Tone Glow 061: Listening Corner, January-March 2021
Our writers talk about non-2021 albums they listened to in the year's first quarter
Those who have been following Tone Glow for the past year may have noticed that starting in 2021, we stopped including the “Download Corner” section in our regular issues. We’ve opted to turn this into a quarterly “Listening Corner.” This means we’ve nixed any downloads, largely due to our growing stature and my increased disinterest in getting yelled at by artists and labels (and the looming threat of this Substack shutting down if we continued). Still, we felt it important to highlight older works that we’ve been spending our time with, and below you’ll find 20 albums we’ve enjoyed throughout the year’s first quarter. Happy digging. —Joshua Minsoo Kim
Watazumi Doso Roshi - Hotchiku (Polydor, 1968)
The making and playing of disposable practice flutes from bamboo is a key part of the musical curriculum of some cultures. It makes sense: bamboo is practically perfect flute-making material, once you know where to cut the holes, almost any piece can be made into a playable instrument. In Japan, the process of flute-making was refined and elaborated over centuries until the design of the modern shakuhachi took shape. Though any piece of bamboo can be made into a flute, a proper shakuhachi cannot be made from any random piece because of the tonal purity and timbral perfection that’s desired; it’s not uncommon to go through over a hundred pieces of bamboo before finding one that has the proper balance of characteristics.
Watazumi played the flute almost every day of his life, but he repeatedly insisted that he was not a musician and was not interested in music for its beauty or grace. Reviving the concepts of the monks who started the komuso (literally, “monk of emptiness”) tradition, Watazumi considered blowing into a flute to be a spiritual practice that connected him with the energies of the universe. For him, this pure connection with the universe was the point of all music-making and thus the lacquered and refined form of the shakuhachi was an impediment, an unnatural barrier between his self and the universe.
Watazumi insisted on playing large, crude hotchiku flutes, claiming that its unrefined state allowed for him to become one with the natural world in a way other instruments were incapable of. As the liner notes indicate, each track on this album was made with a different hotchiku, often made by amateurs or children, and sometimes literally broken pieces of bamboo that were picked up off the side of the road. Many of the pieces on this album are classics of the honkyoku canon, but they are performed with an uncommon exploratory air, with Watazumi just as likely to explore an unusual timbral extension of his unique instrument than to elaborate on a classic melody. The skill and physical stamina required to play such broken instruments is immense, the sensitivity needed to explore their range is unparalleled. An idiosyncratic and virtuosic take on traditional Japanese aesthetics and a masterpiece in its own right, Hotchiku stands as a high water mark for one of the greatest flautists of the 20th century. —Samuel McLemore
Various Artists - Musique Du Burundi (Ocora, 1968)
Since music is a language with some meaning at least for the immense majority of mankind, although only a tiny minority of people are capable of formulating a meaning in it, and since it is the only language with the contradictory attributes of being at once intelligible and untranslatable, the musical creator is a being comparable to the gods, and music itself the supreme mystery of the science of man, a mystery that all the various disciplines come up against and which holds the key to their progress.
The words, lifted from Lévi-Strauss, reveal in brevity what draws me to ethnomusicology, a field and framework more often than not inclined to embody a lens for the outsider to look in. At its peak, the fruits of these findings present an unmistakable “thereness,” the shock and awe of unaltered human performance that flow intrinsic to us all, totally bereft of technological aid. Preceding the commercial connotations of watered-down “world music,” the documenter of Indigenous song chronicled not for academic context but for unabashed admiration of the sounds, to broaden the orbit of Western criteria, to dodge the defects of colonial impulse and Orientalist thought, and to prevent storied histories from remaining unsounded.
Our story starts in Paris in the early fifties: following a childhood spent in Southeast Asia and piano studies at the Conservatoire, a young Charles Duvelle is invited by an undisclosed filmmaker to work on a soundtrack loosely inspired by African music. Though the project remains undeveloped, his research will lead him to the older Pierre Schaeffer, fresh off founding GRM—that pioneering atelier that developed the idiom we now know as musique concrète—before taking a temporary hiatus to pursue a new sonic venture: production of radio broadcasts for Francophone Africa.
Shortly after meeting, Schaeffer hires Duvelle to bring order to the chaos of said archive, a mess of unorganized, low-quality tapes; this job soon evolves into traveling to several Sub-Saharan countries with cameras, reel-to-reel machines and microphones, pointing them toward its people, and documenting the purveyors of their manifold musical traditions. This catalog evolves into the first batch of nation-in-review LPs for the label Ocora, a library of traditional music which would soon span timbres, textures, continents.
In the spring of 1967, Duvelle and recordist Michel Vuylsteke travelled to the Republic of Burundi. Situated west of Tanzania and east of what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the country hosts the source of the Nile River and remains one of Africa’s most densely populated countries that the Hutu, Tutsi and Twa peoples have all inhabited for over half a millennia. From the liner notes translated from the French:
“In the former Kingdom […] possession of cattle and waging war represented the two major economic, social and cultural activities. Today the culture remains very diversified even though the entire population speaks one single, national language - Kirundi. The recordings presented here demonstrate this cultural diversity insofar as music is concerned.”
To be sure, the miscellany exhibited on the resulting compilation is the first facet noticed upon first playback: the needle drops on the startlingly gravely whisper of cover photo subject François Muduga, accompanying himself on the inaga trough zither; a delicate balance between throat and string at the apex of a push-pull pulse. From there, our ears move toward two elderly women cupping their hands to their mouths, their lips controlling the volume of air like reeds; shepherds accompanying themselves on musical bows and the sanza; the hypnotizing polyphonic interplay between two young female voices.
The most memorable section of Musique Du Burundi is doubtless the ensemble of drummers captured in the closing cut––a tradition handed down from father to son and once exclusively utilized in the royal court:
“25 drums can be heard in this recording. The group begins to play after a series of calls from their leader. Then each drummer in turn takes up his position in front of the central drum, which he beats while dancing and the other musicians continue playing their own drums.”
Vuylsteke’s recording of the percussive custom that once followed Burundi’s monarchs through their travels has since been lifted and flipped in countless popular contexts: Joni used it as a rhythm track on The Hissing Of Summer Lawns, crediting as personnel the “Warrior Drums of Burundi”; they can be heard halfway through the soundtrack of Herzog’s jungle opera Fitzcarraldo; it became a sonic trademark for a number of new wave bands Malcolm McLaren managed, most notably Bow Wow Wow and Adam And The Ants; it is one of several samples flipped by the Dust Brothers for Paul’s Boutique—all prototypical case studies in Western appropriation predating the music industry gone global, the ethnographic equivalent of the Amen break.
Still, nothing remotely compares to the original recording, a strident, kinetic pulse in crisp, tape-distorted glory. Try as major-label bigwigs might to erase the face of history in favor of the hegemonic voice of solipsistic ‘genius’, one will always give their full attention to the rhythm, and lean in. —Nick Zanca
Wayan Lotring - Hommage à Wayan Lotring (CBS, 1974)
If you’ve only ever heard gamelan music in passing, then chances are likely that what you heard was Balinese gong kebyar, the most popular and widely traveled of the many gamelan styles. Played on an iron gamelan at blisteringly fast tempos with techniques that demand incredible stamina and cohesion from the entire orchestra, it is music with an immediately striking and arresting force; this perhaps accounts for gong kebyar’s enormous popularity among Westerners and locals alike ever since it boomed in the 1920s. Gamelan musical theory is arguably the furthest in the world from Western classical tradition in its fundamental assumptions about musical organization, but these qualities of gamelan are made accessible to Western audiences by the flamboyant skill that gong kebyar showcases.
Almost completely unknown in the west, Wayan Lotring was one of the most influential and respected composers and performers in Bali during the first half of the 20th century. Part of the last generation of musicians that were trained in the royal courts of Bali, he grew up performing for kings, and became well versed in the classic gamelan styles of semar pegulingan and palegongan. Later, his kreasi baru compositions cleverly recreated sacred melodies inside secular scales, a completely unheard of bit of modulation which marked a tectonic shift in Balinese music. (If you want to know more about this fascinating era of music history, including the only other recordings Lotring ever made, I highly recommend Arbiter Records 5-disc Bali 1928 boxset.) But when gong kebyar swept the island Lotring was left behind in the dust of the new craze. Still a well respected master of his art, he was simply out of fashion.
As opposed to the explosive force that gamelan gong kebyar is famous for, the gamelan palegongan that Lotring played for most of his life was known for its subtle shades of expression and uniquely beautiful tone. Led by Lotring on the kendang, he and his orchestra are in top form here despite not having played together for years. Lotring, famous for his perfectionism, refused to allow any mistakes to be captured on tape and would only move on to the next song after being satisfied with the quality of the current one. Thankfully the recording is clean and close enough to hear even the subtlest of inflections; an especially important consideration for music with this level of interconnected complexity. Stuttering melodies are weaved into floating rhythms, gently unspooling themselves according to the logic of what Lotring claimed was divine inspiration. Performing a mixture of Lotring’s own compositions and old standards, this is a gamelan that sounds as heavenly as the legends claim the first gamelan did.
Made from an alloy of bronze and gold, the same gamelan palegongan recorded here was melted down for its scrap value and replaced by an iron kebyar set the year after these recordings were made. Lotring died in 1982 without recording again. We are lucky to have these recordings as an example of an ancient style that has all but died out. —Samuel McLemore
John McGuire - 48 Variations for Two Pianos (Largo, 1987)
Surely part of the reason that John Mcguire has escaped the recognition of the classical world is his stubborn refusal to fit neatly into any one box or label. Both his music and his stated goals are varied enough that he has been called a Minimalist, a Post-Minimalist, a Serialist, and a Serial Minimalist by different critics. McGuire studied counterpoint under Penderecki and composition with Stockhausen in the 1960s, and though he has used serial techniques in almost all his compositions, his music is more obviously linked with the lush and inviting soundworlds of Reich or Glass than anything as brutal as his teachers’. One of his most accessible works, 48 Variations for Two Pianos, showcases his rigorous mixture of serialism and minimalism well.
One of McGuire’s stated intentions with 48 Variations was to build up so many layers of musical activity moving at one time that it produced “perceptual indeterminacy” in the listener’s ear. The result here is an effect most akin to staring at a flickering flame or listening to a stream babbling through the woods. Obvious symmetries and patterns emerge before being sublimated under the whole, with any attempt to closely follow any to their conclusion stymied by the sheer confusion of notes being played at any one moment: four different melodic waves coming together and falling apart in 16 different temporal layers, all played simultaneously by two pianists. From beginning to end the whole piece is awash in melodies and figures that would be lushly romantic in any other setting, but here have been orchestrated into an aural puzzle box. Austerely refusing to give these melodic and temporal constructions a narrative to hang onto, the variations aren’t arranged into an easy dramatic arc or given any kind of grand conclusion, ending instead as simply and swiftly as a flame being snuffed out. —Samuel McLemore
Katia & Marielle Labèque - Minimalist Dream House (KML Classic, 2013)
In an article titled “A problem with classical music publicists,” classical music critic Greg Sandow challenged publicists to answer the questions, “What’s distinctive about you? What can you offer that no one else can?” The same can be issued at performers: in a flooded market with a decreasing audience, it’s no longer enough to be able to play The Four Seasons for the billionth time. What makes your Four Seasons special? As technology allowed for more recording space, some publicists/performers answered this question by adding unofficial bonus tracks, 10-minute loosies tacked onto the end of a symphony recording regardless if they were from the same composer or era, and as that became the norm, the question was re-raised: What makes this CD different? What does it offer that no one else does?
French sisters Katia Labèque & Marielle Labèque answer these questions on 2013’s Minimalist Dream House by constructing a literal dream house: everything you would ever need from minimalism in one place. I exaggerate, of course: no Reich or La Monte Yonge, but Philip Glass and Terry O’Riley, as well as postminimalist William Duckworth. And if that weren’t enough, they bring in selections from John Cage, Arvo Part and Howard Skempton.
The blurb accompanying Minimalist Dream House declares minimalism as “the last great musical revolution of the 20th century. And it became the most influential and successful ism of them all.” As if desperate to prove that hyperbolic claim for the spectralism enthusiasts, they cover a spattering of pop songs too. Enlisting David Chalmin (guitar), Raphael Seguinier (drums) and Nicola Tescari (keyboards), they become a literal band and tackle Radiohead, Brian Eno and Aphex Twin. Aphex Twin is not so surprising when you consider how easily his music lent to Philip Glass orchestration or that much of his early work was minimalist at heart, so “Avril 14th” is here, beating out Murcof & Vanessa Wagner doing the same on Statea and Daniel Hope on For Seasons by a few years, as well as “Nanou2.” (“Avril 14th”: the great uniter of weird IDM kids and classical types with “Gymnopedie #1” in their veins, and since Kanye sampled it, the hip-hop heads too.) More surprising is the selection for Brian Eno: you’d think they would have gone for Discreet Music or Ambient 1: Music for Airports, but they select “In Dark Trees,” the rhythmic oddity from Another Green World. And most surprising is Suicide’s “Ghost Rider,” which they play heavier and faster so it feels like what it must have been to hear their debut in ’77.
The clarity of sound is only matched by the wealth of material; the two sisters sound telepathic in their attack on Philip Glass’s “Four Movements for Two Pianos,” particularly the first movement. Howard Skempton presents his love for New York’s experimental school on “Images,” a set of eight pieces that can be played in any order (so don’t be upset that Marielle Labèque only plays 5 of them), revealing Skempton’s affinity for John Cage, while the notes quietly bud against one another like molecules in flight, reminiscent of Morton Feldman. Having heard Terry Riley’s first release of “In C” in 1968 so many times, I’ve forgotten that it’s at once a seminal release of minimalism and indeterminancy: even though all the melodies are familiar, when they’re played is up to each performer, and having a version that’s 14 minutes shorter makes that clearer than ever.
Having been forced to play classical piano since age four, I turned my back on classical music after high school and embraced rock music. Minimalism was my way back in, a compromise by removing the harmonic complexities and putting in a steady beat and often sounding as electrifying as rock music. More recently, I’ve finally taken the plunge into spectralism—written off by Philip Glass—and I find it deeper. And just when I’ve come to leave minimalism behind, the Labèque sisters bring me back. Is minimalism the most successful “ism” of them all? For almost 3 hours, you’d be convinced. —Marshall Gu
Iancu Dumitrescu / Ana-Maria Avram - Electronic Music (Edition Modern, 2013)
The juddering ‘d-d-d-d-d-d’ of the digital stutter is no alchemical secret: Ableton’s Beat Repeat effect allows one to attain glitch nirvana with one or two mouse clicks. When a technique that once required smashing vinyl records and gluing the fragments together—or damaging CDs to terrorize the player’s error-correction function into spitting out streams of furious noise—becomes a plugin you can download in 10 seconds (note: this is not a bad thing), the question is: what inherent value does the effect have, now that its mysterious, futuristic thrill has all but evaporated with the forward movement of history? Why are we still doing this again? What made this sound so cool in the first place?
This gradual severing of the ‘glitch’ technique from its weighty, tangible foundation is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the philosophical underpinning of the ‘glitch’ is technological failure—malfunction—a rich idea that birthed many groundbreaking successes and genuinely fascinating experiments. But on the other hand, especially from today’s perspective, it’s hard not to see the flourishing ‘glitch music’ of the 90s-00s—for all its truly great achievements—as locked in its time, a mayfly that quickly exhausted the theoretical possibilities of its own concept and continued to feed upon itself, eventually producing gray, monotonous art that, at its laziest, was proto-‘intersection of art and technology’: bland style, no substance.
The end of ‘glitch’ as an automatically and inherently radical concept (how many ‘sounds like a dying computer’ descriptions does it take to screw in a lightbulb?) meant an increasing emphasis on the sound itself: what is it about that stutter that appeals to French house DJs (RIP), Mark Fell and acolytes, brosteppers, lo-fi beatsters and occult Magyck-dealers? The simple answer is that it just sounds really fucking cool (YMMV). The more nuanced answer: like with any other musical technique, the impact of the ‘glitch’ effect depends entirely on its context—the technique itself is no longer the entire story, but simply a part in a whole, a way of enhancing or enlivening that whole, whatever it may be.
I only make this extremely long introduction to heighten the ear- and brain-shattering effect of listening to Ana-Maria Avram (RIP) and Iancu Dumitrescu’s Electronic Music (released in 2013)—especially in 2021, far beyond the ‘glitchy’ 90s-00s heyday. “Hazard and Tectonics (I),” the clear highlight, opens with a groaning, twisting crash, the sound of sheet metal imploding, folding in on itself in fits and starts. That characteristic stutter is there: but just listen to how it shreds, disarms, careens ahead with a momentum and logic of its own. Critically, that distinctive grinding sound serves Avram and Dumitrescu’s overall project. They are interested in how sounds decay, the space between strikes of the hammer; the ‘glitching’ technique turns smooth decays into shuddering, chaotic chemtrails, imbuing what would otherwise be an extremely sparse composition with a rolling, towering quality.
“Crepuscule (I)” and “Early, Before All Times (I)” are also strong, exploring different registers (ranging from the highest, barely-audible frequencies to the lowest) with a similarly gripping approach. Avram’s “Metalstorm (I)” introduces more internal movement and fluctuating bursts of pink noise, culminating in a paranoid tornado of pure, rumbling sound. Bits and bobs from Electronic Music have been reissued by Stephen O’Malley’s Ideologic Organ label—but the full Electronic Music album deserves far more attention in its own right: these pieces are just too incredible to continue lingering in the shadows. —Sunik Kim
Alvin Curran - Natural History (Edition Giannozzo Berlin, 1983)
Alvin Curran is a composer and improviser who has worked in a stunning variety of modes. He has composed works for solo instruments and chamber ensembles and played mind-bending jazz and demonic honky-tonk with Evan Parker and the Rova sax quartet. In the ’70s and ’80s, he went on a prolific recording spree, putting out seven albums in nine years of jagged musique concrète, funereal brass arrangements, Buchla-ambient, field recordings, choirs and opera singers, plucked piano wires, and basically every other sound you care to imagine.
Natural History came out in 1983, near the end of this productive time in Curran’s oeuvre. Originally released as a single, 61-minute piece in two parts, it is better described as an audio diary, a journey through scattered fragments, recorded in New York City, Amsterdam, and various cities in Italy and Germany. (A later cassette divides the piece into twenty-one tracks, without, however, specifying their durations.) Over this hour, we hear tape loops, orchestral music, found-sound, recordings of crowds, bugs and machinery. Despite the fragmentary nature of the recordings—made over a period of at least twelve years—Natural History does reward listening in a single sitting. Curran arranges his material not chronologically, or by source, but from roughly most to least cacophonous, so that the album begins with all the bustle of a city, and ends on what sounds like a desolate dock. It’s an effective, somewhat creepy technique, giving one the feeling of a whole, elaborately drawn world, slipping away into inky darkness. —Mark Cutler
Paul Lansky - More Than Idle Chatter (Bridge, 1994)
Pioneering electronic composer Paul Lansky spent much of the ’90s exploring the musical potential of the human voice through emerging technologies like digital samplers and vocoders. His work from this time is an important precursor to the vocal manipulations of current artists like Holly Herndon, Katie Gately and Aaron David Ross, and completely obviates many less ambitious pieces, like the dreadful Patiño record we all recently endured. 1994’s More Than Idle Chatter is one of Lansky’s most focused and most successful records from this period, spinning what seem like hundreds and hundreds of vocal samples into dizzying compositions.
Most of the album is occupied by a kind of triptych (“Idle Chatter,” “Just More Idle Chatter,” “Notjustmoreidlechatter”), which, although the tracks are not sequential, could plausibly form one vast, twenty-six-minute piece. Across these tracks, Lansky takes the voice of his wife, Hannah MacKay, and slivers it into what sound like quarter-second samples, which he then uses to construct towering choruses, and stuttering, disembodied harmonies. Perhaps because this piece would simply be too relentless if played all at once, the second, fourth and sixth tracks are slower, new-agey compositions in which Lansky mainly stacks and stretches his voices into operatic soundscapes. They offer a lovely counterpoint to the virtuosic “Idle Chatter” suite, making this arguably the most delightful and consistent entry in Lansky’s long and accomplished discography. —Mark Cutler
Georges Aperghis & Martine Viard - Récitations (Harmonia Mundi, 1983)
Cinephiles will recognize the two artists credited here—composer Georges Aperghis and actress-vocalist Martine Viard—for their role in Antouanetta Angelidi’s 1985 avant-garde masterpiece Topos. That film’s episodic nature, surreal atmosphere, and bizarre soundtrack provide an out-of-body, out-of-time experience of a woman after her passing, as depictions of women throughout art’s history conjure up a purgatorial dream state. The frame captures painterly stagings: life as theatre, death as confinement—the two, perhaps, are not too dissimilar. The most surprising aspect of that work, especially compared to other experimental films, is that the soundtrack is little more than extended vocal techniques.
Aperghis, who mostly worked in Greek experimental theater, provides a similarly riveting experience with Récitations. Across 16 tracks, we hear Viard singing and sputtering, occasionally rupturing the space with sudden changes in rhythm or pitch or mouth sound. What’s most exciting about this is the mental-mapping these tracks encourage through their cyclical nature, wherein repeated squawks and gasps constantly return, layering and expanding in scope to provide a semblance of circularity. Whereas Topos may find you bewildered by its sequence of ostensibly disparate images, this record’s act of sense-making is sweeter. A look at scores can help you visualize the playfulness—piece 11, for example, has notation that’s structured like a mountain, and if you read from top to bottom, you notice that every line involves an addition of new noises. That’s ultimately what makes this so fun beyond the sonics themselves: this is music-as-game, and there’s 16 sets of rules for you to decipher while listening. —Joshua Minsoo Kim
Albert Alan Owen - Office Hours (Amphonic Music Ltd., 1987)
Albert Alan Owen is an electronic composer who spent the 1970s and ’80s making the kind of whimsical, pop-adjacent instrumental music which would soon after become deeply unfashionable, until its zombified 2010s return as vaporwave. Both in sound and subject matter, a number of these tracks could slot effortlessly on to Far Side Virtual, but far from Ferraro’s cynical grotesque of Reaganomic exuberance, Owen’s music is a straight-faced, genuinely optimistic tribute to an era when society felt the future had really arrived.
Office Hours is the third and most accomplished of a thematically linked trio of albums—following Technotown and High Life—which celebrate adult life in the big city: cocktail parties, luxury cars, penthouse apartments, and, yes, even the dreary office job. This is major-key music which shimmers with MIDI crispness, taking the listener through a day and night of modern activities and amusements. There’s the morning commute, the working day, the setting sun enjoyed, perhaps, from a glass-walled bar or restaurant. Owen’s instrumentals are remarkably evocative, straying into the didactic. It’s easy to see why, as capitalism’s promised future curdled into a shapeless, perpetual present, this kind of music first fell out of favour, then became the target of explicit ridicule. Yet Owen’s sheer enthusiasm is so infectious that, even all these years later, we can’t help but share it. —Mark Cutler
Tom Mudd - Brass Cultures (fancyyyyy, 2019)
Tom Mudd’s Brass Cultures is a raucous exploration of extraterrestrial music practices. Mudd deftly conjures an orchestra of non-human brass instruments whose otherworldly sounds point to significant developments in musical cultures beyond our orbit. These pieces were composed using a digital synthesis software that simulates the behavior of various acoustic instruments, a synthesis technique known as physical modelling. In this software, Mudd is able to define each instrument’s physical characteristics as well as certain performance parameters that affect the activation of sound over time. These variable features include the instrument’s size, shape, and temperature, as well as the performer’s breath pressure, lip frequency, lip mass, and valve fingering.
As Mudd composes with these physical characteristics, he creates a range of sounds from complex multiphonic drones to off-kilter melodies and rhythms. In “Brass Cultures C” Mudd makes like an intergalactic Mussorgsky, creating an astounding fanfare of dense counterpoint, soaring melodies, and angular ostinatos. There is something almost regal about this composition, as if it were scored for the opening of some extraterrestrial ceremony of great significance.
On encountering these compositions, the listener is left wondering about the creatures that perform them. What specific social functions do these instruments serve? What rituals do they accompany? What is the structure of this extraterrestrial society? What might we learn from them? The absolute joy of Brass Cultures is in the surreal imagining that it encourages.
The non-human entities encountered in Mudd’s piece are not threatening or uncanny. So much experimental music conceives of the non-human through a negative framework in which the distinctions between human, non-human, synthetic and organic are momentarily blurred. We encounter seemingly broken electronics that are reanimated through circuit bending. Having been brought back to life, these electronics become a zombie media, producing an entirely new set of unintended noises and glitches. Extended instrumental techniques simulate the sonic qualities of complex, electronic noise, and vocalists conjure an abject, synthetic voice through the focused application of microphones. Is this performer a human or machine? We don’t often speak about the reality that a manifestation of the uncanny is decidedly negative and often frightening. And yet, we find almost constant stagings of it throughout experimental music. Tom Mudd’s Brass Cultures offers us something entirely different, instead creating an open listening space in which we are free to interpret the uncanny on our terms. Here he frames the non-human as a distinct form of being with its own attendant modes of sensing, embodiment, and performance. And for this acknowledgment, the creatures must be thrilled. —Dominic Coles
Yosuke Yamashita Trio - Montreux Afterglow (Frasco, 1976)
I first got into Yosuke Yamashita’s music during a deep dive into pink film several years ago. His soundtrack to Kōji Wakamatsu’s Ecstasy of the Angels was a major standout, and it was with further listening that I came to cherish Chiasma and Arashi. The former is one of the major triumphs of the Yosuke Yamashita Trio that featured saxophonist Akira Sakata and drummer Takeo Moriyama—the latter’s playing was brash enough to transform their overarching sound into a pugilistic bout. I’ve laughed in glee several times while hearing the album if only because the high-speed snare hits make the physicality of the playing patently obvious.
When Moriyama was replaced with Koyama Shota, some of that energy was replaced—the drumming was still coming from someone undeniably talented, but the sounds felt like less of an assault than something that exuded finesse more forthrightly. That’s especially apparent in the sprawling Arashi, a 94-minute live-recorded performance that occurred with a 13-piece Butoh dance troupe. Montreux Afterglow features this same trio and was recorded a couple months prior to that performance, and is more compact: a crucial single LP of sidelong jazz freak-outs that find the trio taking their Coltrane and Cecil Taylor leanings into relatively pretty territories.
The A side features the trio tackling Albert Ayler’s “Ghosts,” which is delightful for how the members’ playing feels intense enough to conjure up images of billowing, spiraling smoke. There are moments that cut through the haze: the principal saxophone melody provides a charming, regal contrast to the rest of the piece; the terrifying clamor of Yamashita’s slamming keys, which lend credence to claims that his grand piano would shake up and down when he performed live; and the sudden pangs of anguish that Yamashita belts out in the final third. He does the same in the much shorter renditions of “Ghosts” on Arashi, but there’s a sustained energy here that makes this recording more transfixing.
“Banslikana” is equally impressive in its navigating of the melodic and abrasive, with the main motif oozing a deep, grieving pain. As it gets abstracted by both Sakata and Yamashita, Shota’s kick drum sounds like it’s constantly beating it down, and when it finally reemerges in the last couple minutes, its beauty is resplendent, as if its risen from the grave. This moment feels emblematic of a quote from Yamashita:
It should go without saying, but jazz is neither an art nor a work of art. All works of art are created as the result of artistic activities, as I’m sure you’d agree. That realization is the departure point for us. Jazz is more like boxing or soccer, with sound. So unless you think of one boxing match as art or a work of art, you shouldn’t think of jazz that way either. Jazz is only art in the same way that there are moments in the course of a soccer game when beauty is expressed. What the “player” should rightly be striving for is not a “work of art” in any sense, but the best possible kick that he can make at that particular moment. That’s all. We don’t have any need for any kind of “composer.”
What is really needed for jazz today is players who can hurl themselves unhesitatingly into performance, with flexibility, with truly liberated spirits and abilities. Those are the real performers needed today. Jazz is not born from the work of isolated geniuses. But the soul of a real jazz performer may very well begin with mere reflex actions. The problem is that today, there is a serious danger that for many, jazz will not go beyond that reflex action.
The three of us [Yosuke Yamashita, Takeo Moriyama, Seiichi Nakamura] are still apprentices, individually struggling to discover in jazz what unique rights we may have as performers. If we lose track of this goal, then jazz will merely disappear into boring contemporary art music. We don’t have any illusions about contemporary art music. Nor do we have an interest in the trendy “happenings” and “psychedelic” fields. We are only interested in our own “jazz.”
I don’t know where jazz comes from. I don’t know what foreign jazzmen think about this. All I know is that we declare that there is for us in jazz a kind of prototype that we can return to. Unlike this title [Concert in New Jazz], we are not after an experimental ‘new jazz,’ we are after a thoroughly obvious ‘proto-jazz.’
—Yosuke Yamashita, excerpted from the liner notes of Concert in New Jazz (1969), taken from Kato David Hopkins’s translation of Seojima Teruto’s Free Jazz in Japan: A Personal History
Toho Sara - Meijōtanshō (La Musica Records, 1998)
When I first heard this album, I knew nothing about the artist or the music except that it had been issued on the legendary psych-noise label, P.S.F. Records. I thought I must be listening to some arcane ritual music, or perhaps a large-scale jam band of Buddhist monks. Even after finding out this is actually the duo of Asahito Nanjo and Makoto Kawabata—and knowing their respective histories in High Rise and Acid Mothers Temple—it’s still hard to believe that just two people could be making all this noise. According to the liner notes, on this album, Nanjo plays cello, recorder, gong, temple bells, bass, strings, electronics, sitar, and baglama, while Kawabata plays dholak, hojok, algoza, yörük, mey, zurna, kemenche, sarangi, violin, viola, blockflöte, and harmonium. (They are joined, on this recording, by Mineko Mido playing an organ.)
The six tracks on Meijōtanshō vary from six to fifteen minutes in length, but regardless of duration, they unfold at a glacial pace. Each piece begins by laying out a foundation, and gradually stacking sound on top. No matter how frenzied these top layers of instrumentation become, the foundation remains largely inert. Appropriate to the project’s focus on traditional and spiritually significant instruments, these pieces remind me of gagaku, the stately Japanese court music which accompanies various, highly methodical rituals, from Buddhist prayers to wedding ceremonies. Despite Nanjo and Kawabata’s backgrounds in more aggressive hard rock and noisy, psychedelic jams, their explorations as Toho Sara are frequently meditative, even relaxing. It’s a shame that they abandoned this project after just a few years—it serves as an unexpected but welcome counterpoint to their other, more abrasive projects. —Mark Cutler
Relly Tarlo – Tracks 2 (PRS Baarn, 1984)
Despite an apparent fifty-year career as a composer, sound and installation artist, there is stunningly little documentation of the work of Israeli-born Relly Tarlo. Before 2019, when Slowscan published Territorial Landscape No. 1, this was the only recording of Tarlo’s work ever to be released. Perhaps, given that Tarlo’s works generally require enormous scale and elaborate, 3D arrays of instruments, microphones, or other noisemaking entities, he simply feels that his work is not well-suited to the stereo record. It’s a shame, because Tracks 2 is an extraordinary document, which makes one sorely wish for a Tracks 1, if not a Tracks 3 through 6.
For the installation which produced Tracks 2, Tarlo hung a series of pipes across the full length of a large room, connected them to contact mics, and had his ‘players’ roll various spherical objects down the pipes. The variety of sound he extracts from this simple setup is remarkable. At first, we can hear each object—a marble, a golf ball, maybe an orange or ball bearing—as it rolls down and occasionally trips over a bend or seam in the pipe. As the players add more and more objects, the sound changes entirely, and identification soon becomes impossible. At times, the pipes sound more like rippling water, or the last audible vibrations of a brass gong. Eventually, we hear what sound like whistles, heavy machinery and jet engines, as the noise continuously mounts to a squall. The piece has a few crescendos over its forty-five minutes, but the last is a speaker-blowing din that could give any subsequent harsh noise artist a run for their money. Absolutely essential listening. —Mark Cutler
Amateur Hour - Framtiden Tillhör Inte Oss (Happiest Place, 2019)
Amateur Hour is one of the best contemporary acts out of Gothenburg, which shouldn’t be a surprise given that it’s one of many projects featuring the ever-prolific Dan Johansson. He’s here alongside Hugo Randulv and Julia Bjernelind—former and current members of Westkust, respectively. The irresistible earworms that define that shoegaze band are replaced with the sort of murk and gloom you’d find in Johansson and Randulv’s Enhet För Fri Musik.
Framtiden Tillhör Inte Oss, the trio’s second album containing original material, revels in lo-fi fuzz and vinyl crackle—the sort of nostalgia one feels in the dead of night when reminscing and sleepy-high. Appropriately, Bjernelind’s vocals are all dramatic bellows and spectral coos, able to feel both stately (“Jenny’s Place”) and tender (“Dream of You”). Comparisons to Grouper are expected but ultimately vacuous, failing to account for the queasy instrumentals and emotive noise on display. The title track is an especially special moment, its child-hearted carnival synths summing up the album’s listless and lovelorn moods. Amateur Hour’s cover of Television Personalities’s “The Girl Who Had Everything” is another highlight, suffused with both solemn regret and acceptance. Framtiden Tillhör Inte Oss is one for those cigarette drags you take under moonlight—breathe it all in. —Joshua Minsoo Kim
Coals - Tamagotchi (Agora, 2017)
It’s always been strange to read about early ’10s underground indie pop as someone born just too late to witness its zenith. Seapunk, mallsoft, witch house, whatever royalty Grimes once aspired to—everything is written in an odd, living past tense. The appeal of Neon Indian or Macintosh Plus has typically been lost on me, but lately, I’ve found myself inexplicably pulled to this era, especially in the months after I’ve moved far away from home for the first time. I won’t bother with re-treading the same story about moving to New York as a fresh-eyed teenager—you’ve read it from others, The Walkmens sung it, and I doubt mine is anywhere near these very few interesting ones. But there is still something in the cold solitude of this city, one that I’ve only ever half-imagined in sounds and images, and it pulls me back to the wide, intimate expanse of chillwave’s pop. It’s something in the heartstrings of “Phone Sex”, or “Strawberry Skies”: their plush, confection-tinged melodies, the deep and scrying loneliness at their very core.
Coals’ Tamagotchi—upon which there is literally a song titled “Hauntology”— is a 2017-borne encapsulation at the fringe of this era, quietly situated past its decline. There exists no particularly good catch-all to describe the record: a post-chillwave without irony, perhaps, or some chopped-and-screwed refraction of dream pop. The Polish duo re-examine that rare American summer in their distanced framework, with songs like “Damaged Film Reel” denaturing the straightforward current of their pop and rending it apart like broken thread. This is indietronica with what sheen it had stripped away, frigid feedback and noise creeping into the solemnity of Katarzyna Kowalczyk’s haunted vocals. Tamagotchi slants neatly between the muted glass of skyscrapers, in the voiceless chill of New York’s sparse crowds: the music no longer yearns but memorializes. This is the loneliness manifest in the chant of “going to the rave alone, going to the rave alone” on the breathless, truncated opener, in the irony of “RAVE03”’s bracing mantra of “summer chilling” against the ice-cold elegy of its background; this is the death of something that was very brief. —Zhenzhen Yu
Shackleton - The Inland Mile (self-released, 1999)
Shackleton were an indie rock band from San Francisco that got their start in 1998. There were four members: Allison Duke, Dee Kesler (of Thee More Shallows), Audra Kunkle, and Tadas Kisielius. They had known each other from other bands they were in from around the SF area, including “sister bands” called Secadora and Dolores Haze, the latter of which featured Duke. Kesler was in National Holiday with Bianca Sparta of Erase Errata, and he also played in Mit Out Sound with Kunkle and the producer Bill Racine. Kesler also told me that he and Kisielius “had a really terrible band in college, which shall remain nameless!”
In their short time together, Shackleton played some shows (“a few one-off trips to LA and the Central Valley,” Kesler tells me) and “made an EP and 1 and a half records.” That “1” record is The Inland Mile from 1999, a lovely collection of slowcore’d, post-rock-inspired Midwest emo reminiscent of bands like The Jim Yoshii Pile-Up and The Van Pelt. If you’ve heard Thee More Shallows, Shackleton’s music isn’t far off. When I asked Kesler to name bands that they were listening to at the time, a good chunk of them made sense: Slint, Bedhead, Smog, Grandaddy, Godspeed You! Black Emperor.
“Flame On!” and “More For Detroit” are a couple of their strongest songs. The former is a real slow-burner, buoyed by horns and steady guitar strums that create a somber, stately atmosphere. The latter is an 8-minute epic that begins with gauzy ambience, like The Caretaker submerged underwater. It slowly builds into a longform jam that eventually settles into something pretty: hushed vocalizing, a nimble bassline, winding guitars. “Detroit is dead” goes the refrain, and the song’s nasally vocals and introspective demeanor carry the right tone to sell the ennui.
Other delights abound: “Jon and Roy” is carried by the sound of a child’s voice constantly looping, toeing the line between cute and cryptic; “Now We Leave You!” is the band’s wordless commitment to the post-rock mode, familiar in sound but endearing and contemplative; and “Yo, Terminator… Meet the Album that Killt Me” spends much of its time carrying a driving energy before concluding with a pained moment of self-awareness: “After the fight, I realized I don’t care a bit / I’d stand for nothing and die to prove it.” It’s an amusing lyric given how it presages how the band broke up in 2001. Kesler explains that the members couldn’t agree on an interpretation of a Journey song they were gonna cover for a benefit show. “Seriously!” he tells me. “But really, the breakup was the culmination of the same interpersonal and power problems that plague all bands as they try to navigate their lives, relationships, and working on a creative endeavor together.” —Joshua Minsoo Kim
Docteur Nico - Orchestre African Fiesta sous la direction du Docteur Nico (Ngoma, 1967)
The particular appeal of soukous—the Congolese abstraction of Cuban dance music– is in the high-piled shimmer of its guitar textures, with fluid layers darting about an often cavernously open band arrangement. “Docteur” Nico Kasanda, whose laconic delicacy as a soloist illuminates these ten songs, plays in a fingerpicked style all sensuous detail and summer haze. The elasticity of his dynamics blend solos and fills into trains of sonic thought that weave around vocals and thread the whole characters of songs. The show is almost entirely Nico’s, but the record reaches peak loveliness with the added flute of “Suavilo.” As a collection of soliloquies for electric guitar, Orchestre African Fiesta makes a gracious antithesis to that other six-string manifesto of 1967, Jimi Hendrix’s Are You Experienced. Here, even the feedback is pretty. —Lucy Frost
Various Artists - Ritual Mouth-Organs of the Murung (1998, Inedit Records)
The plung orchestra, the most important and elaborate aspect of the Murung people’s musical culture, plays one single song for every occasion. Funerals, weddings, and the all-important yearly harvest sacrifice that, according to folklore, also commemorates the mythological event that robbed the Murung of their written language—all of these are accompanied by the same piece of music.
The plung is their instrument, a mouth-organ similar in construction and design to the khaen or the sheng, but much simpler, with each instrument only capable of producing three or four notes. Played in unison by 10 to 20 players (11 on this recording), the plung orchestra can stretch up and down the octaves and create an enormous vertical harmony that is uniquely emphasized and underlined in the music they play. The one piece in question is diabolically simple: it has two simple but distinct sections that alternate in perpetuity. First, a short fanfare in free rhythm, followed by a pounding rhythmic motif that repeats so long and so insistently it almost functions as a static drone. One could almost make the comparison to various minimalist composers famous for their repetition except that the plung orchestra is completely unmoored from any notions of linear development or harmonic cadence, devoted instead to immersing itself, trancelike, into its own soundworld.
For accompanying vocal music, the more versatile rina plung is played solo, and the middle track here not only showcases the more restrained beauty of the Murung people’s oral tradition, it also functions as a necessary breather between the two versions of the plung orchestra that bookend the album. While the first track has the orchestra seated, performing at a stately and dignified pace, the last track was recorded while they danced in a wild circle, the shake of their anklets marking an insistent beat away and towards the microphone. The addition of the doppler effect on top of the mind bending harmonies and repetition of the plung orchestra is almost too much to bear. It’s an all-encompassing music, suitable for any occasion. —Samuel McLemore
Various Artists - The Waimea Music Festival (Panini, 1974)
Kī hō'alu—the Hawaiian variety of slack key guitar—is disproportionately under-represented in recordings for its outsize importance in Hawai'i’s musical culture. Thought to have begun around the 1830s when the Mexican vaquero brought the guitar to the islands, the indigenous fingerstyle technique gets its signature sound from the way the strings of the guitar are detuned (or slacked) to sound a chord in an open tuning. This style of playing existed solely as a Hawaiian folk tradition for nearly 100 years, not being recorded until Gabby Pahinui laid “Hi'ilawe” to tape in 1946 for Bell Records. Gabby’s recording of “Hiʻilawe”—which uses a melody he adapted from an old hula tune “Paʻahana”—inspired a generation of musicians to pick up the guitar and learn slack key. Every slack key guitarist you’re likely to ever hear has cut their teeth on this song that has become a standard in the kī hō'alu canon.
Many of those musicians appear on The Waimea Music Festival, a recording of a one-off concert that occurred on May 14, 1974. Hawaiʻi was in the midst of what would become known as the Second Hawaiian Renaissance, a movement in which native Hawaiians—living under the long shadow of colonialism, their monarchy overthrown and their traditions suppressed—started looking back to the culture of the past for inspiration. Interest in older musical traditions and the Hawaiian language spread over the island like a tsunami breaking along the shore, and there’s probably no better ambassador for the movement than Gabby Pahinui. Having been almost singularly responsible for drumming up interest in playing guitar in the slack key style and singing traditional Hawaiian mele (songs) in the Hawaiian language, he stood alongside many of the musicians he inspired to celebrate Hawaiian music at Paniolo Park in Waimea.
Panini Records, who managed Gabby, pulled out all the stops to record this festival in the highest fidelity that Hawaiian live music had ever been recorded in to date. Hawaiʻi’s most famous musicians of the time—Gabby, Peter Moon’s band The Sunday Manoa, Genoa Keawe—split the bill with virtual unknowns. The recording starts by introducing a group of ladies that were part of a local civic club for preserving Hawaiian arts and culture, who proceed to blow the doors off with a rendition of “Hole Waimea,” a classic oli (chant) turned hula mele. There are also two performances here by Fred Punahoa, who, despite his importance to the history of slack key guitar, has only ever been recorded at this concert. (Two of his students, Ledward Kaapana and Sonny Lim, would go on to be famous.) These Woodstock-like events were commonplace, and probably the main way that traditional Hawaiian music was proliferating in the 70s, but if you want to actually hear an example of it—well, The Waimea Music Festival is pretty much your only option. —Shy Thompson
Thank you for reading the sixty-first issue of Tone Glow. Happy listening :+)
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Blown away by Hazard and Tectonics!! listened to it after having watched parts of The Animatrix, what a circuit-trip. Thanks for the ongoing coverage of coded music/glitch-punk/funk/thedevil'sinthetimestretchalgorithm-music/etc.
That Black Truffle's "Natural History" opened to me the world of Alvin Curran. That's what a great label is meant for. I love that record. Thank you for bringing back attention to it, much appreciated.