Tone Glow 086: Devin DiSanto
An interview with Devin DiSanto + our Writers Panel on Moin's 'Paste' + Autumn Fair's self-titled album
Devin DiSanto
Devin DiSanto is a composer and performer from Hartford, Connecticut who is currently based in New York. His musical career spans solo and collaborative records that are task-based and fall into a lineage of acousmatic music from artists like Taku Unami and Takahiro Kawaguchi. After a string of albums during the 2010s—2013’s Tracing a Boundary, 2015’s Three Exercises with Nick Hoffman, and a live recording with Unami—he took a break from releasing music. He returned at the turn of the decade with a piece for AMPLIFY 2020 and a virtual live performance for a Tone Glow-programmed show in 2021. Earlier this year he released an album on the Seoul-based Rope Editions titled Waiting and Counting: Domestic Ritual for the Stereo Field. Joshua Minsoo Kim talked with DiSanto on May 20th, 2022 via Zoom to discuss his childhood experiences with sound, performance art, getting involved with Seoul’s electroacoustic improvisation scene, detaching sounds from their sources, and works from his discography.
Joshua Minsoo Kim: Hello, hello.
Devin DiSanto: Hey, how's it going?
I just finished up my school year—I’m a high school teacher.
Cool, congrats. That was probably an intense, crazy ending I imagine.
Yeah, it was kind of a hellish year in general. Literally every single teacher I know said it was like teaching for the first time again. It was the first year we’d been fully back in person. I mostly teach sophomores and because we didn’t have school in person last year, and the year before that was when COVID started, these kids were basically like middle schoolers. They also absolutely don’t remember any content since they weren’t paying attention in online classes, which… I don’t blame them.
Yeah, they were dealing with a lot of stuff! My sister is a high school teacher and she was telling me it was wild. Not only with doing schoolwork, but you have to be on a little bit with how you deal with the kids. Can you breathe now?
Yes, I’m still getting used to the fact that we’re done. I slept a lot yesterday for the first time in a while. How have you been?
I’ve been good. Things have been pretty regular workwise—I was lucky I wasn’t hit too bad with any big pandemic shifts or COVID stuff. But other than that, things are good. Things started picking up again with music, which was nice. I had downtime with that because of work—I’m a sound designer, so I was focusing on the more work-oriented side of things.
Who do you do sound design for?
Mostly I’ll do app and notification sounds. I’ll get an individual client and they’ll have what they’re looking for with social media or their website. It’s basically the same thing as graphic design—I’ll give someone options, just some short themes or melodies or sounds. That’s just what I ended up knowing how to do after school.
Do you find that creatively fulfilling?
Hmm… (pauses). In a way, I like that I’m at a little bit of a distance from having an audience, or assuming I have one. It’s nice to just have a one-on-one rapport with someone, like, “Hey, is this what you’re looking for?” I don’t get worked up about producing a specific result unless it’s satisfying to them. It ends up being more fun sometimes than working on my own stuff because I’ll play around as much as I can and see what comes out of it, but then there’s the stress of meeting expectations.
It’s a nice link with what your music is in the first place, because there’s a procedural aspect to it. I remember when I first heard your work, I was thinking about what [Fluxus founding member] George Maciunas said about being “anti-professional” and being against bourgeois forms of art, but your music has a corporate feel to it. You have these digitized voices that indicate how much time is remaining, for example. It’s this weird interzone you’re navigating.
I like that description. That kind of happened unconsciously. Associations with work—people think the height of working may be the corporate scenario, but an artist’s work isn’t necessarily related to that way of doing things, so I end up thinking a lot about, “How do you get through undesirable or difficult working situations?” Sound and music ended up being a focal point to be able to get through things and internalize things so I could get through and enjoy things. It’s sort of a whistle-while-you-work mentality.
Is there an early realization you had of that? Maybe with a high school job, where music and sound became an important way to get through the work day?
You know, honestly I think it was just about getting through life (laughter). Music was just everything to me from an early age. I had a big hearing problem as a young kid—I didn’t hear from an early age. Actually, there are family home videos where I’m crawling around during Christmas and they’re calling me, trying to get my attention, but I don’t hear anything. I don’t have a distinct memory of that coming back online, but I was an elective mute when I was a kid for a couple years—I just wouldn’t speak. Listening became the primary way of processing the world, and I would be someone who was just sitting, listening, and taking things in. That was just my primary mode of perception. From then on, all I cared about was anything that had to do with sound… be it listening to Elvis or digging through random crates and finding out what I was into.
I think this idea of isolating that sense of listening isn’t something people today aren’t really afforded the opportunity to do. We’re constantly inundated with so much sound. So as a kid, when you were listening and processing, was there a point when you realized that this wasn’t just helpful in engaging with the world but as a way to more deeply appreciate the art you were getting into?
You know, I don’t think I made art associations with sound until I was a little older. I was really interested in a doubling—of being able to detach a sound from its source in my mind, and then choosing to relate it to the source at will. A sound is interesting because you can think of it as something detached from what produced it, or not. I like that option, and I’m always interested in that. Everything I’m making has a process that created the sound, but I don’t necessarily think that, as a listener, you have to pull that apart analytically. You can enjoy the experience without having to root around in the system that produced it, and oftentimes when you are looking for logical consistency in a process, you’re gonna find falsehoods. You’re gonna find something that doesn’t line up, that contradicts the unity of it. That is something I want to be on the surface of what I’m doing. I don’t know if that’s obvious to a listener when they’re listening, but I do hope that gets picked up sometimes.
This is funny, because when people talk about acousmatic music, I’ve always felt like it’s something you can experience with any music at all. It’s just about the perspective you approach the art. Though on your end, you’re trying ways to provide that experience. Are you trying to figure out what sounds, or what juxtapositions of sounds will provide a way for listeners to detach sounds from their sources?
I want to give a listener as many options as possible. You know what I mean? They can choose to focus in on what they’re getting out of it. I want to provide meaning up front. I think giving a structure, you want to provide a meaning for what is happening, but I don’t necessarily want to do that. I think I’m always going for a paradox, where there’s a meaning here if you want it, but there also isn’t at all. Some of this is arbitrary in and of itself. I don’t want to force a rigid interpretation on how to listen to something—I’d rather give as much information up front as I can so someone can discover it on their own terms, hopefully. I don’t know if I’m actually doing that, but who knows (laughter). But you just hope for the best!
This could be music or otherwise, but were there other pieces of art that provided that same experience for you?
There was this one point where I was getting into, as you mention, the George Maciunas/Fluxus kind of stuff. I was really into how those performances were being documented. The way they’re being written about is more in art historical discourse, where you’re check marking a new technique that happened in this performance area. But there’s no description of what’s happening in these performances, you know? And to me, I was always like, “What’s going on?” I was super interested in what was happening with this sort of stuff. I would check out the Slowscan tapes or the Alga Marghen releases. My favorite kind of recordings on all that stuff was when I had no idea what was going on, but there was something at stake—you can hear an audience, you can hear movement, you can hear some distinctive musical moments but there are other points where you’re so alienated from that, and you have to piece it together yourself as a listener. People like Taku Unami and Takahiro Kawaguchi really touch on that approach to recording, and that’s really exciting to me as a listener. I think there’s a participatory aspect in the listening—I’m discerning and deciphering what’s going on, and I’m not coming from intense, modernist music. It’s really just something that’s more inviting and playful, and even mysterious in a certain sense.
That makes a lot of sense. And I mean, Taku Unami and Takahiro Kawaguchi as references make so much sense. With Unami’s Malignitat (2007), and his whole interest in sci-fi specifically, it made me realize how acousmatic music was like science fiction because of the lack of understanding in the sound sources. And then of course Teatro Assente (2011) is a whole different realm because it’s staged as a performance.
I love the track titles on that album because they give you a little bit of information, you know? I thought that was brilliant because it’s just enough to inform a structure or a touchpoint for what you’re hearing. I thought that was a good step forward in working with that concept. And it’s funny because it’s as simple as a title.
That’s how I felt when I first heard your album Tracing a Boundary (2013), too. Because that title even forced me to listen more closely to figure out what was going on. And you’re right—that’s the key. There has to be some sort of buy-in from the listener without dictating exactly what the experience should be. It reminds me of my teaching practice actually. Do you mind talking about that album?
I always try to think of the limit of an event or a moment. Like, when does a moment stop and when are you in a different one. There’s a quote I like a lot, “exchange begins at the boundary of a community.” That’s where I got “boundary” from, like this is a self-contained moment, but I’m trying to record it from as many possible perspectives as I can before it becomes me standing outside of the performance, or I’m outside the building where it’s happening, or I’m down the street and that performance has nothing to do with me anymore.
There’s a video of it somewhere. When I went to CalArts I did a performance of it but it’s a much more reduced version, but it’s basically a system of moving objects through a room, and from one side to the other, and as I’m moving them I’m triggering a sound that indicates movement. Like, when I open this box, I have to make this sound, and I have to make this causal connection every time I do it. It’s kind of an arbitrary choice but as the piece unfolds and gains momentum, it becomes an association that the ear relies on for information if you want it—and if you don’t that’s fine too.
I get into this idea of tone color in forms—the way something sounds from a phenomenological standpoint gives you information, and it’s not just musical. When a microwave is done cooking your food, the bell goes off. That’s a very simple example. Another example could be you’re outdoors and you’re picking up the sounds around and you’re choosing what’s foreground and background, what’s meaningful to you, and you’re gaining information about your surroundings. There are things that have more of a 1:1 correspondence, and others that are a generally more immersive environment where you’re parsing out individual moments from. I incorporate instruments to highlight that concept. I like task-oriented performance in the sense that it gives the impression that something’s at stake—you’re completing a process and you’re judging it qualitatively. Did he do that well? Did he do that poorly? What was the pacing that he chose to carry out that task? Was there a time constraint? How do these factors influence the performance and then the sound or musical outcome? I want to bring all those factors into a piece and juxtapose and balance them.
I didn’t realize you went to CalArts. Were there any teachers who had a big influence on the way you think about art or performance?
I took lessons with Michael Pisaro for a year and it was really rewarding. I was there around the time the July Mountain (2010) recording came out, and that’s a great piece. There were some lessons I took from those meetings, and one of the big ones was that there’s a big difference between a performance that happens in real time at a concert and its recorded representation. That was really beneficial in giving me pause to how I would put out a release. I would think that I could just record a performance and put out a piece but he really convinced me to do it based on the medium. You don’t wanna just avoid editing, and avoid what the medium allows you to do to communicate to an audience. I don’t know if I would’ve picked up on that quickly if I didn’t have that experience.
Obviously you have that album with Taku Unami [ErstLive 013], and that was a recording of a live performance. What was the experience of the actual performance as it happened, and then later on when you listened to the album? What was your experience like as a participant and as a listener?
Hm, that’s a good question. As a listener, I felt pleasantly alienated from the performance. I was like, I don’t remember a lot of this, this is great (laughter). We had a quick powwow before it happened, where I just shared what I was doing and asked what he was doing. It wasn’t a rigidly worked out performance; I just quickly ran through what I was gonna do, and he explained what he could bring to it, and then I made adjustments. It ended up being a baseline test where I had audio being the guiding framework for identifying… well, I don’t want to get too heady about it because it’s a pretty funny thing. Like, to me it was just one big joke (laughter).
I grew up being a bad test taker, and I grew up during the Bush era with mandatory standardized tests, and everyone was measured by a certain metric. I think often I felt like I was falling behind this standard, and I always wanted to play with the notion of, okay, what’s the baseline notion that enables me to be considered a human being (laughter). So let’s make a piece about that, and I’m very obviously getting these requests wrong, and I’m getting it wrong in a very human error kind of way. I wanted failure to be self-evident. I like when there’s something at stake and it’s like, oh, that didn’t go well. With music, that doesn’t matter, because it can still be compelling as a theme or moment. Regardless of success or failure, music can be intriguing.
But in this case it’s a performance. There’s a difference between there being an actual, unintentional mistake and releasing that versus something that’s more staged.
I don’t know if it’s “staged.” I made it so there was a slideshow that was randomized and then they would ask me to do something, and there were things I had to do on the fly. What was at stake was very authentic but it was staged in the sense that I was wearing formal attire and had props. But anything I was doing, it was like, I could mess this up at any moment. There’s a humiliation factor that’s a part of it, and for whatever reason I lean into that stuff. I don’t know if I like humiliation, but I like being on the spot as a jester. There’s something honest about it—you’re throwing yourself out there to show that there’s an incompetence that’s gonna linger into your adulthood in certain areas. You put on your best face to be in the world, but in your private life you’re probably messing up a lot of stuff. I know I am (laughter). So if I can bring that to the foreground sometimes, it brings up an interesting point to talk about in terms of performance. I went to music school, and everything had to be exact and dead on, and there’s a certain ideological viewpoint of what performing is, and I think that once I got into the more art side of things, it was like, performance is a very broad category. It’s probably the unifier for all the fine arts. That was the bridge to cross from music stuff to art performance.
All this made me think of a series of things. I was thinking of Taku Unami and Mattin’s album where they’re just crying [Distributing Vulnerability To The Affective Classes (2010)]. And then I was thinking of this idea of there being a stand-up comedy sort of feel to this sort of performance, and then we landed on performance art. Were there specific performance art pieces that you were moved by throughout your life?
When I was getting into performance stuff, I was into the more ephemeral gestures. I think there’s a Joseph Kosuth piece where he goes into the desert and releases smoke or sand. And then I really got into Tehching Hsieh. He would do these pieces that were very self-serious, which I ended up not loving all the time, but he did one where he would be in his studio in a janitor’s garb and every hour on the hour he would hit the clock and there’d be a timestamp [One Year Performance, 1980-1981]. It would be this disciplined action. I thought that was really interesting. I don’t gravitate towards endurance-based performance, but trying to do disciplined actions based on time structures was really attractive for me. What music ends up being is disposable time, so it was working with the notion of how music changes how you experience time. That performance shifted my way of thinking how music could be approached.
There are some Fluxus pieces I like too—I really like Ben Patterson’s stuff. It’s really humorous but there’s an honest investigation happening. There’s a critique of the concert hall, and they’re performing in different kinds of values and dealing with those traditions, but doing it in a cheeky way. I love the recorded stuff—I think those are worth listening to and spending time with. He knows his instrument and he knows what he’s doing, and I only say it like that because I think Fluxus has that stigma… like I don’t want to experience Fluxus pieces nominally, like, oh that’s the title, that’s a picture of it, check it off the box. I want to experience it as it unfolds. I like Giuseppe Chiari, but I don’t know if that’s performance though. That’s more thinking about sound from different vantage points. I get excited about that. It gets stuffy in the conservatory when different perspectives are not incorporated with how you talk about music—everything has to come from a theoretical standpoint. Which I think is great, but you’re ultimately not saying as much as you could when you just stick with that.
Do you have a distaste for that concert hall setting, or anything in that academic field?
I don’t have any desire to make concert pieces. I would give it a go just for personal practice, maybe, but I don’t apply for grants that would allow me to write orchestral music or something. I like new music—I don’t like the term “new music” (laughter). Composers I like are very rooted in that tradition, but the self-seriousness of it, and the presumption that it’s doing something that sometimes I don’t think it’s doing, is sometimes a bit of a repellant. How do you feel about it?
It’s hard to say. I’m grateful because I feel very far removed from the music world at large. Like, none of my friends in real life are into music, really, and it’s great. I go to concerts but I sort of dislike concerts as a whole. I think the act of going to a concert and listening to music on your own are completely different processes; I’m a bigger fan of the “courting process,” of having to learn to understand a piece of music and having it become associated with a certain time, place, and people in your life. Concerts are usually more ephemeral and narrow in experience in a way I dislike. Some experimental music concerts have been wonderful, but I usually don’t feel compelled to go to many, though I imagine it’d be a different story if I lived in New York and there were so many concerts. Specific to the concert hall stuff, I don’t dislike it because I do think it has its place, but obviously there are so many things that should be changed. It’s really disinterested in self-assessment and thinking about how myopic it can be, or like you said, how it thinks it’s doing something that it really isn’t. But as a whole, my distaste for it is more related to my distaste for live performance as a whole than anything specific.
It’s funny how it’s such a private experience for you. It was for me, too. I was surrounded by people who loved music but the specific strain of this area was a quest all on my own, so much so that I would do internships. I did one at Mode Records for a while, and I worked at The Stone, and I worked with C.F. Peters so I could see all the scores for the composers I was really curious about. Much like you, it wasn’t something I was having a dialogue with multiple people about, it was more of a thing I was investigating on my own, and it ended up being a private experience.
It’s funny how the more I was around that stuff, the more it felt self-aggrandizing. It was always trying to prove there was this technical innovation that was happening and that there was this linear progress. I just liked pieces that felt compelling based on how I listened to them, it was never like, (in a stuffy academic voice) “this piece is good because he figured out how to extend this technique” or “because he did this with the violin.” The pieces that I liked from that area are pretty conceptually based, like, what is music? What is the social impact? How did the moment come about? That’s what I took away from that stuff, and not so much trying to be the next genius who’s bringing the canon forward or something (laughter). That stuff has nothing to do with me.
I wanted to ask about Three Exercises (2015). I believe that’s when we first started talking. What was your experience like working with Nick Hoffman? Were you in conversation with him prior to making that album? And what was it like working with him compared to working with Taku.
We had phone conversations before we had any plans to meet up. I was doing a lot of writing of ideas, and I was pitching it to him. I was a big fan of Pilgrim Talk before I was even asked to make the album. I was really stoked on the label and I was trying to figure out something that could be incorporated into his skill set, which is actually pretty broad. He can do a lot of stuff. I made a loose outline of a performance and I had an idea where I thought it’d be interesting to bring people in to interpret things as they were happening and describe it and hopefully work that into a composition where the listener was listening to bits of information and then decide if they wanted to listen to that in a purely acousmatic way or dig deeper, find information, and piece things together. He had this patch he was using that was a spectral thing. It tracked the ambiance in the room and based on volume or loudness, it’d have certain responses. I don’t know what he was using too well, but that ended up being a very interesting thing to work with as we were moving things around in the room.
Working with Nick was great. He’s really open-minded, and he comes from a pretty traditional musical background but he also comes from the Midwest noise scene, which I had some familiarity with because I had a noise project with a buddy of mine from school. We did a lot of touring but going through the Midwest left a really big impression on me. There’s a show that really sticks out in my mind. We were in Ohio and there was this place called Bela Dubby. There was this duo of this guy, Wyatt Howland who called himself Skin Graft, and this guy David Russell. That was one of the best things I had ever seen. David does this performative stuff where it was a little bit intense—he had this hatchet. And there was this relationship between his movement and the sound that’s being made, and Wyatt was doing this soundscape around it. It was one of those times where afterwards everyone was partying and I was just sitting on a couch and just like… (laughs). It left a big impact. Nick has all that internalized and then all the formal academic stuff, so with the way we were chatting, he was able to go in any direction—conceptual, or something more musical. I mean, look at him now, he’s doing lute music and he’s crushing it.
I would say the difference between working with Nick and Taku was that me and Taku didn’t really communicate that much. I mean, we have great conversations but when it comes to doing something, there’s a mutual trust we have where we can follow each other and when to read the moment. It’s less verbally communicated and we know each other’s skill set and we just saw what happened. I think it’s a more old-school approach specific to how he’s been doing things, but the thing is that he’s such a good musician that he can follow whatever’s happening and influence a moment in a really creative, unexpected way. He can shift a moment enough to shift how you’re listening to it. With Taku it would just be like, okay let’s just do the things, let’s be patient and considerate.
Nick Hoffman had that album with Hong Chulki and Ryu Hankil, SONNE (2012), but how did you get involved with the Korean avant-garde scene?
It was actually separate from Nick, which was kind of weird. And it worked out later where we had mutual touchpoints to work on. I did CalArts for a year and then I left to finish my degree at the Art Institute of Chicago. When I was there, there was a LAMPO show with Choi Joonyong and Hong Chulki, and they knew Nick Collins who was working there. And that’s actually the concert where I met JY, who’s my buddy who lives in Seoul right now. We were at that concert and it was really great—Chulki was doing his turntable stuff where he was putting objects on them and creating huge feedback walls, and then Choi Joonyong was putting vibrating objects around the room and he was methodically taping things to the floor. The second set was this huge noise set and half the people just leave the room, and then it’s just me and JY left in a corner and we just looked at each other like, that was so good (laughter).
We just bonded over that and through that I met them. I went over to Seoul to meet my wife’s family, and I was just like, hey I’m gonna be here would it be cool to do a concert, and then I did a Jin Sangtae concert in New York, and then my buddy opened up a store and did a concert there. I’ve just been lucky to sustain that connection—a little bit loosely. When they come here or I go there, I try to meet up. I’m not trying to push my own stuff; I just want to go to a concert. That community is very unique and they have a distinctive approach to what they’re doing. The Dotolimpic stuff was so fun, I thought. There’s a good humor to it and a seriousness to executing it, too, and that’s been a big influence on me. So me and JY, we just started doing stuff together. He just changed my mind about music entirely. He’s super into dance music so he came to Chicago to get into house stuff, and I didn’t have much experience with that, so when we started hanging out he was like, “I think you’d be into this, I think you’d be into that” and it was like (makes exploding head sound) whoa! He just opened up all these doors for me. I wasn’t close-minded, but I thought I had my references and my thing, but he’d show me like Hieroglyphic Being and it was like, holy crap. It was experimental music but just from a different area.
I emailed JY once years ago and I think he told me that he stepped away from making music?
Yeah. He’s an amazing DJ, and he’d laugh at me if I said that because he’s so modest—he doesn’t sell himself so well. He knows so much about music, but he’s the least pretentious guy ever. He was kind of running a club in Itaewon for a while and programming some really great DJs and taking risks with stuff. That’s a tough audience to do that for, and if you could convince people of those risks, that’s pretty cool.
That’s awesome. I didn’t go to that LAMPO show you just mentioned but I did go to one with Hong Chulki and the filmmaker Lee Hangjun, and that was crazy. That was one of the most memorable concerts I’ve ever been to. I remember there was this one part where they were walking around with the film strips and just tugging at it and making sounds with that. I also remember there being a photographic umbrella and they kept flashing it, and they were using the sound created from that along with the flash—it was like a flicker film. I remember people leaving too, and it just being this huge sensory overload.
They toured with those pieces, right?
Yeah, there were a couple shows.
I remember being so bummed about missing it. I saw the photos and was like, wow this looks crazy.
It really was. I did want to talk about your “return” to music. You had a piece called “ritual out of order” in Jon Abbey’s AMPLIFY 2020.
I’m always writing down ideas. I think that’s how I keep myself refreshed—I have project ideas all the time written in a notebook. It had been a long time since I did any recordings and that was an excuse to rekindle some tools. I made a patch and was working with feedback; I was just trying to play around in a simple, fundamental way. The reason I started doing stuff again is because JY was like, hey, I wanna do a label, would you consider doing something? He’s the sort of guy where even if I don’t wanna do something, I’ll do it. We have that jeong (정) kind of thing where we want the best from each other and there’s an expectation I wanna meet for him. It’s just a mutual respect sort of thing. Even when I was visiting Seoul the last time, he was like, “Do you wanna do a concert?” I was terrified but I still did it (laughs). Performing was a lot easier for me when I was younger because it was like, okay, no thinking, let’s just do it. Now that I’m a little older, it’s like, oh, I’m in front of all these people, I have to compose myself and make this happen. Regarding the return, I had an idea for a project that was on hold and when he asked me to do it, I thought it’d be a worthwhile time to make it happen.
With this album, Waiting and Counting: Domestic Ritual for the Stereo Field, you took recordings from the past. How was it revisiting those?
Each track is actually just an excerpt from a live performance, so there was no layering of additional audio. If I was just playing a recording it was just happening in the room—it was being triggered by the patch. I’m interested in those kind of recordings because I like to hear them, but they also had this conceptual relationship to waiting, and during quarantine we were alienated from collective life and I had these recordings of waiting rooms that I’d been making when I was younger. There’s something about the sound of collective experience, and then being alienated from that, and trying to bring that into my solitary situation and superimpose that with timekeeping, music-making, and executing tasks and orders. I was trying to bring that all together. That’s what happened to me during lockdown, where you’re doing the bare minimum to take care of yourself, you’re cleaning and doing these chores and you can either find them painful and annoying or try to structure them so you can get through it in a way that brings meaning to your life or enjoyment or something like that. That seems to be the motive, I’m realizing—you can either decide that you’re miserable and that there are things you have to execute, or you can focus in on the experiential aspect, and sound always ends up being the entry point for me.
Yeah, earlier you mentioned this idea of how sound changes our relationship with time, and that makes sense with how if you’re at work you can do things to make it seem like time is going by faster. Do you feel like your music and performances have had an impact on your everyday life? Is there a throughline there?
Yeah, I think so. I pay attention to how I do something in a different way. I don’t know why but I keep thinking about washing the dishes. It was something that became a big deal during lockdown. I don’t know if I just got particularly annoyed with it, but I did have to find a way to be listening and less anxious to be completing something. I wanted to be in the moment, and I like the sound of clatter, of unarticulated rustling—and I imagine that’s something you’re into as well—but I love that little trick that thinking can do, where you’re parsing out elements of an experience and you’re unifying it and pulling it apart. Something as simple as doing the dishes can do that for me.
A lot of what you’re saying makes a lot of sense to me, and even the fact that this album has recordings from waiting areas does too. Like, if I’m waiting for a bus or I’m just in any situation where I’m waiting for time to pass, I’ll play a “game” where I’m just listening to all the sounds around me. I’ll be isolating individual sounds, thinking specifically about what they are and what specific direction they’re coming from in relation to myself, and then how they then interact with each other. That’s literally my go-to thing when I need to pass time and need to stay in a designated area.
Yeah, I think you just said that way better than I did. That’s kind of exactly what I do. What information am I getting from this? What’s the sensual experience of it? What’s the experience of those two? You’re kind of placing yourself, or locating yourself. It’s the way you experience space. It’s funny, because I think sound is a space, and contains its own space, and that sounds like a romantic notion, but sound doesn’t displace a whole lot. It’s moving on a center, but it’s the sort of thing when there’s a collection of it, it creates a distinctive environment. When you’re walking through a landscape, how do you decide when you’re at a different location? And time becomes the framework for that.
That’s a good way of thinking about it. There’s a point at which you’ll leave a landscape and you’ll be able to know beyond any visual cues.
Right, and that’s exactly what Tracing a Boundary was supposed to be. Like, how do I know I’m in a new moment or new place? Am I between two places? What does between sound like? I’m always trying to question the “unified” experience of something, like this moment is happening but there are moments around it. What’s informing it, what’s related to it, and what’s not at all related?
This just makes me think about why I like a lot of your music and others in this vein. It puts me in this mindset where I’m approaching sound from a place of humility. There’s just a huge sensorial aspect that I’m not always privy to, and whenever music puts me in that position, it reminds just of how much more there is in this world in general. I think a lot of experimental art is about that. I think a lot of experimental films are about helping me to see things in a new perspective, or it’ll help me appreciate the texture of things or something. It just helps me to not take things for granted.
Right, it attenuates your perception or gives you a new vantage point. Art that regenerates your interest in life or your ability to see things… it’s like, you project what you know onto the world, so when you’re reflecting on that often, you’re probably appreciating what’s around you more. I think that’s why I make work in general. I don’t presume to have an audience; I mostly make things to continue the curiosity, to sustain myself, to reinvigorate, to get excited again.
I’m 100% on the same page. I think everything I do in my life is just an excuse to research more, to understand things about the world or myself better. They’re just reasons to just not stay still and do nothing.
Right, and it’s not some self-absorbed thing, it’s about appreciating the things and people around you.
Is there anything we didn’t talk about that you wanted to touch on?
Not really. I had a list here of stuff I wanted to mention, but no, unless there’s something else you’re curious about. I think I went through anything that was relevant. I have a hard time talking about myself, so it’s weird to be like, well I wanna say this about me (laughter). It was actually nice to connect with you because we’ve been revolving around each other for years. I remember when you were about to start Tone Glow and I was like, yeah dude, go for it. And you’ve done good work with it.
It’s kind of funny how all the first years were me just figuring out what I wanted to do with it, and then during quarantine I realized that I just like doing interviews.
The interviews are really good. A dialogue is a really good way to pull out the interesting and meaningful aspects of someone’s practice. I’ve read a bunch of what you’ve posted and I don’t think you get to that kind of information in another setting. It’s a great structure.
Thank you, and yeah it works out really well! There’s a final question I wanted to ask you. Do you mind sharing one thing you love about yourself?
Well I think it goes back to what we were saying, of having the ability to reinvigorate myself, where I want to get excited about what’s around me. I put effort into trying to think about things in a new way, to sustain my curiosity. I would say that’s probably the thing I most appreciate about myself. It’s an impulse now, it’s an instinct; I’m not conscious about doing it, it’s just something I’m gonna do because that’s how I enjoy life. I’m trying to get stoked on stuff, I’m trying to find something that gets me excited. I don’t wanna get cynical.
Devin DiSanto’s Waiting and Counting: Domestic Ritual for the Stereo Field is available via Rope Editions.
Writers Panel
Every issue, Tone Glow has a panel of writers share thoughts on albums and assign them a score between 0 and 10. This section of the website is inspired by The Singles Jukebox.
Moin - Paste (AD 93, 2022)
Press Release info: “The follow up to their well received debut album ‘Moot!’, the record draws influences from alternative guitar music in its many forms, using electronic manipulations and sampling techniques to redefine it's context, not settling on any one style but moving through them in search of new connections. By exploring these relationships, Moin delivers another collage of the known and unknown, punctuated by words that are just out of reach.”
Purchase Paste at Bandcamp.
Jude Noel: Whether recorded clean or obscured by a film of boutique effects, guitars communicate tension. Though the hundred or so discrete tones that can be coaxed from a fretboard are the product of stress and strain, the strain of dissonant noise rock that influences Moin flips the script, using droning clusters of notes as the backdrop for experiments that examine the textural outlines of their guitaristry. Sonic Youth, their clearest precursor, often migrated to the headstocks of their instruments, producing apocryphal creaking just millimeters away from where the strings wrap around the tuning posts—a sound that intentionally made the guitar sound more like a tool than a magic wand.
Though Paste tends to be a smoother, less abrasive ride than the work of Moin’s noise rock forebears, it zeroes in on the tensile strength that made Slint, Dianogah, and Ui so transfixing. Each element of “Hung Up,” from its antsy percussion to the plinking guitar noodling that bends like uncooked linguine, feels like it could burst, snap, or launch into orbit if the band loses focus for a second. Moin thrives under intense pressure, teetering on the edge of crescendo without giving in to the thrill. The subtle threads of electronica woven into the record are a welcome touch—especially that synth that sounds like an elephant’s cry on “Foot Wrong”—but I’m not as crazy about the spoken word vocals, cribbed a bit too closely from Spiderland’s bag of tricks. At best, on “Forgetting is Like Syrup,” they add some chopped-and-screwed destabilization to the song’s glitchy sound collage. At worst, they’re superfluous and derivative. Overall, though, my fondness for Paste’s instrumentation, which recreates the lightheaded unease you feel when pool water is trapped in your inner ear, outweighs the nitpicking.
[6]
Sunik Kim: There is an arresting sense of control and restraint to this collection that defies initial guitar-music expectations. Opener “Foot Wrong” is an excellent and auspicious start, one in which loops form the foundation, establishing a constant teetering between suspense and resolution wherein quicker loops link and unlink with longer ones, the latter of which only reveal themselves as loops upon restart. The overt emo-ish tonal coloring of some tracks (“Melon”) acts as a kind of grounding element, a familiar emotional core in an otherwise potentially ashen-faced Spiderland-colored palette. Somewhat unexpectedly, the use of loops and sampling here reminds me of charmingly clunky ’90s attempts at the same, e.g. Bowery Electric, only more self-aware, self-referential, pulling in jagged and pitched vocal fragments that are sometimes almost comical in their overt ugliness. In fact, these fragments often act as stereotypical downcast, spoken-word post-rock vocals, but their very evident and intentional artifice throws this potential cookie-cutterness off balance to generative ends. Ultimately, however, the plodding, spacious nature of this music ultimately reduces the latter, especially in the album’s second half, to a kind of gray post-rock-ish anonymity. Paste offers a brief glimpse into a genuinely new perspective on a guitar-electronics synthesis, but equally stands as a reminder that radically reinventing guitar-based music in 2022 freed of nostalgia’s shackles can be a near-impossible challenge with diminishing returns.
[6]
[7]
Eli Schoop: Moin operate within Slint’s universe, drawing out guitar strings, meticulous in their drumming, adorning music with dialogue. One could consider them anti-rock, almost non-rock in their approach. But I dare say, the most analogous conceptual framework for Paste is Francis Fukuyama’s End of History. If we take on face value that liberal democracy is the endgame of human civilization, Paste runs on a notion that post-rock is the endgame of rock as a genre.
Moin’s music slithers and creeps. Unlike Moot!, which contains more familiar alt-rock tempos and climaxes, Paste is content to meander. You never get the feeling the band has an interest in taking a song a concrete direction. This would bring to mind jazz, except for the lack of clear improvisation, as songs are self-contained and tightly strung together. Listening to this album is like being at an art exhibit and pondering its meaning, but you’re not sure how you arrived there, and there are no entrances or exits.
Forgive me Kodwo Eshun, for citing you about a white band, but Moin encapsulates his work about imagining new sonic futures. Most notably, “Forgetting is Like Syrup” centers a chopped-n-screwed sample, another genre that ran parallel to the reorienting nature of post-rock in its usage of samples and sonic disassociation. Following this line of thought, the Black imagination paramount in sampling and DJing directly caused post-rock’s appropriative nature, acting as the final frontier in what rock music can be imagined as. Moin has seized upon this, offering us a definitive statement at the end of history.
[8]
Marshall Gu: Other than “In a Tizzy,” a shorter drumless song placed in the dead-middle of the album, the drums occupy the bulk of the mix in Moin’s Paste. Drums that skitter, slink, pulse and boom in circular patterns reminiscent of so much Krautrock and post-punk. They’re mixed in a way that I can’t help but check the credits to see if Steve Albini is listed here: they have the bite and weight of Pixies’ Surfer Rosa, Slint’s Tweez and Big Black. (Albini’s only here in spirit.) These drums pull everything else into its orbit: the droning guitars, strange chords and stranger samples. “Hello? Do you hear me? Can you hear me?” “Melon” asks over the din, before matching the groove in intensity: “I sure as fuck know you.”
As someone who grew up on ’80s and ’90s underground rock to the point that they’re in my veins, Moin is something of a Godsend, and yet, unlike many of the post-punk crop of the past few years, Moin are nothing of a nostalgia play. Sure, the ringing guitar notes on “Hung Up” sound like Slint, but the song itself doesn’t sound like Slint at all: the story isn’t told through words because there is no story, just groove. Those drums are post-punk and even industrial, yes, but the songs they build don’t fit into either bucket. The band share a kinship with Krautrock’s love of treating the studio as an instrument, but it’s also (obviously) not Krautrock, being from England circa 2020s and not Germany circa 1970s. Uncategorizable music; file under good rock music instead.
[8]
Gil Sansón: The sophomore album from Moin offers the subtle motorik rhythm of artists like To Rococo Rot or Pluramon mixed with sparse bouts of heavily distorted electric guitar, never overpowering the beat or indie rock feeling. It fits the passive aggressive nature of the lyrics and vocal delivery. The second track, “Melon,” has a voice that’s much more Laurie Anderson than Kim Gordon despite having a subject matter far closer to the latter. Even in the tracks that imply physical violence, there’s a somewhat distant delivery, with music being more of a plateau than a rollercoaster for dynamics à la early PJ Harvey or Slint. The nakedness of the music—combined with the subtle sense of menace—adds a sex appeal to this apparently unassuming set of songs. For the most part, the drums are at the forefront, in a captivating mix of programming that keeps both the feeling of the real drums and its sampling. Then comes the guitar, and only third the voice. The vocal samples provide bile and despondency in equal measure, though there’s peaceful reflection on a track like “In A Tizzy.” Moin’s noise rock feels earnest, even if it can be a bit trite (maybe I’m missing a bit of irony to enjoy the plodding riff in “Knuckle”). Still, there’s enough variety of texture and rhythmic approach that keeps the album from being a mere exercise in style.
[7]
Vincent Jenewein: Is it just me or does this record sound like a bunch of outtakes? The songs here are barely songs—bare, tracky, repetitive meandering, not really going anywhere, just a tad bit dour all around. Don’t get me wrong: I’m a Techno guy at heart. Gimme me some sweet tones—they got that part right—and solid grooves and I’m good to go. But with how openly Paste wears its influences on its sleeve, one cannot help but notice what is missing: the songwriting. The album feels less inspired by actual ’90s rock albums than it feels inspired by the demos, cutting-floor compilations, and leaked multi-tracks that have trickled down to obsessive fans over the decades. Perhaps this is the inevitable conclusion of any fandom—eventually, the marginalia becomes more appealing than the meat and potatoes. Simon Reynolds once coined the term “Record Collector Rock.” Perhaps we need a new term: “Wookieepedia Rock.” A riff from here, a riff from there, let’s get this tone, let’s get that tone. Did you know that Kevin Shields re-sampled and arranged pretty much all of Loveless on an Akai S1000? Yeah, Yeah. I’m not judging! Sign me right up for Altgazeepedia. But is that Star Wars? At the end of the day, isn’t it about the simple things—a narrative, emotions, a conflict and all that; alright?
[4]
Joshua Minsoo Kim: The older I get the more I realize that music history is unreliable—everyone’s just learning about experiences secondhand, and the people who lived through it can only provide their own version of the story (which is colored by their own biases and points of fixation anyway). This is of course, the real joy of art: that it’s living and can be understood from a multitude of perspectives. The best facet of Moin’s shtick is that it takes everything about ’90s post-hardcore and magnifies specific qualities to reveal what was always there in the first place. Those Slint-esque spoken word bits? Why not trace them to the poets that existed in the LA and Downtown scenes, which Paste liberally samples from. Those searing guitar riffs that feel like meticulous locked grooves? They remind you that dance-punk’s funk and new-wave inspirations weren’t even necessary to conjure something so danceable. The unwavering dynamics and extreme linearity of these tracks? Well, maybe these bands never needed huge build-ups in the first place, and that the sludgy tonal qualities were enough to grant a sense of liberating catharsis. This is an album that reintroduces you to the familiar and canonical, that ruptures the all-knowing music nerd’s sense of confidence in what this particular music was, did, and could continue to be. Albums rarely feel this instructive.
[8]
Matthew Blackwell: At first, it seems like there’s nothing new about Moin. Last year’s excellent Moot! simply took hyper-precise drumming and fuzzed-out guitars and a few vocal samples and put them together. Now, Paste refines their sound, slims it down, spaces it out. All their influences are right there on the tip of the tongue: sometimes the band sounds like Sonic Youth, or Yo La Tengo, or a bit like Codeine or maybe Slint. Except that’s just it—the novelty lies in the gaps and fissures, the elements that aren’t quite right.
Moin has distilled the essences of myriad canonized rock bands and rearranged them. Perhaps this is why they are so refreshing. Rather than a moonshot lobbed at a completely novel sound, they make incremental progress by dragging well-worn sonic hallmarks forward, just so. The material is not new, but its shape is. In that sense, they are “post”-rock: rock that by necessity has to come after all the bands that it reconfigures. The vocal samples aren’t just a clever way to make a three-person group sound bigger; they’re an extension of the reuse-and-recycle ethos that underpins Moin’s approach. If a certain sound—drums, guitar, spoken word—is important to them, they use it. The result sounds like no one but themselves.
[8]
Average: [6.89]
Autumn Fair - Autumn Fair (Recital, 2022)
Press Release info: To celebrate the 10th anniversary of Recital, we present Autumn Fair. A group LP comprised of 44 guest players (full list below), curated and edited together by Sean McCann. Autumn Fair aptly embodies the feeling of Recital as a record label; the infusion of abstract sound art and sentimental beauty – performed by both younger and older generations of artists.
Purchase Autumn Fair at Bandcamp.
Mark Cutler: Well, it does sound like a Recital record. There are plaintive strings, piano ballads, sine waves, square waves, chirping birds, objects getting hit, choirs, spoken word interludes, some noisy field-recordingy parts, bells… all elements which have characterized Recital’s distinct brand of formally rigorous yet sonically cozy improvised music. I speculated previously that the “experimental scene” has in recent years been preoccupied with the forms of the chamber ensemble and the radio drama—roughly, with a return to pencil-to-paper composition for classical Western and non-Western instruments, and with a new investigation of the potentials and limits of recorded speech, respectively. Both of these preoccupations can be traced in large part back to Sean McCann and his universe of collaborators, who have collectively defined a style which often feels like both at the same time.
Forty-four of those collaborators show up for the Autumn Fair, and their presence is relentlessly felt. The consonances between players and performances are occasionally, strikingly beautiful. But never did I think “wow, this doesn’t sound at all like it was assembled from separately-recorded fragments.” McCann isn’t coy about his patchwork-compositional approach to the source material; these pieces are littered with abrupt cuts and jarring sonic juxtapositions which make us pointedly aware that we’re listening to performers from around the world, who never heard one another play. Yet—uncharacteristically for McCann’s work—the result is that these songs are often busy, bordering on zany. The compositions lurch awkwardly hither and thither, sometimes coming to a total stop mid-track so they can launch again in another direction. Compelling sounds and ideas bubble up but disappear too soon, their component elements dissipating back into the soupy, orchestral mix which predominates a number of tracks.
I don’t mean to come down too harshly on Autumn Fair. It is an enjoyable album with a few genuinely great moments and tracks. However, I will also say it was a successful label promo chiefly in that it made me want to listen to other, older Recital albums instead. There are too many competing directions for any to be pursued satisfactorily, making the album feel simultaneously overstuffed and underdeveloped. Sean McCann’s place in the history of avant-garde music is incontestable; he has more than earned the right to throw himself a party. I do hope all the guests had a ball.
[5]
Dominic Coles: Recital’s Autumn Fair has the unusual characteristic of treating incongruity as a form of drone. In this record, the juxtaposition, layering, and mingling of disparate materials becomes a repetitive and predictable formal scheme in spite of the unique identity of each track’s component materials. Low fidelity archival audio, field recordings, subtle vocalizations, and text are so consistently combined and composed that it starts to feel as if a formula was applied to each track, as if somehow the compositions were algorithmically generated. These delicate and complex materials have their own internal motion, their own desires and drives which are entirely ignored. Why?
This alienated relationship to the material is characteristic of a symptom identifiable in various strains of contemporary experimental music. Many of said materials—narrative and spoken texts, field recordings, recorded listenings, etc.—were developed in the explosive context of post-Cagean experimentalism. They were materials that pointed back to the listener, that took the discovery of the auditor in their physiological, personal, and historical particularity as the catalyst for compositional activity. In Autumn Fair, these materials are divorced from their original implications, from the new sensibilities and ways of listening that they suggested. They are heard instead as indicators of style, genre, and vibe, and in hearing them as such the generative claims originally bound to these materials are lost. They are reduced instead to pure surface.
I recognize that this release is intended as a celebration—and it is a well-deserved one. This writing is not intended to discount the amazing work this label has done the past 10 years, but rather to note a specific and alienated relationship to the compositional materials that is present on this recording and identifiable throughout experimental music. But in stretching my ears, I can imagine this record as a goodbye: a goodbye to a way of working; as the beginning of a new process entirely. Perhaps Recital will push further into the unknown, into the depths of the listener and the listening act? Perhaps they will develop and discover works that seek new ways of hearing and new sensibilities entirely? We look forward to hearing more.
[3]
Sunik Kim: In an era where the rustle, bump and whisper of the field recording has become ubiquitous and inescapable, it’s a worthwhile exercise to pause and ask why the approach—technique—was ever compelling in the first place. I view the idiom as one that inherently tunes our ears in an attempt to change them: on a most basic level, yes, to broaden the scope of what is considered “musical,” but also to turn our ears towards entities that may not always be audible—social relations, natural and historical processes, etc. This seems so necessarily embedded in the nature of the technique itself that it’s still a little surprising to observe the extent to which it’s ossified into a trope, one that simply provides a generalized sprinkling of “ambiance,” intimacy, and presumed emotional complexity. Autumn Fair stands as a representation of that ossification. There is a clearly self-aware, winkingly saccharine quality to this collection of roomy, feathery portraits, but it’s ultimately hard to identify what is genuine, what is being poked fun at, and what is an inside joke. If we are to take the heartfelt sentimentality here at face value, it’s objectively corny in a diaristic way, a kind of artificial confessional; if there are further layers, it is unclear what they are. The moments of dissonance, while they should feel like welcome respites, actually further accentuate the drabness of the whole affair; in this context, they serve not as radical disruptions, but rather as more of the same, an anonymized, flattened sound-material, due to the simultaneously haphazard and formulaic way in which the various strands and stratas of sound are piled onto one another in each piece. If the goal here was to generate a kind of heightened, buttoned-up mood music, all’s good on my end; but I suspect that the intention goes deeper, and that is where the smudgy-ness of this music stand out all the more starkly.
[3]
Vincent Jenewein: In the last fifteen or so years, niche underground record labels have come to increasingly resemble high school drama clubs. You get a part, and you get a part, and you get a part! For this release, the list of collaborators is twice as long as the actual promo blurb. I'm sure they had a great time making this. But do we, the rest of the world, need to hear their community outreach program slash team-spirit building exercise? Because the hodgepodge of collaborators seems to do nothing but amplify the problems already common to this type of release - tonally and emotionally, this record is all over place, zig-zagging from place to place without ever settling down long enough to give consistency to its myriad of musical ideas. Some of the tonal shifts are almost comical, veering from from neo-classical cheese corn dogs (the promo blurb prefers the euphemism "sentimental beauty") to typical field recording tkhudshbkjvcxvckjdslidskjds (that's onomatopoeia). I'm gonna say it: Too much community all the time does no good for anybody. The great-man (women, non-binary) theory might not be of the spirit of the age but at least it does produce some cohesive albums from time to time.
[5]
[8]
Maxie Younger: I’ve never missed playing my cello so much as when I first heard Autumn Fair’s opening track, “The Devil’s Violinist.” The piece is straightforward: a home recording of Michel Samson on violin banging out Paganini’s Caprice No. 5, briefly joined by the blooming chimes of a clock tower. Samson finishes playing, the last shrieks of his violin pinging against the harsh walls of his recording space, and lets out a flat “OK.” It reminds me of late nights spent in practice rooms honing a solo or a difficult part, running bleary-eyed through beautiful music again and again, cringing at barely perceptible mistakes and, eventually, resigning myself to whatever flawed version of the piece I had become most comfortable performing. The rest of the album is a genial procession of mood-ish sound art and collages that—through no fault of their own, really—hold little sway over me at the moment. This is pleasant work, paced and plotted in a naturalistic fashion. Dissonance here, spoken word there: things sandwiched, compacted and sent rolling smoothly along to whatever ethereal, reverberant place one can imagine waiting at the other end. Appropriate to its communal origins, it’s lived-in, warm, and sentimental (aggressively so, even—“Three Pastorals” can’t help but to collapse into mushy, pliable coos of guitar tone that stink like rotting fruit). I’m not as familiar with Recital’s back catalog as I’d like to be, and perhaps I’d find more to appreciate on the album if this were the case; certainly, closer “Recital Program”’s victory-lap slush of samples from past Recital releases might charm me. For now, however, I’m not particularly invested in this celebration.
[6]
Gil Sansón: When you take the notion of compilation album and run away with it with more artistic than comercial sights in mind, great things can happen. Here the Recital label offers a ten year anniversary gift to listeners, curated and edited by Sean McCann. It has an overall warm sound, despite the wide array of collaborators, close in spirit, perhaps, to 90's post rock ensembles like The Boxhead Ensemble, with an often elegiac tone combined with found sound and spoken word, The groove slows to a crawl in places, with that peculiar feeling of slowed down vinyl so dear to David Lynch in his soundtrack work. The whole is bigger than the sum of the parts, with a nice balance between the clever and the earnest. There's something amateurish to some of the tracks that combined with the good taste and restraint from the playing makes for a subdued and moving listen. It's a bit pretentious but in a good way, without seemingly trying to make a statement. The bits and pieces taken from the history of western music are not for defacing but as evidence of an ongoing relationship and appraisal with it. If anything, one could say that what all the artists in this compilation have in common is the will to find beauty in unusual places and without much fanfare.
[8]
[6]
Adesh Thapliyal: Autumn Fair is billed as a supergroup celebrating the 10th anniversary of Sean McCann’s Recital Records—really, though, this is a McCann project, a continuation of the method of Music for Public Ensemble, where McCann solicited dozens of contributors for work and then meticulously pieced them together (some of the collaborators reoccur: Sarah Davachi, Scott Frost, Rob Magill). It even features McCann signatures like his favorite sample, a lip-smacking sound drawn from his 2015 track “Cosmopolitan Voice Piece,” which has popped up on two out of the three of his most recent solo outings and shows up here again, on three separate tracks.
Autumn Fair, the album, is a continuation of McCann’s ambient chamber music thing he’s been pursuing since “Music for Private Ensemble”—it’s a style that shares an interest in duration and reinvention (of the previous clichés of orchestral music) with a lot of contemporary classical, but with the indiscernible structure, love of silence and ambient’s refusal of rhythm. McCann hasn’t quite mastered this developing style: he has some perfect tracks (see “String Quartet with Ski Response” off Music for Public Ensemble) but his eclecticism as a composer, and therefore his corresponding love of frequent shifts in mood and instrumentation, has sometimes made his albums a little too formless for their own good.
Autumn Fair is typical for a McCann album in that its has its brilliant moments but does not cohere. McCann works best when he paints with a limited palette, as in “Sonata,” composed of piano and fuzzy field recordings, or “Three Pastorals,” which is a long, lovely wash of strings and birdsong. His more complex compositions, like “The Town Clock” or “A Night on the Tiles” feel a little aimless, missing a strong conceptual gambit to tie the various field recordings, keening violins, spoken word segments and harmonizing vocals going “aah” together. We barely get to know these sounds before they’re whisked away by the album’s quick progression, but neither do we find much meaning in the apparently random sequencing of these sounds—a point maybe most egregiously made when the album segues into coffee house jazz for the fourth track, “Seafood,” a tonal mismatch with anything else on the record. “Recital Program,” the final track, is a take on the overture form except with 2-second samples of every album ever released on Recital Records, and here we finally get a nice meaty idea to wrap around: the endurance and prodigious output of this celebrated experimental music label, the surprising kinship between its archival reissues and its contemporary releases, the vision of label boss McCann somehow making it all make sense.
[4]
Shy Clara Thompson: Before Tone Glow, I didn’t have much interest in collaborating with people. Media criticism was a selfish pursuit first and foremost—a way to make sense of the art I spend my time with, for my own benefit. For the most part, that’s not likely to change; I’m my own favorite person (besides my mother, the more virtuous version of myself), and I love to live inside my own head. Making connections with other people through art is a way to understand my own feelings by building a network of comparisons and contrasts. In a roundabout way, I think I may have crafted a working definition of empathy—but I’m also not sure if I have described something completely foreign. All I know is this is how I make sense of it all.
In participating in the writers panel, I’ve discovered another way. According to our editor, the aim of the panel is to present a spectrum of analysis from people with vastly different experiences, reference points, and critical styles, actively pushing back against the notion of a codified opinion. I believe in the necessity of this sort of critical asset, and I think it accomplishes this goal well, but I’ve become much more interested in the way the panel becomes a work of art in its own right—an collection of things sometimes performing the role of straight criticism, sometimes poetry, sometimes excerpts of an autobiography. Reviewing an album feels more like a prompt than the task at hand; an excuse to gather with friends and create something that feels uniquely ours.
Sean McCann probably feels similarly about his label Recital. When I interviewed him for Bandcamp Daily a couple of years ago, it struck me how transparent he was about the fact that it’s ultimately all for him. The label holds a wealth of archival releases, collaborations, and kinesic studies in contemporary experimental music, but what McCann considers the true soul of Recital are the “baseless beautiful free-for-all” records that are patchwork quilts of contributions from his friends. Autumn Fair is the latest of these expansive collages, assembled to celebrate a decade of the label’s existence. Similar to Simple Affections and Music for Public Ensemble that precede it, the record epitomizes McCann’s aesthetic goals of whipping together the micro-sized sound bites from his buddies into a twisted circuit of overwrought beauty.
With regards to this newsletter, I’m operating under a similar guiding principle. I felt a little something was missing during our long hiatus; I continued to write and still enjoy the selfish pursuit of my own emotional enrichment, I felt like I lost a creative outlet rather than a critical one. I’m grateful for what my friends can teach me by sharing their perspectives, but it’s also fulfilling to hype them up and feel like we’ve all done something together. Even if someone else on the panel deigns to trash this record, they have my forgiveness. I’m just glad to be in their company.
[9]
Average: [5.70]
Further Ephemera
Our writers do more than just write for this newsletter! Occasionally, we’ll highlight things we’ve done that we’d love for you to check out.
Matthew Blackwell recently published this guide to nostalgic indie favorites Modest Mouse for Bandcamp Daily.
Joshua Minsoo Kim wrote an interview feature on Joyce Moreno for the latest issue of The Wire. It is his favorite interview feature he’s ever written.
Sunik Kim released a new album, Raid on the White Tiger Regiment, on Notice Recordings, featuring recordings of performances at Cafe Oto and Counterflows.
Leah B. Levinson has an essay in about queerness and Jewish mysticism in Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander in Poise & Resignation.
Jude Noel wrote a review for Moth Cock’s Whipped Stream and Other Earthly Delights for Pitchfork. He also wrote an article on pro skaters who became musicians, for Bandcamp Daily.
Eli Schoop wrote about the diluted dance music on Beyoncé’s Renaissance for No Bells.
Evan Welsh writes a (mostly) poetry newsletter about music and other things called Let This Be My Epitaph
Thank you for reading the eighty-sixth issue of Tone Glow. Let’s get stoked on stuff.
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