Tone Glow 060: Our Favorite Songs, January-March 2021
Tone Glow's writers highlight 20 songs from the year's first quarter
Last month I made a tweet while in a depressive state that prompted David Sylvian to reply, “self forgiveness will offset what is already a debilitating condition. the weight of being places you outside of time. akin to a hospital stay. you’re out of the loop. rest&repair.” He recommended I read Denise Riley’s Time Lived, Without Its Flow, a book that, in conjunction with Sophy Romvari’s Still Processing (both of which deal with grief), reminded me of art’s ability to provide a sense of comfort through atemporality.
Music is perhaps the easiest medium with which one can experience art as a provider of liminal (head)spaces. And in a sense, every piece of music has the potential to change a person, even if in the smallest manner; every idea and opinion can be subsumed into—and consequently shape—someone throughout the course of their life. As someone who constantly feels like engaging in art needs to have an endgame (“Can I write about this somewhere?” “Did this help me gain a broader understanding of a certain era in music?” “Would this fit in a cute playlist I send my crush?”), I found Sylvian’s messages a welcome reminder: art’s ability to transform can also take place in the form of providing rest.
Below you’ll find 20 songs that Tone Glow’s writers enjoyed throughout the past three months. Maybe you’ll find that, in listening and reading, you’ll learn more about yourself or the artist or something beyond our selves. Maybe you’ll feel compelled to do more searching on your own. Or maybe you’ll just relish in time spent enjoying good music. Whatever the case, it’s all time well spent. —Joshua Minsoo Kim
Yvette Janine Jackson - “Invisible People” (Fridman Gallery)
“A film does not address a spectator, a film constructs a spectator.” I’ve been thinking about these words, spoken by director Christopher Harris, as they’re the sort of thing an artist only says if they understand the sheer power they have over those engaging with their work. That sentence also make clear that Harris isn’t fucking around—his films aren’t simple, frilly things. In Reckless Eyeballing, he culls together a variety of images—namely, footage of Pam Grier, Angela Davis, and D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation—to make a disorienting black-and-white collage that points to the persistence of anti-Blackness throughout history.
“Invisible People” is the only other piece of art I’ve consumed this year that feels so assured of what it’s doing. Across 20 minutes, Yvette Janine Jackson presents something resembling a radio drama, but what makes this more striking is how—similar to Harris’s film—it feels like its references are constantly informing one another, that the time period these sounds are sourced from are only important insofar as they reveal the perpetual existence of something heinous—in this case, homophobia.
Also like Reckless Eyeballing, the purpose of “Invisible People” is less about outright education than disruption. There are various sound bites we hear, including: Obama speaking on marriage equality (though we don’t feel completely fond of him; he expresses initial reservations of the decision because he thought civil unions would be sufficient in their human rights provisions), of various voices expressing vehement disagreement with the former president’s stance (“He’s going to destroy this country”), of Frances Cress Welsing’s idea of “Secondary effeminacy” (“Black male homosexuality is consciously imposed on the Black man by the white man for the purpose of destroying the Black family”), of a gospel band and a pastor speaking passionately. “Invisible People” is fractured and gloomy and haunting, but Jackson does more than sculpt an atmosphere—she provides a piece meant to be heard linearly, if only because doing so provides maximum discomfort.
At first, the pastor powerfully states, “Today is your day for deliverance! You are courageous. If you want to be free just come on up!” With the help of trusty gospel piano, Jackson conjures up a sense that an opportunity has arrived: one can find a peace that transcends all that’s horrific in this world, including the homophobia that preceded this passage. But as the song develops into a murky pool of electronics and strings, there’s a creeping suspicion that something isn’t right. We eventually hear text-to-speech audio taken from that most famous and influential of American sermons, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” “You are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours,” goes the line, the (self-)hatred that’s embedded in such an assertion producing numbness through its robotic delivery.
At the end of “Invisible People,” the pastor arrives once more and quotes that same line, bridging 2021 to 1741. Even more, what appears alongside all this is the sound of jazz. It’s a sudden, shocking reveal: these major Black American institutions, the same ones in which people have found some semblance of liberation, have also led to the creation of these titular invisible people through the squashing and rejection of their gay identity. Jackson’s arrangement leaves no room for apathy; as spectators, we’re forced to reckon with these truths. It’s devastating. —Joshua Minsoo Kim
Purchase Freedom at Bandcamp.
Sarah Rosamond Hartnett and Kieron Livingstone - “The Changing of the Guard” (Ghost Lore of Britain)
The video for “The Changing of the Guard” is best experienced without context. Go to the Ghost Lore of Britain website and there it is. Underneath, there is a description that does little to relieve the perplexity: “Live from the ceremonial counties of Kent and Essex: the sounds of the Hoo Peninsula. A psychic Journey from Shornemead Fort to Tilbury Fort via carparks, laybys and graveyards.” Click play. What you’ll see is ten minutes of footage from either side of a river, with oddly affecting shots of ships, rainy streets, trees, electric transformers, horses, and yes, graveyards. They replace one another in revolving triptychs. There’s no narrative, just these images. I recommend stopping here and letting it settle in your mind, returning every few days, as I did.
If you want to follow the digital breadcrumbs to learn more about this mysterious footage, then fine—Shornemead and Tilbury are two forts built across the Thames from each other on the Hoo Peninsula, way out to the east of London. Click the one link under the video and you get a little more information about Sarah Rosamond Hartnett and Kieron Livingstone. Hartnett is an artist who has contributed to Nervemeter Magazine in London, and Livingstone is the art director of that magazine. They’ve worked together before, on something called the “Self-Enquiry Inquiry Commission,” a thirty-minute radio-art program for the Camden Art Centre. They’ve also done an expanded version of the “Changing of the Guard” track for Ormside Projects, who have collaborated with NKISI, Lolina, and oxhy. And so we arrive at the facts as they would be presented on a press release: Hartnett and Livingstone are London-based musicians and artists whose video, “The Changing of the Guard,” takes them across the Thames to document the changing landscape of the city’s eastern perimeter, as centuries-old forts now crumble in the face of cargo ships traveling the river. RIYL NKISI, Lolina, oxhy.
Return to the video, though, and I think you’ll agree that none of this context helps explain the strange fascination of that first viewing. Hartnett’s haunting vocals and the track’s persistent drone stick with you, as do certain scenes from the duo’s trek across the peninsula. Perhaps a better explanation of the video is simply that water and nature and death and night have an inherent allure, and Hartnett and Livingstone have presented them in just the right ratio to keep us coming back. It’s not often that a song turns up unaccompanied by artist statements and one-sheets and track reviews, and I have to admit I’ve likely ruined the effect if you’ve read this far. But your consolation prize is this: now you can follow Hartnett and Livingstone to see what they do next. —Matthew Blackwell
Ayami Suzuki & Leo Okagawa - “Undercurrent” (Falt)
Undercurrent/Wanderlust collects two live collaborations between the Tokyo-born, Irish-trained vocalist Ayami Suzuki and lowercase musician Leo Okagawa. Each performance runs a little shy of twenty-five minutes. Both are excellent, but the first performance (“Undercurrent”) is remarkable for its sheer patience. Suzuki makes judicious use of her pedals, not so much distorting her voice as setting it adrift, letting it wander in and out of focus. Okagawa serves up quiet but shrill drones in the general register between radio static and a dental drill. The piece proceeds like this for the bulk of its duration, with Suzuki in particular casting out little snatches of tune, looping them over themselves, fading them in and out. Only in the final minute or so does she permit a full-blown melody to emerge, pulling all her looping vocals together for one perfect moment. —Mark Cutler
Purchase Undercurrent/Wanderlust at Bandcamp.
Fosco/Rolin - “Glacier” (self-released)
The combination of my annual February blues with the bleak outlook of the COVID-19 pandemic made this winter particularly challenging, to say the least. But listening to guitarists Pete Fosco and Matthew Rolin’s “Glacier” felt like a ray of hope: The 22-minute wandering drone provides just the right mix of cathartic crunch and warm embrace. Like much music over the past year, it was recorded in isolation, with the two musicians recording each part from their own home. But the sound is still seamless, unfolding into multiple layers of gentle melodies that each exude a much-needed radiance, just like the calm after a storm. Once I heard it, I couldn’t stop listening. There’s nothing more comforting to me than shrouding myself in the cocoon of sprawling electric guitars, and “Glacier” was just the right antidote to the winter’s grayness. —Vanessa Ague
Purchase “Glacier” at Bandcamp.
Skogar - “Golden Otter” (Studio Barnhus)
The unpretentious simplicity that’s defined a sizable chunk of Johannes Brander aka Skogar’s work continues here on Paradise City Jams, his “first album proper.” Being a decade removed from hypnagogic pop’s turn-of-the-decade buzz, one may be tempted to compare these guitar n’ synth sketch-as-song reveries as something resembling those lo-fi paeans to yesteryear. But nostalgic as these songs may be, listen closer and you’ll sense something displaced from time altogether. Whereas Rangers may have had more concrete songs (sung vox and all), and something like James Ferraro’s Last American Hero indulged in longform drifts into VHS’d psychedelia and twang, Skogar finds a constant sweet spot in both song length and development to lend credence to the album title, specifically that of “paradise.” Centerpiece “Golden Otter” is the most evocative, its neon synths emitting a dingy glow, rocking back and forth before a mid-song shift into melodic guitar meandering. As with the rest of Paradise City Jams, “Golden Otter” never allows for any sense of bliss to come to completion; songs and moods are truncated, and the sudden entrance into a following song begets a feeling of melancholic longing. This isn’t about the future or the past—these are songs that remind you of how music can take you into a world as quickly as it can take you out. Paradise is only ever an unreality. —Joshua Minsoo Kim
Purchase Paradise City Jams at Bandcamp.
Morten B - “Innerfrieden” (Wandlung)
I don’t know who Morten B. is (Google spits out no identifying personal information), but if this isn’t a pseudonym for an already established artist, then hats off. It takes a high level of musical confidence to start off your debut with a ten minutes and forty seconds long study in timbral geometry centered around nothing but a kickdrum and a few minor triad chords. As any craftsperson knows, the most criminally simple is always the hardest to pull off; the sign of true mastery. “Innerfrieden” is a track so unapologetically focused on the absolute basics that, if it weren’t for the slightly tidy production giving its contemporaneity away, it could’ve come out any time in the last twenty-five years. Perhaps progress is the price to pay for access to the eternal.
Things kick off with an uptempo, dimmed and midrange-y kick, over which a center-panned, saturated and low-passed chord sequence mechanically slides back and forth. The background and edges of the mix are haunted by moving, icy winds of filtered white noise. Static hiss fills out the fissures and crannies. Everything is pushing into the dynamic systole and diastole of a pumping and breathing mix bus compressor, imbuing the mix with an organistic quality. Neither a bassline, nor additional drums are present and Morten B. will keep it that way throughout, except for a single delayed offbeat shaker that makes an appearance later on. Even the kick is really just giving meter; what carries the track is the various chord sequences’ rhythms. And, as someone that has hundreds of failed attempts at techno tracks sitting on their hard drive, let me tell you that squeezing satisfying rhythmic-percussive energy out of pure synths is hard and requires astute, perfectly pinpointed programming.
“Innerfrieden”’s rhythmic centerpiece is a chord lead sequence with incandescent upper saw harmonics; dry and interwoven with smoky imperfections. It starts out with two medium spaced hits that push into nonlinear tape delay feedback. Then it asymmetrically descends into three rapidly succeeding steps towards the end of the bar, giving it an energetic, forward-hurling momentum. Its stereo delay has a well-placed timing offset between the left and right stereo taps, making the track’s stereo image rhythmically expand and contract back and forth. With time, additional layers of differentially filtered chords appear, further adding to the complex rhythmic interplay. Around the six minute mark, there is a long breakdown in which the kick disappears and the chords’ dubbed modulations go haywire. Freed from the kick’s constant metric, they start accentuating their own rhythms even further, descending and ascending into free flows of delayed refractions and reverberant flares that ignite even the furthest corners of the track’s vast cavern with bright, blinding light. After the kick eventually comes back in, nothing radically changes because nothing has to change; all is already there. —Vincent Jenewein
Purchase HANDLUNG001 at Bandcamp and Hard Wax.
Oui Ennui - “Daphne” (self-released)
It happens at around 28 seconds—the hiccup, I mean. If you listen to the introductory track of Oui Ennui’s L’espirit de l’escalier you’ll hear it, too: A meandering melody ensconces us, distorted, hazy, waterlogged. Then, for a flash of a second—not even a second, really—nothing.
“Daphne,” and by extension Oui Ennui’s entire output, seized me at that moment. The inexhaustible Chicago-based synth player/DJ/Angel Bat Dawid collaborator’s music unostentatiously subverts expectation—like when the groove stealthily materializes halfway through “Daphne,” or when an unannounced marimba Pollocks a spatter of daisy-yellow over the song’s dark palette. “Daphne” has the pockmarked, eclectic beauty of a subway ride, with all its polyglot influences, unexpected juxtapositions, and metallic rumblings. I only wish the trip lasted longer.
And to think it nearly never reached our ears! It took a soul-rattling COVID-19 diagnosis last April for Oui Ennui, a.k.a. Jonn Wallen, to unstopper years of hitherto unreleased music, starting with Sirius Bismuth in May. Full-length albums have joined it every month since, the most recent being his reflective Virga/Recrudescence. With L’esprit de l’escalier, however—beautifully captured in miniature by “Daphne”—the artist synthesizes past work and gestures towards a limitless future. I’m excited to hear that future unfold. —Hannah Edgar
Purchase L’esprit de l’escalier at Bandcamp.
Debby Friday - “Runnin” (self-released)
Debby Friday’s music often feels like danger is lurking just outside of the frame. Without revealing if she’s being pursued or is the one stalking prey, the glamorous goth electronic producer rarely stops moving. Only in her recent short film, Bare Bones, have we been given a glimpse at what happens when supernatural forces take hold.
Friday’s latest single “Runnin” continues the chase towards an unknown destination. Ramping up over 45 seconds of incantatory backmasked vocals, the beat drops like a heart monitor rhythm from Kurupt FM. As the song swells into a vaporous mass of drums, whispers, and distant squeals, it becomes what This Heat might have described as music like escaping gas. Rather than alternating between dynamic passages, “Runnin” simply sets a pace of simmering menace and filters out until the valve is shut off. Friday struts over the beat, oozing with confidence of her knowledge at whatever shadowy figures are just around the corner. Like Yves Tumor shredding solos or Lil Nas X having sex with Satan, she joins a new crop of rock stars letting their freak flags hang out. —Jesse Locke
Purchase “Runnin” at Bandcamp.
Klein - “baller alert” (self-released)
“baller alert” moves in ducks and dodges, a constant masking and unmasking, but this particular house of mirrors is full of humor and life, even in its cryptic sleights of hand. Replication, doubling and iteration form the core of this music: the austere piano phrase that structures the track toggles restlessly between two chords, and Klein’s voice—ushered in by a sudden “Eh”—shifts from a single track to multiple, layering upon itself, riding the jagged crests of the piano hits as they emerge and decay. This endlessly shifting, morphing energy drives the music forward: as soon as the piano phrase rigidifies, it simply disintegrates, forming a trapdoor through which a new Klein appears—summoned with a flourish and a wink.
The song’s centerpiece is a disconcertingly peppy cheerleader chant—“B to the… A to the… L L E R…”—that is irresistible in its perfectly timing, simultaneously disturbing and hilarious. Klein initially performs it entirely acapella, giving it the ghostly quality of an “isolated vocals” track—a song that is sung to no one, with no one, but still burns with an uninhibited passion. That these constant switch-ups feel absolutely necessary rather than flashy and frenetic is a testament to Klein’s perfectly-tuned sense for timing and narrative. “baller alert” is a series of mini-vortexes, each with its particular quirks and abilities: time passes differently in each section, even though they are all composed from the same sonic material. As a result, the song is as intense and immersive as the greatest pop music, but in a twisted, inverted way; this is the sound of the shadow cast by the singer as they belt the chorus, their hidden core laid bare. —Sunik Kim
Purchase now that’s what i call r&b at Bandcamp.
Valee - “HIMMYimmy (Part 2)” (self-released)
Bro I can’t stop writing about Valee. It’s his fault though; man will not, cannot, has never missed. “HIMMYimmy” is just another in a long line of successes, many attributed to the fact that it’s like he views rapping as simply another mundane task to be done like washing the dishes or mopping the floor. In a hyperactive era of rap like 2021, his swim against the current is a breath of fresh air—a clear willingness to stay Valee, in all his Valeeisms. No wonder his Twitter bio is “public figure 🤧”. Let’s all take a cue from Valee in his infinite wisdom; do what comes natural, take it easy, and don’t get extra with it. —Eli Schoop
RXK Nephew - “I Just Want To Be Loved”
If we’re reaching for similar sounding voices in the mainstream we might say that RXK Nephew has the dark humor of Teejayx6 and the esoteric lyrical interests of Lil B but with more aggression than either of those names are known for. In common with all three is a relentless release schedule, and I probably could have chosen any of the dozens of tracks he (or his partner in crime, RX Papi) have released this year to highlight his talent. Indeed singling out one track can feel like missing the point of someone like RXK Nephew, but the way the energy in “I Just Want To Be Loved”—essentially a long list of all the ways Neph is gonna beat and/or murder the cops—starts at a fever pitch and then just keeps escalating until the threats and braggadocio transmogrify into absurdity (“Opp been missing since last summer / I stabbed his ass to infinity numbers”) is well worth making a note of. Balancing violence and humor is always a tricky act, the response being deeply subjective and highly dependent on what exactly is being made fun or exposed to violence, but suffice it to say when I got to “kill a n**** and fuck up they mom / raise his kids and tell them I hate ’em” I lost it and laughed so hard I had to hit replay. Not exactly sure what that says about me but I’m willing to be entertained by it. —Samuel McLemore
midwxst - “Final Breath” (self-released)
The most surprising thing about this post-1000 gecs hyperpop world is how the duo were far less indicative of the scene’s future than one would presume. But it makes sense given how complex that album was (how could anyone compete?), and more importantly, it’s best to see 100 gecs as part of a broader revitalization and transformation of 1990s and 2000s-era musical trends in Western pop. One can see this in the Avril Lavigne and Michelle Branch idolizing of Pale Waves and beabadoobee and PRINCESSBRI, the post-Paramore pop-punk of Maggie Lindemann, or the nu-metal interpolations of Rina Sawayama and Ashnikko. To be more specific to the nebulous world of hyperpop, this past quarter saw artists (from different generations!) take a stab at trance: Danny Harle’s Harlecore and Petal Supply’s “1.”
What’s also been happening in hyperpop, naturally, is a bunch of rap. And as one could do with various burgeoning underground rap scenes around the world, one can trace a lot of this back to Drain Gang and the various emo rappers who’ve cropped up in the past decade. The most exciting of the hyperpop bunch is midwxst, a 17-year-old who released one of the best hyperpop release with last year’s Secrets. His follow-up SUMMER03 is an equally bite-sized treat of emotive pop—a nice complement to the more direct pop-punk stylings of underscores or the emo wails that permeate AVIT’s best music (“goodbye” sounds like Mae making lo-fi trap-pop).
“Final Breath” was released as a single in February but slots itself in as the final track of SUMMER03. It’s a downer of a song, making it less of a victory lap than an exasperated sigh of someone feeling helpless. It features the cute, technicolor blips found in his other songs, but they’re more effectively contrasted to the rest of the instrumentation here: there’s nervousness in nimble-moving guitars, disorientation in sputtering synth stabs, and a searing discomfort and self-loathing in midwxst’s lyrics. In a quick two minutes, he shows how his anxiety has manifested as self-hatred, and his slurred confessionals and almost-angry rap verse tell all: this is the sound of someone at once exhausted and sad and hurt, fully cognizant of how they’re coming off to others, of how these depressive episodes are crushing them into a pulp. As the song bops along playfully, midwxst feels increasingly desperate for some sort of resolve, but all that’s left is a mess of thoughts swirling around his head. One line sums it all up: “I don’t know what the fuck I’ve turned into.” —Joshua Minsoo Kim
Frogman - “Cult Party” (Dismiss Yourself)
“Cult Party” takes place in an alternate universe where Playboi Carti, Sanrio, and Jet Set Radio have the largest cultural cachet. From “Cult Party”’s chipmunked intro to the festive bells and constant sound effects, Frogman is having the time of his fucking life composing a PS2 symphony to match the exaggerated swagger of a froggy boy—the song is replete with an endearingly nasally inflection. As internet music keeps clashing with today’s musical trends in a heated fever pitch, so too will our acceptance of absurdities and garish aesthetics, as if we haven’t detached enough already. But tracks like these are jolts of lightning for the critical brain; there’s always someone inventing and imagining, and for that I’m thankful. —Eli Schoop
Purchase Slyme Koro at Bandcamp.
Sweet Trip – “Walkers Beware! We Drive into the Sun” (Darla)
The sparkle and sway of “Walkers Beware! We Drive into the Sun,” the vitalizing details of its ambiance present Sweet Trip at a pinnacle of breathy languor—think late-summer bleeding into the luscious chill of autumn. Valerie Cooper and Roby Burgos—whose dazzling and intricate digitization of shoegaze produced a masterpiece in 2003’s velocity : design : comfort—have never sounded as stately as they do here, and never quite so tender, so directly and warmly emotive, not even when their 2009 album You Will Never Know Why played with slower tempos; and “played” is a crucial word for describing Sweet Trip’s earlier sound. Fans might miss some of that playfulness in “Walkers Beware,” whose exclamatory title suggests something more kinetic than the bass-y mood piece that it is.
It’s a swooning ballad set to slow-motion disco percussion, and its great virtues are those of space and color. I approach it in a bloom of synesthesia, tallying the perfect pink coolness of evening air, the way a slow dance tastes on a beach at sunset. I’ve never danced on a beach at sunset before, which is exactly why I’ve been listening to “Walkers Beware! We Drive into the Sun” on repeat since I first heard it a few weeks ago. It belongs to the order of art that lives out beautiful variations on our lives, enacting hypotheticals in the departments of our sensual idealities, and reports back to us as aesthetic experience, thereby making imaginative life into an inward fugue of all that might have been. You know: pop music. One thinks of “Dancing Queen,” the poems of Hart Crane, and the way streetlights blurred in a plume of October fog can call to mind the names of friendly acquaintances you wish you’d gotten to know better.
The texture and flavor of a ballad tend to operate like literary metaphors, transports from one idea to another; “Walkers Beware” achieves a gentle alchemy of just that sort. The arrangement ripples with ambient fluidity. The interlocking articulate sighs that drive its vocal hook enunciate “beware” as a dreamy invitation, as possibility rather than threat– an ambiguity that draws beautiful maps in the imagination. —Lucy Frost
Purchase “Walkers Beware! We Drive Into the Sun” / “Stab/Slow” at Bandcamp.
Bloodslide - “Pica” (self-released)
It’s a sign of both Protomartyr and Preoccupations’s brilliance that their supergroup doesn’t merely produce a twice-as-gloomy post-punk. Instead, Bloodslide’s “Pica” immediately debuts as an abstract, grotesque post-rock landscape with, somewhat inexplicably, Nancy Sinatra’s daughter on vocals—the song is noisy, opaque with misanthropy, embracing an unadorned animosity in a wider dimension from its punk origins. Every dense plane of Greg Ahee’s guitar work resounds like something alien and prehistorically glacial, nearly eclipsing the cruel bite of a heavy synthetic backing. And AJ Lambert’s vocals only heighten the cult-like atmosphere. “Ice cracks your teeth, chalk on the tip of your lips,” she chants, bitterly hypnotic, almost like an invocation: “sucking your teeth for the pain, mama”. The press release itself is just as delightfully near-incomprehensible a litany of pica symptoms—the aesthetic invokes more Beastmilk and Bloodborne visuals than B Boys and British art schools, and the forthcoming EP promises to be an excessively ambitious visual event, saturated with red-tinted images of hyper-digitalization. Even if you go into “Pica” expecting more Telemetry at Howe Bridge, it’s hard to resist the stark seduction of its alienation. —Zhenzhen Yu
Purchase “Pica” at Bandcamp.
Új Bála - “Rush” (self-released)
Hungary-based Új Bála crafts gritty, wonky, unpredictable beats with an ear for the bucolic, sounds pushing through warm line hiss like tall grass through underbrush, splaying in the breeze: to explore Bála’s universe is to wander dense forests, to gather dark loam in your hands, dirt nestling itself firmly underneath your fingernails. The titular track from his February Rush EP is no exception to this trend, an eight-minute epic of feverish, acid-soaked dance madness that shines with enough manic energy to light up a stadium. Woody tom hits and nervous hi-hat skitters build a hesitant back-and-forth dialogue across the stereo field before being assaulted by raucous kick drums, piercing cymbals and a shrill, screeching melody that layers itself relentlessly, increasing in intensity until the piece’s all-too-soon end. It’s a rambunctious, exhilarating, exhausting listen; and, look, I can describe it with my best efforts until the cows come home, but it’s no substitute for hearing the thing yourself. “Rush” possesses an infectious, rabid energy like no other dance cut I’ve heard this quarter, and if the world were fair and just it would be blasting in every club as we speak. Until that can happen, blow it out on whatever system you have handy: a track this massive belongs solely at the forefront of your attention. —Maxie Younger
Purchase Rush at Bandcamp.
Yu Su - “Xiu” (bié Records)
The propulsive and utterly compelling opener of Yu Su's January EP Yellow River Blue was the song that stuck with me in early 2021. Its light confidence gave the raw new year a hopeful patina.
The Vancouver-based artist has been steadily releasing studio samples over the last few years for boutique imprints like Shanghai’s Eating Music and Ninja Tune sub-label Technicolour, building an international following and local sphere of collaborators in the process. But “Yellow River Blue” is a more intentional reflection of the artist’s diverse tributary of inspirations, the inaugural release on a label she’s co-running, bié, designed to index “the emergent and diverse musical flavourings from the far reaches of China.” (See Leslie Ken Chu’s excellent CBC profile of Yu Su for more on this.)
“Xiu” does this in microcosm, built as it is around a springy pipa sample, and supplemented with the low-end rhythmic chug of bass from 工工工’s Joshua Frank—another figure straddling the Canadian & Chinese music undergrounds. While Yellow River Blue dabbles in ambient, dub and house, and is flecked with avant production techniques intended to obscure and muddy at points, “Xiu” pulses ease and grace, coolly wrapping Su’s skills and experiences to date in a concise, uplifting package. —Josh Feola
Purchase Yellow River Blue at Bandcamp.
Robert Hood - “Hard To Kill” (M-Plant)
“Hard To Kill” comes as part of a long overdue first time digital release and reissue of techno legend Robert Hood’s 1998 Underestimated EP. After his seminal and still utterly indispensable mid-90s studies in abstraction and minimalism, Hood turned to lighter, jazzier, somewhat more ‘musical’ variations of his style during the late 90s and early 00s. One common feature of his work during this period is an acute interest in the border between the synthetic and the acoustic, often resulting in Rorschach-like synth sequences that double as bizarre simulacra of existing acoustic instruments. Case in point, “Hard To Kill”’s lead sequence doubles as a pseudo-accordion with a hard-to-pinpoint, rubbery timbre that is interlaced with trace amounts of twangy saw harmonics. It mechanically lurches forward in a see-saw like manner; seemingly not modulating at all, statically repeating itself ad infinitum.
Yet, after a few minutes, it no longer feels like you are still listening to the same sound. As so often with Hood—and he is an absolute master at these perceptual sleights of hand—it is hard, if not impossible, to tell if what you are hearing is actually moving and modulating or if his shrewd and labyrinthine programming has just tricked your brain into hearing changes and modulations in entirely static repetitions. Here, a closer listen reveals that the lead sequence all along came with a slight, detuned pitch modulation, endowing it with a subtly seasick feel that destabilizes the track’s more rigid rhythms. However, what I cannot pinpoint at all is whether this pitch modulation itself is varying from bar to bar or if it keeps statically repeating the same modulative pattern. I'm not sure if a track like this could be properly called ‘funny,’ but it seems to me that there is nonetheless a certain humor in these kinds of perceptual ironies.
As the track progresses, the lead sequence is joined by a secondary, more noticeably detuned synth figure whose dimmer, lowpassed harmonics smoothly counterpoint the lead’s movements. Additionally, a few well-placed details emerge: Two sampled vocal snippets, one male, one female, perform a duet that seems to blissfully dwell on it's own lack of semantic significance. A hard-panned noisy synth scrapes against the right edge of the stereo field while missing a counterpart on the left, reinforcing the track's slight off-kilter feel. A quick, flanged resonant synth blip tap dances in the center, infusing the synth section with a touch of percussive energy. While these extra details may come across as slightly superfluous—Hood is usually at his best when committed to total reductionism—they also imbue the track with a pleasant sense of luxuriousness, since what is luxury if not having things you don’t need? —Vincent Jenewein
Purchase Underestimated at Forced Exposure (US), Bleep (UK), and Hard Wax (Germany).
Ooaayu - “1” (School of the Arts)
Russian Hill Chiropractic is the latest project from Alex Yu. Much like tracks in his project Hooded Communion, this cassette under the moniker Ooaayu is defined by a noisy, droning racket bolstered in part by field recordings. On “1,” metallic clangs and repeated squawks form a prominent rhythm; with the aid of stereo panning, it becomes an act of hypnosis. As a lurching synth pad imbues the piece with a gothic theatricality, everything suddenly disintegrates, but Yu then allows this rupturing to become a part of the song’s rhythmic propulsion, the graininess of that explosive sound only adding further textural depth. In its final seconds, everything echoes and wails and hurls, as if we’ve finally been spewed out of this tunnel of whirlwinding sound. —Joshua Minsoo Kim
Purchase Russian Hill Chiropractic at Bandcamp.
DMRA - “SP.E.N.T.” (MMODEMM)
I know the secret to this song. My pal Jimmy from down the street, he said he knows the secret to this song too. “Oh, ‘SP.E.N.T.’ by DMRA? I know the secret to that song,” he told me. “It’s that aggressive bouncing bass line. It’s the first thing you hear, and it provides the track with undeniable forward momentum,” he said, bouncing a little himself. Jimmy always talks like that. But he was wrong and I told him so.
“Well then it has to be the syncopated percussion that comes in later. It adds a complexity that keeps the listener invested.” Nope. Wrong again.
“The soaring, detuned synths, then? The ones that sound like an old warped cassette tape? Those make me nostalgic for my misspent youth, a time I yearn to return to.” He was now staring into the middle distance, a little down at the mouth. But he was still wrong. Three strikes and you’re out, Jimmy.
Do you want to know the secret to this song? It’s the clanging bell sound that enters at 1:37. Bong. It’s easy to miss, that first time. But there it is again at 1:41, a little quieter. Bong. Your close attention to the track will be rewarded if you catch these first two tentative appearances, because the bell returns in its climactic moments. 2:38: Bong. 2:40: Bong. 2:43, 2:46, 2:50: Bong bong bong. Then all at once, at 2:53: Bong, bongbong. It would be easy, but unpleasant, to imagine this track without these crucial touches. They add such flavor. So now you know the secret to this song too. Go tell all your friends. —Matthew Blackwell
Purchase MMODEMM | PH17 at Bandcamp.
Thank you for reading the sixtieth issue of Tone Glow. Happy listening :+)
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