shaped into something radical and new. Indeed, in more ways than one, he is operating on a scale of his own—this is percussion elevated to talismanic, technicolor heights. —Nick Zanca
Purchase Genetic at Bandcamp.
FUJI||||||||||TA - “Sukima” (Hallow Ground)
The pipe organ, formerly the sole domain of classical music and church hymns, has recently become a fixture of the ambient and sound art worlds. Albums by composers such as Sarah Davachi, Ellen Arkbro, and Kali Malone have gotten much press and acclaim in recent years for their innovative approaches to the pipe organ as an instrument. They rethought the organ, attempting to eliminate the stereotypical baggage of “organ music” and create the kind of pure music the pipe organ is most peculiarly suited for. On a parallel track to these composers is the Japanese sound artist Fujita Yosuke, who, inspired by the characteristic aitake sound of Gagaku music, built his own pipe organ from scratch with no expertise in 2009. Iki is his first album in 9 years, and the first one solely for his organ.
Though Kali Malone and her ilk may have served as a direct inspiration to Fujita, their music is unfortunately defined by the limits of the often church-bound instruments they play. Much of their new approaches to the organ amount to attempts to cut apart the sound of the instrument and remove it from its physical presence. Taking away the natural reverb of a large church hall seems an obvious first step to avoiding becoming mired in tradition, but in doing so they run the risk of flattening and reducing the sound of the organ, blunting the full and rich sound into one quite dull and brassy. Fujita thankfully faces no such issue; his instrument is quite literally one of a kind.
The natural full sound it makes—a pumping and whooshing bellows with gently clacking metal stops—may not be fit under traditionally accepted notions of musicality, but it adds no mental baggage to the proceedings, and indeed only serves to focus the listeners mind on the music it makes.
Nowhere is this more apparent than on the final track of the album, “Sukima.” Arriving as a series of staccato hoots from the organ, the percussive sounds that emerge as a byproduct of its operation are allowed room to swell in the soundscape. As Fujita continues his explorations in organ making, we eagerly await to see what innovations he may inspire from his peers. —Samuel McLemore
Purchase Iki at Bandcamp.
Kitri - “Akari” (Nippon Columbia)
The classic piano riff of “Akari” takes a stroll with a pep to its step, and the sisters of Kitri elaborate on the giddiness behind its stride. “That we’re headed a gentle path downhill / I don’t want to think about that for one bit,” the pop duo softly sings as they try to keep hold of optimism. That upbeat swing eventually gets shaded by the gradual loss of innocence that comes with growing older. The sweetness of the music does its best to level out the sorrow of the lyrics, but the song ultimately shows a sliver of its underlining melancholy. With the duo’s sighs revealing a glimpse of their self-doubt, “Akari” becomes a lullaby Kitri sing to themselves so they can keep their faith that things will turn alright. —Ryo Miyauchi
Halsey - “Ashley” (Capitol)
I never liked being named Ashley. Every character named Ashley is always so basic and mean. The only Ashley I like is Ashley Spinelli from the show Recess because she was a bitch in a powerful way. I used to hate Halsey exclusively because of her legal name—Ashley—so I guess I get jealous of other Ashleys if they challenge my position as the Alternative, Artistic Ashley. But this song is pretty, the little synth loops are bubbly and I love the crackly straining of Halsey’s voice as she explodes into the chorus, wondering about “someday, when I burst into flames.” Usually, songs are not about Ashley. They’re about Jolene, Mary, and most often, Baby. Halsey is most likely singing about herself, but really, “Ashley” could be about any “Ashley,” even me. Sometimes I feel like disintegrating, too. I want to change too. I bet a lot of Ashleys feel like a “fucked up girl” looking for their “own peace of mind.” Maybe we all play this song and think of each other. —Ashley Bardhan
Purchase Manic at the Halsey website.
Planet 1999 - “Night” (PC Music)
It was a Thursday night when you told me the truth, that you couldn’t risk dating me. It made sense—I’m not sure I’d date me either.
I left Planet 1999’s “Night” on repeat until morning, my finger running across my phone’s speaker grill—I wanted so bad for these half-garbled words to sound full-garbled, for “I’m over you” to sound muffled, confused, hurt. As I flew out for work the next day, I slept in 29F with “Night” ringing in my ears, the window closed. Whenever the song ends, there’s a momentary silence that feels like the world is pouring into you, where it feels like the music isn’t enough, that the space it creates is only ever temporary. —Joshua Minsoo Kim
Purchase Devotion at Bandcamp.
Still from Third Eye Butterfly (Storm De Hirsch, 1968)
Thank you for reading the sixteenth issue of Tone Glow. We hope you liked at least one song we picked :~)
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