Tone Glow 047: December Albums
Our writers tackle more than a dozen albums that were released in December 2020
Given the week we’ve had, I imagine every single person could use a bit of time to relax and remove oneself from the surrounding turmoil. As I get ready to dive into the weekend, I look forward to one of the only things I know that can provide reliable comfort: listening to music. Below, find a slew of albums released in December that we wanted to write about, ending with three write-ups on Playboi Carti’s Whole Lotta Red, one of our favorite albums of 2020. —Joshua Minsoo Kim
Hanno Leichtmann - Loop Music (Off Center)
I’m always fascinated by the early days of the new year, when it feels like the earth is recalibrating: the sunlight takes on a different luster, another coat of tinted shellac, and the air hums with the promise of new possibilities. It reminds me of the waking moments between stirring and opening your eyes, where you wonder, if only briefly, how the world you’re about to reenter might have changed. It’s an uncanny quality that I believe Hanno Leichtmann’s latest work, Loop Music, captures beautifully. Across eighteen short looping phrases, Leichtmann sustains a trembling sense of tension through simple arrangements of fuzzy orchestral samples held in suspended animation, circling back on themselves like haunted Möbius strips. Half-breaths of voices and chopped stings of organ and piano bloom quietly from fields of blackened line hiss. What I think works best about Loop Music is its sense of forward momentum; we are cycled restlessly through these snapshots of sound, never permitted to linger on them for more than a few minutes at a time. Each brief phrase only hints at the full majesty of its existence, stretching out infinitely in both directions. You could liken the album’s effect to running through an art gallery and, in your mind’s eye, extrapolating the details of each painting you see from the quick, blurred glance you get of it. It all makes for an enchanting, eerie, and singular experience. —Maxie Younger
Purchase Loop Music at Bandcamp.
Hideki Umezawa & Andrew Pekler - Two Views of Amami Oshima (Edições CN)
Three weeks ago, at the start of winter in their homes of Japan and Germany, Hideki Umezawa and Andrew Pekler released a split LP of bright, tropical ambient inspired by the life and work of Japanese painter Isson Tanaka. In 1958, Tanaka moved to Amami Ōshima, a minuscule island which most vacationers fly over on their way to the much more popular resort island Okinawa. Sitting latitudinally parallel to Morocco and northern Mexico, Amami is warm and lush with palm forests and mangroves, which remain largely untouched thanks to its small population and national park protections. This boundless greenery would serve as Tanaka’s home and sole artistic subject for the remainder of his life.
Umezawa and Pekler’s LP, Two Views of Amami Oshima, offers precisely that, with each musician crafting their take on the idyllic island. Tanaka’s paintings of Amami are flat, sharp and vivid, sometimes resembling arrangements of brightly-colored construction paper. For his side, Umezawa mixes field recordings collected from Amami's birds and insects with glassy synth notes and other chirping, burbling electronics. The total effect is sunny and plasticky, successfully conjuring both the island’s natural environment and its stylized, almost psychedelic renderings in Tanaka’s later works.
On its face, Pekler’s featherlight ambient music seems well-matched to Tanaka’s artistic style, and the artist comes through with some lovely, pulsing synth chords that build and lapse like a shoreline breeze. Pekler never visited Amami, and uses Umezawa’s composition as a point of departure for his own, imagined ‘view’ of Tanaka’s island home. This perhaps explains the only misstep on Pekler’s side: the layers and players of animal noises, which recall less a ‘dreamscape’, as the liner notes put it, than an entire sample pack played at once. Though clearly taking their cue from Umezawa’s piece, the noises here lean a little too artificial-sounding, distracting from some top-notch synth work which would have stood perfectly well on its own. —Mark Cutler
Purchase Two Views of Amami Oshima at Bandcamp.
Eiko Ishibashi - Contentless Dream (Pianola)
Five nights ago, I had a lovely dream that began with me making dumplings in my childhood home and ended with me visiting Eiko Ishibashi and Jim O’Rourke at a yard sale. The particulars of the dream are fuzzy, but what I do remember is that when I saw Eiko and Jim, I gave them big hugs and it made me feel happy (I miss hugging friends, truly). After we exchanged pleasantries, the two had to scurry off for some unknown reason and asked me to take over the operation. I obliged, ever-gracious human that I am, but as I looked to see the records that were for sale, I noticed that Jim was selling stuff I had personally sent him. “Not cool,” I thought, before waking up and remembering that I’ve never even sent him anything, and that there’s no reason to be offended by anything in that scenario anyway. Also, I didn’t bring my dumplings for Eiko and Jim to eat; I was the bad guy all along.
I share this dream partly because I wanted to remember it (Tone Glow sometimes functions as a diary, don’t you know), and partly because the seeming coherency of dream narratives comes to mind when listening to Ishibashi’s Contentless Dream, one of the most exciting entries in the artist’s prolific 2020 output. At 37 minutes, it drifts along seamlessly, occasionally tethered by the soft pulse of a skipping needle. It begins with piano melodies that wander aimlessly, suffused with the sort of reverbed mystique that Harold Budd excelled at. As the piece progresses, the piano moves to a lower register to ground it, and the sound of warped chimes and hiss blanket it in a diaphanous fog. Suddenly, it shifts into a passage with charming prepared piano, and then to one buoyed by soft creaking.
The most thrilling passage is when Ishibashi opts for dynamic, stuttering synths all for it to lead into the sound of traffic. It’s in hearing the familiar sounds of the outside world that I momentarily snapped out of the meditative state Contentless Dream brought me into. Up until that point, there had been a welcome preciousness to the whole affair, as if Ishibashi was carefully holding together the sensitivity and softness of this dream-like song. But in its final third, Contentless Dream has a great deal of tension. There are piano chords that move upwards—slowly, steadily, chromatically—and every note is a sting of pain. It feels like waking from a dream and fighting to re-enter it, knowing full well you’ll never be in that world again. In a sly move, the piece ends with the sound of traffic once more, and then the sound of a turntable being stopped: Contentless Dream ends with Ishibashi gently waking you up. —Joshua Minsoo Kim
Purchase Contentless Dream at the Pianola website and at Bandcamp.
Arthur Russell - The Deer in The Forest: March 2, 1985 Live at Roulette
The afterlife of Arthur Russell is one of the few boons of the 21st century. Too often dismissed as too difficult, Russell floated through the subcultures of premillennial America. Born in Iowa, the heartland if not exact center, he moved, going West for the summer of love and then East for NYC’s queer liberation. Along the way, he took in: culty ’60s Frisco Buddhist communes and Allen Ginsburg’s Poet’s Building in the early ’70s East Village where he lived almost until the day he died in 1992; SoHo’s New Music lynchpin the Kitchen, the queer fantasias of the Loft and the Paradise Garage, the ’80s Art incubators Roulette and the Experimental Intermedia Foundation… all the while making records that were bridges, or perhaps megamixes, of Ginsburg’s holy hooey and the uncynical if unstable genre agnosticism of Bowie and Prince; the minimalism of La Monte Young and the maximalism of Larry Levan and the studio-as-instrument inventions of Joe Meek and Lee “Scratch” Perry and Alvin Lucier and the elemental clarity of Nick Drake or Shirley Collins. In a way he was too much for his world, and seemed to leave behind too little.
And yet more of him keeps appearing. At this point, Russell could be said to form a kind of holy trinity with Patrick Cowley and Julius Eastman—and light candles that Eastman receives the extensive and revelatory reissue campaigns of his white peers—of queer visionaries, their aspects appearing on vinyl and Bandcamp like faces on shrouds. In Russell’s case, around the end of 2020, a pair of live concerts took shape, offering early and altered versions of songs from his forthcoming 1986 masterpiece, the puzzle able to break both brain and heart World of Echo. While Sketches for World of Echo: June 25 1984 Live at EI is raw and fuzzy, just him and his amplified cello making sounds like pencil marks later to be illuminated by the album’s oil-slicked watercolors, The Deer in the Forest: March 2, 1985 Live at Roulette proves Russell truly shone in collaboration.
Named after a song he didn’t play that night, and full of pieces which quote or prefigure or reconfigure other recordings, Deer sets Russell’s voice and cello across expanses of keyboards and trumpet courtesy of longtime collaborators Elodie Lauten and Peter Zummo. It starts with golden harmonic shafts moving like sunlight through a room: “A sudden chill broke the dreams he leans away from,” Russell sings, his mouth sounding very close to his mic in a fullhearted murmur. The tenderness of his bow against his strings, both scratch and caress, has an erotic beauty, but soon enough it’s moved into a lick from “Hiding Your Present from You,” just a tease. It unfurls and vanishes as “This Is How We Walk on the Moon” arrives, free of the vertigo its later recorded version delights in. Less of a party, more of a prayer.
Senses mix, as people do: “I’m watching out of my ear / when the fog goes up,” Russell sings over the lovely fuzz of “Rabbit’s Ear.” “Inside I’m like him / but more to myself.” It seems impossible he’s just sitting in a chair making all this happen, but here’s proof. Live, “Home Away from Home” is a headfuck, floors dropping out from underneath the song structure with audible clicks of Russell’s effects pedals until the whole thing blows up into an otherwise unreleased jam called (and resembling) “Singing Tractors.” It’s an abject gem not miles away from Throbbing Gristle’s Heathen Earth, a hot grit that descends, like quicksand, into a surprisingly anxious take on “Another Thought,” on record an affectionate ode to restlessness that here makes audible the drag of rumination. Lauten repeats again and again her little melody, Russell’s cello gurgles like mud sucking up a puddle. “A single thought takes up your whole time,” his voice paces, “I want a thing that I can’t see matters.” The dread calcifies into the set’s glittering climax, a lengthy take on World of Echo’s “Hiding Your Present from You” in which Russell sounds more than a little lost in the waves of sound. The song shimmers and unveils its endless layers in bliss and panic, as fabulous and claustrophobic as the opening of Kenneth Anger’s Puce Moment. In the end, it’s evidence he could do freakout. There’s also such pain.
It’s tempting to view Russell’s constant searching—the fabrication of dozens of mixes per track, his fabled daylong tuning of a kickdrum and nightlong repetitions of a single bassline, the way he rarely finished anything and even rarer would let someone else finish it for him, the entire albums deleted after test-pressing—as some kind of Buddhist or postmodern or romantic quest. Or the kind of queerness José Esteban Muñoz identified as “the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality.” That’s often what Arthur Russell sounds like, to me. But The Deer in the Forest is more than that. Russell wandered, but he also got lost in the dark. His genius was in making beauty from both situations, of sounding things out and letting them bleed into each other. He seems able to reappear forever. Echoes replicate themselves. Echoes never die. —Jesse Dorris
Purchase The Deer in The Forest: March 2, 1985 Live at Roulette at Bandcamp.
Anna Thorvaldsdóttir / Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti - Sola (New Focus Recordings)
The viola’s most popular taught repertoire centers on music composed hundreds of years ago, like most instruments with a history tied to the Western classical tradition. As a centennial celebration of three of the most prominent solo viola works, violist Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti commissions three composers to write three new pieces for solo viola; Sola, by Norwegian composer Anna Thorvaldsdóttir, is the first in this new trilogy. The piece conjures imagery of barren fields and gray, snowy days with its twinkling, uncertain placidity. Lanzilotti’s viola swims through forlorn double stops and high-pitched, airy harmonics, creating a sense of desolation that’s finally released into quiet chaos. Here, Thorvaldsdóttir writes music for isolation, inhabiting the space where you finally make peace with your own loneliness. Sola’s second side features an illuminating interview with Thorvaldsdóttir, which leaves us with perhaps the most compelling sentiment of all the sound: “I don’t care if it ever gets played, I just really want to do this, and I need to do this… I can’t stop, and I don’t wanna stop.” —Vanessa Ague
Purchase Sola at Bandcamp.
My Bloody Sex Party - Vol. 1 (Zoomin’ Night)
While continuing Zoomin’ Night’s tradition of showcasing amateur musicians, My Bloody Sex Party’s Vol. 1 is a bit of a departure for the label, whose releases have tended more towards the influences of EAI and onkyo. In contrast, this is completely unfiltered rock and roll, made by (assuming the story is true, and it has to be) a group of high school friends during their last summer vacation together. Ranging all the way from Guitar Center-style jams to abstract freakouts reminiscent of NNCK, the song structures can best be described as “improvised” and have a habit of changing shape dramatically or randomly every two or three minutes. This keeps the music from ever fully cohering as an album, but that’s not much of a downside when the joy of exploration and expression is so clearly evident in every track. Making an album with your best buds—what more could you want from your last summer vacation? —Samuel McLemore
Purchase Vol. 1 at Bandcamp.
seaketa - すぎる (Kumo Communication)
Today, while idly scrolling Twitter like I do almost every day, I caught a glimpse of #dogecoin trending in the sidebar. Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency created as a joke based around a popular meme in 2013 or so, has inexplicably made a resurgence. Scrolling through this tag, a bunch of people that are probably around the same age that I was when I first learned about Dogecoin are trying their damndest to get the value of it to rise to one dollar, and were celebrating because the value finally reached one whole cent. The popular refrain often uttered when discussing this currency—”to the moon!”—had made a comeback too, and it makes the point of Dogecoin nakedly transparent: nobody really believes in this currency, they just want to see a line on a graph go way up so that they can feel comfortable selling the stuff off for a profit. I had a Dogecoin wallet and a miner set up in 2013, which I haven’t the faintest clue how to access anymore because I got bored of it after a few days.
Dogecoin ended up dissolving at some point because it turned out to be involved in a huge scam. Its friendly, memey nature attracted a lot of kids that knew nothing about cryptocurrency and couldn’t go to their parents or the police when their money got stolen because they didn’t even know having the stuff was legal. Bitcoin had unshakable associations with black market drug sites and hitmen, but Dogecoin—its image softened by that funny shiba inu everyone loved, felt like a more comfortable environment for kids to learn what cryptocurrency was all about. The very thing that made Dogecoin feel safe is what made it ripe for exploitation. As the bright-eyed hopefuls of today’s iteration of Dogecoin daydream about how they’ll have it made once Elon Musk finally tweets about it, I’m sure a lot of ignorant onlookers can’t tell if all of it is a joke or not. I lived through the first rise and fall of Dogecoin, and I’m not even sure myself. And yet... I’m still considering putting ten bucks into it for a laugh.
Music steeped in internet imagery and culture must feel this way too, right? I remember all the think pieces in which music writers awkwardly fumbled with the idea of taking vaporwave seriously, something that has repeated itself with hyperpop and will doubtlessly happen again with hexd bitcrushed cloud rap or whatever the fuck happens next that makes us late 20-somethings feel left out. I’m a child of the internet and I spent my entire youth getting swept up in things that happened so fast I didn’t have time to really develop my thoughts about them—and I think, at least sometimes, that’s the best way to enjoy things. This seaketa album fell into my lap hours ago, and I’ve spent the entire night listening to the rest of their music. It’s all clearly got a mysterious internet-adjacent vibe to it but, honestly, I have no interest in peeling back the curtain and digging into how serious it might be. It’s just fun, interesting and makes me feel good—and that’s enough. Let’s go to the moon. —Shy Thompson
Purchase すぎる at Bandcamp.
Kevin Good - Slow, Silent, Singing (Edition Wandelweiser)
Kevin Good’s last release on Edition Wandelweiser was Listen, a piece that saw the American composer and percussionist taking field recordings and then recreating them. When listening to the album, it’s not clear whether certain sounds are the originals or the recreations, so it primarily becomes an exercise in careful listening via its mere softness. Really, though, the best thing about Listen is the addition of sparse and sudden voices throughout its runtime; the beauty of a single utterance is felt whenever it appears amidst the plaintive sounds of nature.
Slow, Silent, Singing is wildly different in that it’s a piece for solo glockenspiel (performed here by Michael Jones). While a version of this piece appeared on YouTube last year, this performance removes the high noise floor to make the listening experience all about those high-pitched tones: they resonate, interact with each other, and disappear. Frankly, this very much could have been titled Listen as well because it becomes very therapeutic to trace a single note or chord to its end.
In fact, the title here feels like a bit of a misnomer: I don’t really consider this composition to be slow or silent, and there certainly isn’t any singing. The liner notes find Michael Pisaro-Liu noting, “The notes are deceptively, patiently spread out in time—so that the decaying tones become something like melody. We, the listeners, fill the gaps. We are the ones who sing.” My experience of this album is absolutely nothing like that—it feels like there’s rarely a moment for actual silence. Usually, a note or chord is played and as I listen to it, another one has arrived either during or by the time it’s about to dissolve into silence. What occurs is a beautiful interlocking—an ever-growing web.
Slow, Silent, Singing is consequently the Edition Wandelweiser release that caught me most by surprise this year as it eschews my expectations for something on this label: when hearing this, I’m never fully immersed in the durational aspect of any note or period of silence (these glockenspiel notes fade quickly). Any moment of silence never exists for long enough to keep you sated, and for music of this ilk, the end result is as close to an adrenaline rush as you could expect. For any Edition Wandelweiser release to keep me consistently antsy is an unexpected delight. —Joshua Minsoo Kim
Purchase Slow, Silent, Singing at the Edition Wandelweiser website.
Line Gate - Apex (Mappa)
Czech musician Michal Vaľko returns from a three-year silence with Apex, a sixty-minute tape of thick hurdy-gurdy drone and layered vocal melodies. Though the two thirty-minute pieces are largely static, meditative compositions, they evolve enough to reward sustained attention. While the first side heavily preferences the hurdy-gurdy, with vocal phrases threaded through, the second side foregoes instrumentation in favour of stacked vocal drones and hymnal intonations. If the phrases themselves skew a little cheesy, the mantra-like repetition quickly effaces their literal meanings, until one almost forgets that they are listening to voice at all.
Although these are minimal, minor-key compositions, the tones of the hurdy-gurdy and voice are warm and woody, resonating right down to your thoracic cavity. The lazily looping phrases on the second side in particular have a pleasantly soporific quality which makes me want to curl up and close my eyes. This is, in my estimation, music equally suited to introspecting, zoning out, or just getting nice and cozy, on a dusky winter’s day, to watch the snow fall. —Mark Cutler
Purchase Mappa at Bandcamp.
Nick Malkin - Waiting in a Vacant Lobby (self-released)
My favorite thing about first listening to Nick Malkin’s Waiting in a Vacant Lobby was that I initially wasn’t sure if its premise was real. The album, which features field recordings taken in various video games (including Counter-Strike: Source, Team Fortress 2, Halo 3, and NeoTokyo), often sounds indistinguishable from a collage of typical field recordings taken in the real world (those who are super familiar with the games may be able to recognize them, however; according to a friend of a friend, the first recording is taken from the intel room in the Team Fortress 2 map 2Fort). There aren’t any non-diegetic sounds here, so the result is dripping water and eerie winds, birdsong and wind chimes, thunderstorms and the low hum of electronics. What I end up thinking about while hearing this album is the fact that foley artists had actually created the sounds for these games, and Malkin simply recorded them; these are real recordings of real sounds, the only artificial thing being the setting in which they’re presented. This led to an interesting revelation: video games have the capability of feeling perceptibly real insofar as we don’t engage with any visual element.
Part of what makes Waiting in a Vacant Lobby so fun is how you end up trying to identify the ways in which you can tell certain sounds are sourced from a video game. For example: The repeated clinking of a glass bottle is a bit too perfectly on beat, the sound of airplanes flying overhead is too frequent and not quite true-to-life, and the recurring audio of someone speaking on a radio feels like classic video game sound design for a desolate, bleak landscape. Naturally, this piece ends up feeling lonely; there’s never a moment when we feel like a human is next to us (there are dogs, but there’s no interaction with them; they just bark). As such, Waiting in a Vacant Lobby feels weirder the more you listen to it because this is ultimately a loneliness that’s manufactured and dramatized. And by the end of it, you can sense that. To hear such a simulacrum only makes any actual loneliness feel all the more real in comparison. —Joshua Minsoo Kim
Purchase Waiting in a Vacant Lobby at Bandcamp.
Nakajima / Ikeda / Bell - The Bell, The Pond And The Island (Superpang)
As regular readers are most likely aware, I love Rie Nakajima. I went into granular detail about how the 3D graphics software in my brain reliably draws an image that my incorporeal bundle of neural impulses loves to live inside in an earlier issue. Nakajima’s music possesses the richness of a full ensemble, effortlessly calling out and responding to itself with a sharp awareness I’d easily put up against any jazz musician this side of Miles Davis—the kinetic forces of the objects that sing her rich musical tapestries are constantly in conversation with one another, crashing together like a cascade of dominoes.
It seems fairly natural, then, that Nakajima would make interesting music with collaborators that are skilled at having conversations in their own right, responding to her waterfall of stimulus with musical objects for that stream to take shape around. I go back and forth on how I feel about Rie Nakajima collaborating with others, because I think about what that software in my head might do when the variables are tweaked. The way I draw out a landscape to her sonic palettes feels pretty much perfect to me, and I get concerned that the theorem might be broken if you go adding extra mathematical operators. I’m no physicist, but I should have more faith in my findings—Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity stood up to a mountain of scrutiny, and the Theory of Nakajima is even more perfect.
The mathematics have held true alongside Angharad Davies and Alice Purton, as well with electronics wizard Ken Ikeda—who appears on this release too, along with shakuhachi player Clive Bell. Rie Nakajima is what drew me to each of these collaborative releases, admittedly, but it shouldn’t be understated how important the other musicians are in contributing to each piece’s unique shape. I’d say Clive Bell contributes most to the general contours of this release, his shakuhachi and various wind instruments providing a sound that lays wide and flat across the mental landscape. Nakajima—as well as Ikeda—play the role of providing the object with texture, giving you something to run your fingers across and feel when you get up close to it. Like any good scientific postulate, the Theory of Nakajima works in a wide variety of practical applications. —Shy Thompson
Purchase The Bell, The Pond And The Island at Bandcamp.
end_age / Izumi Gould - Split (Ten Thousand Tapes)
Den Sei Kwan released an overlooked cassette on the famed Vanity Records back in 1981. I’m particularly fond of the shorter sketches that make up the album’s middle four tracks, but the way closer “Plastic Garden” has its electronic sputters fade into nothingness and then remains like that for the rest of its runtime is a favorite moment in the label’s entire catalogue.
“eden001” begins in a similarly minimal fashion, and my first listen had me wondering if the rest of this 23-minute track was going to be much of the same deal. While there’s still a sense of homespun electronic madness, Den Sei Kwan—working under the moniker end_age this time around—operates in a more rhythmic mode, transforming his stuttering pulses into austere techno-ish buzzing. It’s caustic but contained—there’s nothing meant to be all-consuming about this piece. It feels better for it, too, as its ramping up in noise has a delightfully clinical feel that allows for one to focus more closely on its individual elements and how they interact.
Izumi Gould’s four tracks on the B-side are decidedly more overwhelming. “lost” has an industrial edge to it, and feels like being trapped in a huge factory, albeit its lurching organ-like wheezes sound humorously turgid—it’s nice to hear “dark” music like this feel fun. “reparation I” and “reparation II” are searing noise tracks that don’t let up, but it’s closer “object” that steals the show: a short 3-minute howler that marries the intensity of the previous three tracks and delivers it as a thick cloud. It’s loud and intense and whatever, but I mostly just think it’s really beautiful. —Joshua Minsoo Kim
Purchase Split at Bandcamp.
Creode - Ectroni (Alien Passengers)
I like listening to Creode because, more than solo works from members Samantha Flowers and Tyler Hicks, there’s a real sense that you’re stumbling upon something mysterious; their music is simply there, existing. While previous Creode releases have had bursts of noise and sci-fi-like synth noodling, Ectroni is more uniformly grody and low-key. It’s a bit like that viral tweet of a bathroom filled with squirming rat-tailed maggots: confusing and gross and alluring, yet interestingly banal—like, those fellas are just sort of chilling there, you know?
On Ectroni, there’s creaking, laser-like synths, and percussive rustling, and everything’s shrouded in a murky droning to feed into an overarching impression of almost-freakishness—“almost” because it’s too lethargic and lacking in dynamics to be more than that. This is crucial because it’s as if we as listeners are just left here to rot in this space; nothing incredibly dramatic is going to happen here, and accepting that is more unsettling than a massive wall of sound or something meant to hold your attention; that lack of anticipation makes the music even more beguiling. It’s like we’re hearing an installation held in a sewage system (albeit, one without any of water running), and that’s about as appropriate an experience I could’ve asked 2020 to end with. —Joshua Minsoo Kim
Purchase Ectroni at the Alien Passengers website.
Seth Cooke - This Content is Unavailable in Your Country (self-released)
The fear of missing out is a powerful thing. When I saw a message in my email inbox that was sent out from Seth Cooke’s Bandcamp page that he was re-releasing an album for one day only, I bought it without a second thought. I didn’t even look very closely to see what it was about—it only cost a pound anyway, so I figured I wouldn’t mind too much if I didn’t end up liking it. I just wanted to have it because I knew I’d be one of only a few people that even had a chance to have it, by virtue of being there at the right time and place. I grew up on Pokémon cards and Tamagotchi, and that desire to have something rare just because it’s rare never completely left me. It’s a hard habit to kick.
The release ended up being quite interesting—which I acknowledge doesn’t make my impulses any less absurd, but it makes me feel validated in this case. The downloaded included an audio file and two accompanying .pdf files, one of which presents an analysis of Pornhub data from October 2018 that derives from the search term “Bristol.” The audio is sourced from a now-removed video titled “JOHNNY ROCKARD’S BRISTOL REDHEAD - MILF STREET PICK UP AND FUCK” in which the titular Johnny Rockhard—who turns out to be a UK Independence Party politician named John Langley—does exactly what the video says he does. Mr. Rockard got himself into a bit of trouble for the content of his videos in which he does lewd things in public places, and Cooke theorizes that he took his videos down in preparation for another go at running for mayor of Bristol—I can’t imagine that will go well for him. There’s a lot more to this release than I can properly explain, but it’s fascinating.
What made me want to write about this is something that Cooke writes in the .pdf made specifically for the second release of this project, in which he states that the goal is to posit “what kind of art a person might make about ‘place’ if they didn’t leave the house, spend any money, or make any of the source material.” My perspective on art was dramatically transformed by the realization that purpose and context matter significantly more than skill and effort. Marcel Duchamp broadened the horizons of visual artists by presenting his so-called readymades as original pieces. John Cage composed a piece of music that could never twice be the same by putting 4 minutes and 33 seconds of nothing on a score and suggesting that what you should be listening for is everything but what the performer is doing. Kenneth Goldsmith challenged our understanding of how to “write” a narrative by publishing a selection of transcribed weather reports and putting his name on it. All of these pieces are things an unskilled person can do, I guess, but are all so evocative to me as art precisely because they aggressively pick at the notions of what art is supposed to be.
Seth Cooke’s methods for this piece remind me of an idea I had a long time ago, to publish an “autobiography” that consisted of nothing but my unembellished internet search history, as far back as it goes. In a way, it seems even more terrifying than baring myself in my own words, because I don’t remember what’s in there and I cede control of the narrative completely to the reader, giving them free reign to believe whatever they want about me. I might still do this one day, or maybe I’ll only publish a particular, significant window of time. Maybe somebody will steal that idea from me now that I’ve written it here, or maybe it’s not a good idea in the first place. I don’t know, honestly. What I do know is that any art that makes me think broadly about what I believe art can be is probably some pretty good art. I got a lot more value out of This Content is Unavailable in Your Country than a Pokémon card. —Shy Thompson
This Content is Unavailable in Your Country is not available for purchase.
Amalia Bakas, Sarah Behar, and Victoria Hazan - No News From Tomorrow: Greek and Turkish Speaking Jewish Women in New York, ca. 1942-50 (Canary)
Ian Nagoski is one of the most important figures in music today but the reality is that the archival work he’s doing via Canary Records was always destined for minimal coverage by traditional music publications: the songs aren’t usually in English, most people don’t care about early 20th century music, and few writers could competently muster up words about these artists and works that provide insight beyond the accompanying liner notes. I won’t claim to be any different, but I do think this is one of the stronger releases of Canary’s busy 2020 and I consequently want to sing its praises.
More than half the songs on this compilation come from Amalia Bakas, a woman who lived in the Jewish Lower East Side and had two daughters, one of whom ended up being babysat by Marika Papagika. I’m particularly fond of “Abroad Since I Was Small,” whose repeating violin figure is mirrored by Bakas’s vocals; the constant presence of this phrase, and the way in which it dances around before landing on a lower note, gives it a sense of solemnity and restlessness. “Don’t Beat Me, Mama” follows it and has lively oud and violin playing that playfully intersect. Bakas’s croons inject the piece to provide both weariness and disenchantment.
No News From Tomorrow also features the sole two tracks recorded by Sarah Behar, a woman whose exact identity isn’t yet known. While both tracks contain charming vocals—the accented, “hiccupped” notes on “New Little Lady” are especially delightful—the instrumental outros make me wish the music could last for ages given how homey they feel. My wish comes true, somewhat, in the following track: Victoria Hazan’s “Neva Rast Gazel.” It begins with more relaxed oud playing, but when her vocals come in, she sustains a tone for a relatively long period of time, allowing her warbles to contribute a major textural component to the song. Her tracks are the most exciting here, with the vocal-only “Huzam Gazel” highlighting how beautiful her singing can be on its own. —Joshua Minsoo Kim
Purchase No News From Tomorrow at Bandcamp.
Omeed Norouzi - Mirage (Ascetic House)
This new tape from the ever-cryptic Omeed Norouzi was apparently released on December 31, 2020, far too late to appear on any “Best of 2020” lists. That’s a shame, because this is a delicious slice of minor-key synth work, taking cues from dance, noise and ambient music, without slotting neatly into any of the above. Even the more melodic tracks are built around sounds which are both sharp and abstract—scratchings and ringings and rattlings that are almost piercing, but for that no easier to identify. Over these, we get smatterings of synth melody, which are, at times, almost danceable, and at others, just skitter around the track without identifiable tempo or key. This is a slippery, versatile little collection of tracks. —Mark Cutler
Purchase Mirage at Bandcamp.
Four Tet - Parallel (Text)
I’ve been advocating that Four Tet’s releases after There Is Love In You deserve more attention(for whatever reason, the hype seems to have cooled off Hebden for some time now), but Parallel—one of two Four Tet albums released on Christmas Day, the other being the archival 871—doesn’t feel substantial enough. Pretty, certainly, but ‘pretty’ are results that Hebden can produce in his sleep. Adding to this feeling is that at least a few of these songs are from his ‘parallel’ project under the pronounceable/unsearchable alias ⣎⡇ꉺლ༽இ•̛)ྀ◞ ༎ຶ ༽ৣৢ؞ৢ؞ؖ ꉺლ. For example, “Parallel 4” first appeared in 2019, and “Parallel 6” appeared earlier in 2020, both under different stupidly stylized names, of course.
The first song, running close to 27 minutes ought to be Hebden’s most ambitious composition since 2015’s Morning / Evening, but at some point during the patient unveiling of different synth pings, it becomes clear that there’s nothing there: it’s just long. Afterwards, the songs feel all too familiar, let alone from his side project: the housey thumps of “Parallel 2” and “Parallel 4” could have been on Pink while “Parallel 6” feels like a rejigging of “Circling” from There Is Love In You with the additional kicker of not being as good the second (third) time around now. Given all of this, even though the turns from Eno to house on “Parallel 9” and then the Harold Budd tribute tucked away in the second half of “Parallel 10” are well appreciated, they feel a little too late. As a surprise Christmas gift, I’m not gonna complain much, but as a Four Tet album, this ain’t it. —Marshall Gu
Purchase Parallel at Bandcamp.
Various Artists - Cache 02 (SVBKVLT)
There’s a swarm element to the music that SVBKVLT has released over the last few years, a pulse evolving in the petri dish of affiliated Shanghai venue ALL. This swarm is both a sound and an action, a physical manifestation on the dance floor. I fall back on a few go-to’s when describing the standard SVBKVLT issue, like Hyph11e’s brilliant debut album, Aperture (a Tone Glow Q4 2020 favorite): fragmented, jagged, metallic, abrasive, as if I’m describing sharp and brutal tools. I realize after absorbing SVBKVLT’s new compilation, Cache 02, that these descriptors fall short because the sounds may be human-agnostic, but they’re not inorganic.
Much of the music on Cache 02 creates a tickling sensation on the eardrum when listened to in headphones, or on the skin in a quiet setting, a slightly nauseating increase in heart rate, a microdose of adrenaline. It’s usually very fast, only occasionally clings to melody, and confronts in every track with unexpected decisions and unconventional timbral and rhythmic combinations. When experienced live the swarm sensation is stronger, accompanied by pupil-dilating LED screens broadcasting the work of a heterodox group of VJs and visual artists, and enough decibels delivered in a tight space to immerse the body without irritating neighbors enough for them to call the cops.
The baseline SVBKVLT sound is organic insofar as it can be insectile, or sometimes maybe fungal. This is especially true of the label’s Shanghai-based cohort. 33EMYBW told me in an interview last year for The Wire that insects were her main influence, her project being to articulate an idiosyncratically segmented “arthropod dance” sound. Gooooose has talked about simulating flocking systems — like birds flying or fish swimming — when working with generative Max/MSP programs for recent projects, and his Cache 02 track “Cows” incorporates an 808 cowbell in a manner closer to digestion than sampling. Aperture insinuates a “narrative space infested by biological and geological phenomenon,” writes Jaime Chu in an insightful profile of Hyph11e.
I’ve been swimming in SVBKVLT’s waters since the label launched with a series of beat tapes in early 2013. It’s covered a lot of sonic terrain since, expanded organically and rhizomatically. The network through which SVBKVLT’s music has circulated in recent years is also decentralized, a global mesh of DJs, artists, labels, festivals and residencies from Shanghai to Bali to Kampala, not to mention London, Berlin and Tokyo. A personal highlight of Cache 02 is the latest in a fruitful series of collaborations between Hyph11e and Kenyan producer Slikback, who on “MUSHEN” mine a zone of the hertz range mostly reserved for bugs. The cover art by Kim Laughton conveys this visually, its anthropocene-adapted dung beetle lording over a ball of silicon and soil. Cache 02 is more like a volatile chemical released into the atmosphere than a collection of club tracks, and its December drop already piques my interest in how SVBKVLT will extend its root structure into 2021. —Josh Feola
Purchase Cache 02 at Bandcamp.
Playboi Carti - Whole Lotta Red (AWGE / Interscope)
Arriving on Christmas Day as a gift, Whole Lotta Red was devoured by us lonely types (I am projecting my pain onto all of you), and before Boxing Day morning, the comparisons were already being dolled out; if I’ve heard anyone say Whole Lotta Red is Carti’s Yeezus, I’ve heard it a dozen times. (Helping solidify that comparison was the appearance of Kanye West himself early on with a verse that is very much in the don’t-care mode of that album.) Personally, the comparison just doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. Yeezus’s power comes from its white-hot intensity of 10 short songs; by contrast, Whole Lotta Red is 24 songs, its intensity arriving in bursts and waves.
Comparisons are, of course, a way of helping frame an album, and Whole Lotta Red and Yeezus are both punk in spirit; this album even starts with a song called “Rockstar Made” and early highlight “Stop Breathing” has a pile-driving bass that’s designed to cut your breath short, to say nothing of how short many of its songs are. But comparisons are also a dangerous way for listeners to, well, avoid listening. You see this all the time: people asking, “Who’s this generation’s Bob Dylan?” or “Didn’t Brian Eno already do this?” often as a means of diminishing one person or album by comparing it to something else. (Take a shot every time someone says Kate Bush or Björk in a review of a female musician.) And naturally, lots of listeners used Die Lit as a way of framing and then diminishing Whole Lotta Red, with many complaints around its perceived “half-bakedness.” Of course, part of the problem is hype culture: you’ve had Die Lit for 2.5 years; you’ve had Whole Lotta Red for less than 1 day. (Or 1 week now, at the time of writing.) My point is, maybe Whole Lotta Red isn’t Yeezus, and maybe it’s not Die Lit either; maybe it’s just Whole Lotta Red.
What I like most about this album is its comic energy. I’ve written on Tone Glow before that hip-hop is one of the few genres that’s willing to make anyone laugh anymore, and the humour here extends beyond just the words. For example, there’s a song named “Vamp Anthem” starting out a sample with time-tested “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor” before producers Jasper Harris & KP Beatz kick Bach in the face so Carti can leap in with “Bitch, you better be ready.” Elsewhere, “M3tamorphosis” leverages Kid Cudi’s deep croon as its literal beat. A 93-second “JumpOutTheHouse” somehow makes room for 30 instances of “Jump out the house” (“What?”) and plenty more of “Jump out the bitch” and crucially doesn’t feel “half-baked.” There’s Carti’s ridiculous straight-out-the-womb voice harmonizing with the beat on “Teen X.” And even when he’s profound, he’s funny: listen to the way Carti sings “I done met different types of gurrllllllllls, yeah” on a song named “F33l Like3 Dyin.” Humour can be cathartic, and in a year as exhausting and grief-filled as 2020, Whole Lotta Red reminded me of what it felt like to laugh; to be alive. —Marshall Gu
Playboi Carti - Whole Lotta Red (AWGE / Interscope)
There’s a lot of aspects to unpack when writing about Whole Lotta Red. One can ponder “Why did it take so long?” or “What the hell was Carti’s thought process making this record?”, but that’s superfluous to consider. We have been inundated to Carti-time, following his every move closely. The leak culture has flourished in his radio silence, making tracks a precious commodity, breathlessly grasped at by his thirsty stans. How many musicians can claim this much of a fervent following? Albums unaffiliated with Carti seem completely coherent when filling his tracklists with leaks and previously lost content. Fans fill in the gaps of his discography. Who else can claim that?
Carti’s most unhinged impulses are fully indulged on Whole Lotta Red, giving into his image as this manic pixie dream boy that has no quality control. Is Kanye the executive producer? We really can’t tell, as both of their most base conclusions about musicmaking are indulged on this record. The fortunate part is, that’s a good thing. There’s no point in which the chaos is tethered, which really encapsulates his whole musical philosophy. Having fun is the Playboi Carti motto, and we get to experience every single stupid, head-scratching, puzzling, absolutely genius move that this man makes.
My fellow critic Sunik Kim remarked on their “@MEH” blurb that they heard “strands of the most radical and transcendent electro, techno, footwork and jungle” in the song. These are all Black-pioneered genres, and it’s logical Carti would follow that progression, but his music most noticeably relies on the classic sub-Saharan syncopation that has not only permeated most of the continent’s styles, but naturally flourishes in Black music worldwide. His constant ad-libs are a measure of this syncopation, and when featured guests buy into it, like Future on “Teen X,” the results are brilliant; two rhythmic vocal talents loose, comfortable, and joyous.
In the end though, it all comes back to raging. We can analyse and proselytize about Carti’s ingenuity till the cows come home, but his shit just hits DIFFERENT. “No Sl33p” instantly makes you hit the scrunch face, KP Beatz’s 8-bit melody surrounding a wild cacophony. “On That Time” is basically a deep-fried version of “No Sl33p” in the best possible way. And even DJ Akademiks’s skunkass can’t ruin the victorious atmosphere of “Control,” with Carti sounding as triumphant as he ever has. The song mirrors our emotions on Whole Lotta Red’s release—finally, He Has Risen.
Listening to this album was the first time I truly wished that concerts were around. Can you imagine the mosh pits for these shows? That kind of inspired fan love can only come from a singular artist, a confounding yet welcome presence in the modern music industry. Carti’s musical whims are always endeavored, no restraint, only gratuity. He operates on a pleasure principle; if it doesn’t feel good, don’t do it. We get to see all of the successes and failures on record, and by god I’ll take more of both. —Eli Schoop
Playboi Carti - Whole Lotta Red (AWGE / Interscope)
I got a lot of influence from [the 60's era] and I thought I might as well turn my voice into a saxophone.
— T-Pain, on his use of Auto-Tune
I always wanted to do more than anything I was doing... I used to come to basketball practice with a skateboard.
On Whole Lotta Red, Carti “comes to basketball practice with a skateboard,” pushing the contemporary trap sound to its limits—not forward (e.g. ever-sharper, more HD, ‘futuristic’) or outward (e.g. more distortion, noise, provocation, ‘deconstruction’), but rather inward: revealing the essence of this music’s driving force, what makes it so radical in the first place. The album’s odd, blown-out, almost frustratingly ‘static’ sound marks a key turning point: once-pointillistic kick drums and skittering hi-hats are squashed, sustained, transformed into dense, roiling slabs of sound, thrumming waves of low-frequency blasts, evoking Sleep’s Dopesmoker in its repetitious immensity. Critically, the fact that WLR’s production stays within fairly ‘standard’ rhythmic boundaries (several beats nearly bleed into one another) makes us feel the rootedness of these sounds, their sources and templates, in the act of their own real-time abstraction: this is an intensive exercise rather than a deconstructive one. In opposition to an album like Yeezus (which is ultimately rooted in pop structures and oriented toward the listener, their shock, pleasure, suspense), WLR is positively hermetic, internally oriented, hellbent on following its own laws of motion to their logical and most extreme conclusions.
The Sleep comparison, coupled with WLR’s rolling, bone-dry percussion—reminiscent of snd’s best clap and rimshot workouts—highlights WLR’s foundational experimental component: repetition. “JumpOutTheHouse” is the key—here, Carti engages in repetition (in every sense) to the extent that the act of repetition itself is foregrounded, actively pointed out. Of course, all rap is rooted in repetition, the ‘loop’; but the presence of rappers often obscures this repetition, establishing a single, unbroken ‘thread’ that can be traced through a song composed of looped fragments. On WLR, and especially on “JumpOutTheHouse,” Carti’s incessant use of repetition uncovers the driving force behind this music, forces us to become aware of it—this music is driven by rhythms interlocking with rhythms, a constant dance of synchronicity and disjunction. Carti is literally experimenting here, successively testing words and rhythms in real time against one another (those bizarre two-line repetitions sound like ‘verifications’), searching for the combination that ‘works,’ a criterion that is constantly changing and in motion. Here, Carti evokes Bach’s The Art of the Fugue—itself a series of technical rhythmic exercises that steadily build in complexity, an “exploration in depth of the contrapuntal possibilities inherent in a single musical subject.”
Critically, this process of rhythmic abstraction does not diminish the central role of words and language in this music. This is not “post-language” or “post-verbal” music (absurd phrases that have been used to describe Young Thug’s work), but rather music that draws out the reality and feeling already contained in language as it exists. ‘Intelligible’ and ‘abstract’ (or ‘words’ and ‘sounds’) are not mutually exclusive opposites; it is impossible for a rapper to engage with one at the total expense of the other. Words ‘alone’ can’t be crudely separated from the ‘shapes’ and textures of the words themselves; each informs the other. WLR actively foregrounds the unity of the two, using the act of vocal abstraction (just listen to those wild adlibs!) to heighten the effect (emotional, visceral) of Carti’s words and the stories they tell. “Punk Monk” is key here—it only takes one listen to instantly demolish the nonsensical idea that Carti (like Young Thug) somehow “doesn’t even really need words” or that the work of rappers in this vein is mostly a totally subjective “Rorschach ink blot test” on which the listener freely projects their own meaning (quotes from this article).
A closer examination of Carti’s use of AutoTune only further drives this critical point home. Like with T-Pain, AutoTune allows Carti to “turn his voice into a saxophone” and channel the key free-flowing element of Coltrane’s improvs, incorporating it within (not merely ‘on top of’) the foundational rhythmic exercises that inform WLR. To be clear, Carti is not trying to ‘sound like a saxophone’ or mimic free jazz improvisations; rather, his use of AutoTune draws out the melodies, gestures and sonic artifacts that are already present in his words themselves, establishing the voice as an instrument and exploring it to the same degree of intensity as Coltrane does on, say, his 26-minute version of “Peace on Earth.” Mark Anthony Neal already identifies the similarities between Lil Wayne’s signature AutoTuned sound and Coltrane’s solos; Ben Ratliff describes the latter’s performance on Live in Japan as “a record of long-form stamina” where Coltrane “displays a technique that had never been more stunning, with rapid interrogations of harmony and extreme dynamics—from mild susurrations to a stretch before the end of this solo where he packs so much force into the horn that it sounds as if it might burst.” Is this anything but a perfect description of Carti’s vocal workouts on WLR?
This AutoTune-saxophone parallel exemplifies the fundamental approach of WLR: for all the popular narratives about AutoTune being a ‘flattener,’ a way to delete the ‘human’ and substitute it with the ‘robotic,’ Carti reveals AutoTune’s radical secret: AutoTune (in its creative, not merely cosmetic, application) highlights, draws out what is already there: it is an intensive tool that abstracts words, reveals previously inaudible connections between and within them, while still grounding these new forms in the words themselves and the meanings therein (as opposed to, say, scatting). Hence, a totally contemporary form of expression: with Carti, we get the sheer, burning, rhythmic, abstract intensity of Coltrane’s saxophone explorations in the form of words that themselves bear a weight and meaning of their own.
In this way, Carti on WLR does look to the future—not in a hackneyed sense, but simply in pointing out that any ‘future’ is built on the present and the past, and that truly groundbreaking music does not hinge on isolated novelties and chasing after the surface-level ‘new,’ but rather on intensive exercises that draw out the infinite reality, feeling, and emotion already contained in, hidden within, life itself. In this way, Carti gets to the root of rap—which is a storytelling tradition at its core—while making clear that just as the ‘story’ itself (history) is in continuous motion and change, so too are the modes of telling it, the ways it is expressed, transmitted, recorded. Carti is not hurtling into some generic, imagined ‘future,’ but rather into the burning core of life and language itself—and, honestly, this has never sounded so damn fun. —Sunik Kim
Thank you for reading the fourty-seventh issue of Tone Glow. Listen to some good music this weekend.
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