Tone Glow 088: Lauren Tosswill
Tone Glow 088: Lauren Tosswill
An interview with Lauren Tosswill + our Writers Panel on Lauren Tosswill's '"1, 2"' and Fievel is Glauque's 'Flaming Swords'
Lauren Tosswill
Lauren Tosswill is an experimental performance artist working with sound, site, and movement to explore improvisation and vulnerability. She uses language and voice as a means to complicate and undermine comprehension, construct absurdity, and engage in live, relational exchange with collaborators and the audience. Working primarily in live performance, Tosswill began her practice in 2016 and has presented her work both in person and through web streams for Sonorium, Non-Event, Experimental Sound Studio and The Wire, and more. Her debut solo album, my home in the year, was released in 2018 by enmossed. Her latest solo album is titled “1, 2” and was released by Hard Return. The record features two 10-minute recordings of a work that can be situated in the lineage of sound poetry, but also finds inspiration from Sacred Harp and the particular rhythmic features of snake-handling preachers. Joshua Minsoo Kim talked with Tosswill on November 8th, 2022 via Zoom to discuss her visual art background, her live performances, her love of snakes, and more.
Joshua Minsoo Kim: What do you do for a living?
Lauren Tosswill: To support myself I mostly solder LED components for light displays or sculptures. I really enjoy it. I’ve done it for a few artists in their studios and also for larger production studios who need displays for different events.
That’s amazing. How’d you get involved in that world?
I wasn’t doing anything like that before. I moved to New York City a year ago and I wasn’t sure how to support myself here. A friend and sound artist, her name is Anastasia Clarke, connected me with these soldering gigs because that’s what they were doing before they started teaching. They put me in touch with these gigs that were being sent their way, but they didn’t have time to do them. That’s how I got started, and I found out I really enjoy doing it.
Before, I was mostly doing work as a legal assistant and I didn’t enjoy that. I found it terribly stressful; I’m really happy I found this instead. Sometimes I feel like a medieval monk gilding some type of manuscript because it’s so meditative and repetitive. And that’s something I’m obviously drawn to.
I get that. I used to work as a pharmacy technician and it was stressful because of all the customer interactions, but I loved methodically counting all the pills and organizing all the shelves. And there were automated pill dispensers and I would count and clean those out.
Oh yeah, that sounds great, if you can somehow cut out the interactions with the clients (laughter).
Do you feel like your experience with soldering has informed your artistic practice in any way?
It’s still new enough that I don’t feel like I’ve experienced an influence from it, but I can see why I have such an affinity for it based on the things I’ve gravitated to.
I wanted to talk with you because there isn’t a lot of information about you online. Were you born in Maine?
Yes, I’ve basically been in Maine my whole life and I moved to New York last year. I was born in the Mid-Coast and I spent the first 20 years of my life in that area. Then I moved to Portland, which is the largest city in Maine—it’s like 75,000 people—and I went to Maine College of Art for undergrad. My degree is technically in painting, but I was doing sound and video installation for my final thesis work.
What’s the earliest memory you have of growing up in Maine and being drawn to this repetition you were talking about? And this could be something you were working on, a specific sound you heard, or maybe something from an entirely different medium.
Honestly, I wasn’t really exposed to any experimental or contemporary music or sound art until much later. Growing up I didn’t have any concept of any of that. What I did do is fixate on songs and play those on repeat; that was my first encounter with repetition. I would just get fixated on one song and loop it. My childhood coincided with downloading music via Napster and Kazaa; the majority of the music I listened to was on these digital files so with Winamp I could play them over and over.
How old are you, if you don’t mind asking?
I’m 33.
What sort of things in your adolescence led you to committing to art in college?
I was very focused on visual art growing up. I seemed to have a knack for drawing things representationally—I enjoyed doing that. Initially I went to Bennington [College] for like a year and studied painting; I applied with an art portfolio. But again, in a lot of ways I wasn’t exposed to the breadth of the art world so I didn’t understand the span of things. I didn’t have an awareness, and so initially I thought that if I was going to college that it’d have to be a lot more academic. I didn’t see how I could reconcile the cerebral part of my personality with the artistic side, and so I thought I would have to forsake one or the other.
As a teen I happened to take a one-off figurative study course where we were drawing and painting from live models for six hours a day. The instructor was very inspiring to me—she’s a Maine-based artist named Andrea Sulzer. Meeting her was the first time I encountered a woman who was doing visual art with these conceptual underpinnings, and I never had encountered that before. It really changed what I thought was possible, and I was able to identify myself with some of that. That’s what led me to apply and attend an art school. I was still focused on visual work for my undergrad and then it was after I graduated that I started attending experimental and DIY shows, and then I became exposed to that entire scene and community. A couple years after that I began participating as a performer and sound artist.
Do you remember the type of paintings that Andrea made and how they affected you?
I remember having these extremely stimulating conversations with her about looking and thinking about art. She would make these huge drawings with lots of very small marks. One of them was on a very large paper and she had taken a white colored pencil and gone over the entire surface of the white paper, but the repetition and insistence of the white marks on the white paper completely changed the surface, and that’s something I’ve come to believe in.
Contemporary performer Okwui Okpokwasili, who does performance that engages with movement and voice, said that when something is repeated over time, a transformation inevitably occurs. That’s something that I’m always looking for—this faith in a repetitious insistence of something, that a transformation will occur. And it’s something you can’t predict.
That makes a lot of sense, and it makes sense that you’re drawn to that idea too. Do you remember the first performance you ever did?
I had participated in a couple group performances and I collaborated on a piece with my friend Kerry Anderson, who is a dancer, choreographer, and artist in Maine. And then my first solo performance… I told my friend—who was organizing shows in Bangor, Maine—that I was interested in performing. He was curating this series that was in his house and he told me I could do the next show. I didn’t know what I was going to do and I’m not really trained in instruments or dance but I am interested in sound and movement, and so a couple weeks before the show I bought a loop pedal, a microphone, and an amp. I figured out how they work (laughter), or how they work for me, anyway. And I figured out this choreography.
I was very fortunate at the time to be working under another brilliant dancer and choreographer, Michelle Mola. She’s also a brilliant teacher, and through conversations and time in the studio with her, I developed this choreography. It was a very short piece. I made a silent loop that was either four or eight seconds long, and then I had the microphone and I would feed little sounds into the loop as I was going. Initially it was me flicking the microphone’s on-off switch, and those clicks would start to feed and come into the loop. I was dragging and striking the mic against my body, my belt buckle, things like this. And they’d get folded into this loop as I was moving. It’s just these percussive sounds and then these choreographed movements and it was a bit unpredictable in how it ended up sounding.
I was really terrified, but once I started performing, I felt myself come out of my body a little bit. I felt myself trembling but inside I felt really calm, so I sealed myself off from the fear and was very focused. So that was my first performance, in my friend’s living room in Bangor. This was, I think, September 2016.
You mentioned that you were terrified. Do you try to maintain that sort of fear before any performance?
I’ve become sort of superstitious—if I don’t feel apprehension before a performance, I fear it won’t go well. And I remember hearing an interview with Eddie Murphy and he said that if you feel completely confident going into a set, then it’s probably not going to be a good set. You need to have a little bit of that uncertainty—of not knowing whether something is going to work—and then to just go for it.
Do you see any link between your visual art and the work you’re doing now with sound and performance? And with your visual art back in the day, did you also try to embrace the unknown of what the end result was going to be?
The only training I have is as a printmaker—that’s the only technical background I have. There’s this magic to printmaking where you don’t exactly know what something’s going to look like until it goes through the press and then that process of extreme pressure occurs and the final piece is revealed. That was a part of printmaking I loved; there was always this surprise and discovery.
For my visual work informing what I do now, one of the things I took away from undergrad was that you have to take responsibility for everything that’s happening. If you draw something in some way, you have to own it. You can’t say, “Oh, that’s just what it looks like.” You are making this decision to depict something this way. And even with installing a work in a space, you have to take everything into consideration. The setting will be acting on the work, and you can’t pretend like your work is in this vacuum—you have to take the next step and take responsibility and think about what’s happening in a space and what you have power over. Can you sweep it up? Can you patch the walls? And that has definitely carried over into how I consider performance because I think it’s so important to take everything into account, not just what you’re doing, but how that appears in the space and how you’re engaging with it. What’s the context of the space? What’s its history? Who’s in the room? What other ambient sounds are acting in the room? All of that is really essential to pay attention to and take responsibility for.
With all that, there are a lot of things I want to talk about regarding your works. Let’s start with your piece for Non-Event. You have a sheet of ice that you’re licking and then your tongue is eventually bleeding. I was reminded of Viennese Actionism and thought of VALIE EXPORT, for example. For that specific piece, do you mind going through the process of planning it, what it was like to actually perform it, and any reflections you had afterwards?
That piece was filmed in 2019, but the Non-Event stream was in 2021, so the pandemic had already been very established at that point. In cutting the footage from that to make the piece, something that was at the fore of my mind was this very painful separation [brought on from the pandemic], and the resulting pain of trying to break through it. It was the insistence on closeness and intimacy and the inevitable harm that might result. I was at a residency in a remote area in Maine, and you can hear all these sounds of insects and, occasionally, you can hear the sound of boats on the lake that the residency is situated by.
Again, I think I’m still applying that same insistence of a repeated gesture. I was licking this ice with my tongue and was seeing what transpired. I didn’t know that I was cutting my tongue because it was numb at the time—I didn’t realize it was getting severed! (laughter). And I didn’t know there was blood getting over the ice as well. And there’s that piece by Tom Price where he licked the walls of a gallery until his tongue was bleeding, and he’s making prints with his tongue on the walls of the space.
How were you thinking about the audience in this case, when it was recorded prior and then presented on a livestream. Obviously you’ve performed in front of a live audience before so this is a different experience.
I’ve found that participating in streamed performances is disturbing (laughter). There really is this unsettling severing between me and the audience. I’ve only done one truly live-streamed performance and it was on Instagram. It was almost traumatizing to do (laughs) because it became apparent in the middle of it that it was a completely different scenario. Trying to respond to the audience, and realizing how difficult it was to communicate to them and be responsive to what they were experiencing, was something based on a number in the corner of the screen that stated how many people were watching. And then there were people in the chat and it was coming up from the bottom.
It was disturbing because, for me, performance needs to be about being present in the context, and that includes the audience as well. You can feel how an audience is responding, even when they’re not saying anything; you can feel this energy. Performing and improvising live is where most of my work arises. Making that piece for Non-Event, I felt it communicated this desperation to connect and to go through great pains to do so. And maybe that connection is still not there, and there’s also this lack of care for the body.
I want to talk about a performance that was clearly done in front of an audience. There’s one you did at Savage Weekend, which was also in 2019. Can you speak to how you were interacting with the environment, space, and people there?
I was also with a collaborator. The voice of the person is Kerry Anderson, who I mentioned earlier. She was the first person I ever collaborated with in live performance and is a very dear friend. So with that piece, I’m having this interaction and experience of trust with someone who I’ve collaborated with before in the setting of an improvised performance, and I’m bringing the audience into that encounter.
She’s relaying this experience she’s having, first through narrating her environment back in Maine. And then she’s trying to relay how she is experiencing my voice traveling through the phone connection, and then we’re having this experience on the other side of her voice amplified in the space, and then there’s me and the gestures and movements of my body and this chair I’m interacting with. I think of the chair as another collaborator, or a dance partner of sorts. On this tour, I performed in DC and I had one of those classic fold-out tables for a standard noise set, and it was just the empty table and this phone. I was speaking to a different person every night for that performance. It was always a new encounter and the person didn’t have any familiarity or preparation for the exchange. And then [at DC] I was dragging the table and climbing it, and at one point it fell over—I was thinking of it as a dance partner while I was having this exchange on the phone. But with Savage Weekend I have this chair I’m interacting with in an almost precarious way, where I’m tipping it all the way back.
It’s really about all generative threads of feedback with the person on the phone, the chair, and then with the audience, and I’m continually trying to feed those things back into each other, and that determines the course of the piece—it encompasses all the realities of the setting.
Do you feel like being a performance artist has impacted the way you live your everyday life?
When I’m performing—when I’m experimenting with sound and movement and objects and my body—it feels like the most natural way of existing in the world. It feels like something I’m naturally drawn to. For example, I’ll notice how a metal pot on the stove will make a squeaking sound as I rotate it, and then for minutes I’ll be fixated on this pot on the stove and explore that sound (laughter). That’s authentically how I wanna be using my time, so performance feels like a more socially acceptable way of engaging in these things I’m naturally drawn to do. Like fixating on a song or a loop or singing repetitiously. I have this memory from when I was a kid: It was my birthday and I wouldn’t stop singing “Happy Birthday” to myself over and over, and my brother started to freak out. He was like, “Stop! Mom, make her stop!” (laughter).
But this is just how I move through the world. Rather than performance informing my life, it’s that there’s an actual context where I can engage in these things that I naturally want to do. In my real life, I feel like I have to rein it in. When I go out into public or have a conversation with strangers, I have to rein that in a bit so I don’t get weird looks or completely alienate myself from society (laughter).
It’s like your everyday life is the performance, and the performance is the reality that you want.
I do kind of feel like that. And that is a reason I perform under my name—I don’t have a performance name. I was joking with someone this year that I should have a name for what I do when I’m out in the world because that feels more like a performance; I should have a name for this project of trying to assimilate into society.
What sort of things do you wish you could do in the real world that you can’t do because you feel it wouldn’t be socially acceptable, or because it’d be alienating?
Well, thankfully, I’ve figured out a way. I think ultimately you have to gravitate towards communities and spaces where people do accept you for all the tangents you go on or if you want to suddenly say, “Everybody listen to this!” and point out a bit of crockery that’s making a weird sound (laughter).
Going through school was really hard, obviously. Sitting at a desk and doing homework—both of those things I was not very good at. And then the necessity of selling your labor under capitalism even when you don’t feel like you’re physically or mentally in the space to do so. Those are the things that I wish were different for everyone. It’s not just me who feels like they have to contort themselves to exist and survive—practically almost everyone does, and some people are more skilled at the contortion than others.
Do you put value in the notion of a performance being surprising or shocking? I was fascinated by the Sonorium piece because it happens on Salem Access Television, which in and of itself is interesting.
I don’t know if I’m ever striving to disturb or unsettle anyone. I’m definitely striving to make an experience that’s interesting and one that people haven’t seen before, because that’s what I wanna see. When I go to a show, I hope that I’m gonna experience something new. Did you find the Sonorium piece shocking?
I didn’t, but when you think about the piece you had for The Wire x ESS streaming festival, anyone tuning into that is gonna expect it to be something more out of the ordinary. For this Sonorium piece, you don’t know if the audience is going to exactly expect anything since it’s broadcasted via Salem Access Television.
So Sonorium is a long-standing series that’s curated by one of my heroes, Andrea Pensado. She lives in Massachusetts and for 12 years she’s curated this quarterly performance series and I don’t know how she got connected with Salem Access TV but before the pandemic, they’d come to the venue where it was filmed and they’d broadcast the show. And you’re right, it’s incredible—there are gonna be people who are tuning in who have no idea what they’re getting into. The Sonorium shows showcase a lot of experimental and improvised work but it’s a very broad range of artists.
For the pandemic, they were keeping it as a livestream out of the station. I think the collaboration is really lovely because these are really genuine people who are so enthusiastic and supportive of collaborating with Andrea. And it’s not the typical thing that they show from their station. I remember the guy who was working the cameras in the control room, he said offhand, “I never really know when the performance is over and when to stop filming.” (laughter). It’s wonderful that these people at the station are so game to house these works even when it’s so different from the typical content they’re dealing with.
Andrea is such a wonderful community-oriented person in a truly authentic way so it’s not surprising to me that she’s made these relationships with local community members. She has so thoughtfully brought experimental and improvised performance to Salem and forges these connections to bring them into that space.
What brought you to New York?
I’m in the MFA at Bard in Upstate New York, and I’m in the music/sound discipline. The pandemic rearranged the order of things but I moved to New York last year after completing my first in-person summer at the program.
How has the change been, especially since you lived in Maine most of your life?
In some ways it felt like these were the most difficult 12 months of my life, which is kind of saying something. I’ve learned a lot and have come out the other side with a lot of knowledge that I wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. It was really challenging and difficult most of the time.
In what sense?
In all senses, with everything. I experienced this complete upheaval of everything that was familiar. It was very destabilizing in all ways—artistically, socially, spiritually, financially. But I feel like I’ve come out the other side and there’s this clarity about what’s important and the sort of relationships and communities that truly matter.
I wanted to talk about “1, 2”. I told so many people about it after I first heard it. We’re gonna review it for Tone Glow and it’s one of those works where, even if someone doesn’t like it, I think it’s amazing. Like, I don’t even care if I disagree with them, I feel like that it’ll only be more illuminating (laughter). Your description on the Bandcamp page mentioned the arrangement of the chairs and how it aligns with the history of Sacred Harp. What is the significance of the piece and that tradition?
Sacred Harp is something very near and dear to me. It’s one of my favorite kinds of music in the world and there are a lot of reasons why it’s so special to me. A big reason is that there’s this emphasis on people who are not trained, on people who don’t have a musical background, and who are engaging with music out of a desire to do so—some are doing it as a form of religious worship, and some are engaging with it in a secular way. What’s very important to me about it is what results from this layering of voices. It’s not smoothed out, it’s not polished—ideally. You can hear professional recordings of professional groups of singers performing these songs but I think those are rubbish; it completely defeats the purpose of Sacred Harp.
To me, the whole point is this dense layering of multiple voices that are singing from a place of… they’re just going for it. They’re putting themselves into it in a way that’s not self-conscious and it’s about the act of singing rather than a concern for a polished product. It’s about engaging in the act of it, of embodying that love and desire to sing. It sounds so good! And there’s something so striking about the configuration of the chairs. It takes away an emphasis on the product that you’re presenting, and it’s more about the experience that you’re having, of this present moment of singing in unison. There’s no sort of audience-and-performer [dynamic], it’s about being present with voice.
I like that. Because that’s what I dislike about some live performances, how there can be this innate hierarchy of performer and audience, and how that can limit one’s experience of the music. How do you then reconcile the fact that you don’t want this to be a product, but then release a piece of music that is a recording of this performance?
No, totally. It’s a different work. This recording that’s being shared digitally is a different piece. I’m not sure, completely, on where I stand with recordings and releases, but I have very few. The vast majority of my work is live performance, and I do document them—I might even think of this release as documentation as well. There’s still something you can experience from it, but you’re not experiencing the performance that was live and occurred in 2021. That’s just how time works I guess (laughs).
What are the differences you feel between hearing it back and what you remember from the performance?
I don’t know how I could convey that, but my experience performing it is different from the audience experiencing the piece live, and that’s different from hearing a recording of the performance. For me, performing that piece, I was trying to induce a trance state, or a state where you’re not really thinking. I wanted to create conditions that would allow for these gestures and sounds and speech that would be more automatic; I’m trying to turn off my brain and access something that’s less conscious. I think I’ve only listened to the recording maybe once when the file was being transferred. The recording is its own thing and I haven’t decided what that is. And I don’t know if I’ve talked in depth to anyone who was in the audience and has also listened to the recording.
I have trouble hearing recordings of my own work because I always think about what I was trying to do—what I was wanting for it to do—and what I’m hearing. Even performances of others I enjoyed or responded to, when I listen back to the recording I feel like, oh, it wasn’t like this.
How do you feel like you’ve grown in the past six years of doing performances?
I still feel like I’m always starting from square one even though I have experience—it’s sort of frustrating (laughter). My earliest pieces were these abstract collages of my voice, with very little if any text. In recent years it’s become more text-driven. Those clock performances I’ve been doing have been me trying to travel back into this area of abstract sound and wielding sound as a material without text. Text is obviously sound as well but it’s another material too. People can be more literal about content when there is text compared to only sound, so I feel myself being drawn to exploiting and experimenting with objects for their potential sound-making properties.
What draws you to using your voice in your works?
It’s something that I have—it’s just a tool that’s readily available. It’s the same with my body and movement. I’m not trained as a singer or dancer but I’ve been walking or talking for most of my life (laughter) and so those are tools that I have. It’s the most expedient way to access these things that interest me.
In your first album, my home in the year, there were more abstract sound-art pieces. But then you had a song like “watch out” where you were using a more typical song-like form. With “1, 2”, it feels like something very much in the lineage of sound poetry and I’m curious if you have an interest in that. Is that something you’re directly informed by?
I think I’ve taken cues from watching contemporary performers who use improvised speech and text. But I was also thinking about these other people who are in a space of improvised performance and speech, and these are people engaging in preaching traditions. It sounds like it’s extemporaneous, like they have to keep speaking, and they’ll be very repetitive in what they say.
I was interested in these small, niche churches who do snake handling in their worship and I was watching videos and documentation of contemporary snake handling preachers and it kind of looks like a DIY hardcore show (laughter). It’s a small service because this is very niche but there’s a band going—there’s a drummer, someone on an organ, a guitar, and then a preacher up front. He’ll have the snake and be speaking continuously and be getting really hyped up. It feels very much like this DIY show—it has the same kind of energy and sometimes the same style. I feel like it’s drawing from this same space, of having to fill this time and space with a voice and conviction. Sometimes that comes out as punk music, and sometimes it’s worshiping Jesus with a venomous snake that might kill you (laughter), and it often does!
That was something I was thinking about with “1, 2”—of maintaining this energy, momentum, and rhythm. With that repetition, it feels like you’re searching for something, or channeling something from a state of trance, or of something outside of you. I think that’s something that drives the speech and the movement and the preaching I was watching.
This is all amazing and makes sense to me. There’s only been one other artist I’ve talked with who was really interested in the rhythm and speech of preachers. Did you grow up in a religious setting at all? Are you religious?
It’s interesting. On my mother’s side, both of her parents—my maternal grandparents—are atheists, but both of their families had very established Baptist practices. My grandfather came from a long line of Baptist ministers and there’s a significant and established Baptist tradition in the region where my grandmother was from, which is Southeastern Kentucky. I have recordings of that—of lined-out Baptist hymnody—that is very significant to me. The documentary was of these Southern snake-handling preachers.
Is this an old documentary?
No, it’s a contemporary one, it’s a few years old. I’m so drawn to that music, and this was before making a connection with my personal family history and with those regions and that kind of worship. I feel like it’s coming from somewhere, like it’s been embedded in some way. Though I’m from the Northeast and though I wasn’t raised in a particularly religious household, there is something that I’m very drawn to in these traditions, like it’s something that has been transferred through generations despite not being explicitly spoken.
Your interest in all this makes sense because there’s a performative aspect to any sort of preaching—you’re putting on a show. I grew up in a religious family and experienced those things—well, not snake handling—but it wasn’t until later that I started to think about preaching in this different way focused on sound. I want to show you this documentary from 1967 called Holy Ghost People that also has snake handlers.
Ohhh, that sounds familiar.
I’ll email it to you. I saw that like 10 years ago and, because it was presented as a documentary, there was this remove that allowed me to view these practices from a different perspective. Did you go to church services, then, and experience these things?
I don’t think I ever went to a Baptist church. The presence of church was very minimal and I think, occasionally, my mom would drag me and my brother to a Unitarian church down the street, but she gave up very quickly because it was too much to corral us on a Sunday morning. Now, when I’m visiting my mom for Christmas I’ll go to a Christmas service with her, but that’s the extent of it—and that’s something I do because my mom wants to do it. I don’t currently go to any kind of church service, but I listen to a lot of spiritual music, particularly Baptist hymnody and Sacred Harp.
And for all these things, the draw is the authenticity?
Yeah, it’s an authentic expression of something that’s felt sincerely.
Is that a goal for your own performances?
Yes. I want something to feel authentic. I think that’s another reason I’m pretty minimal with the gear I’m using and with what I’m doing; I don’t want to feel like there’s any sort of sleight of hand or artifice. I want to be engaging as authentically as I can with what’s happening right now, and I want to acknowledge that. Like, this is happening at this hour in the day with these people and this is what I’m feeling right now and this is what I’m wearing. It’s important that I don’t, in any way, deny the reality—the materials, the context, how everything is showing up in the moment.
Is there anything you wanted to talk about that we didn’t get to talk about?
I think we covered a lot of the major things. (pauses to think). You know, snakes are really important to me in general. I actually had a dream about a snake last night. I dreamt of an enormous anaconda and it seemed like it was harming itself by swallowing a dead tree that had fallen over. It was very quickly engulfing it and it looked like it would kill the snake—it was very alarming but it was also very beautiful and colorful. And then the snake stopped trying to eat the dead tree and began to consume people because it had grown to this size from attempting to eat the tree.
Why are snakes important to you?
I like animals in general, and I really like snakes—I think they’re really cute. I don’t know, I just feel like they keep showing up in my life (laughter). This summer when I was at Bard, I kept finding snakes. I found a little snake that had died. It was a milk snake, and I was riding around on my bike and I think I must have found it shortly after it died because it was still very floppy—the rigidness hadn’t set in yet. So I brought it to my studio and posed it—I propped it up with little bits of paper—and then it hardened in that shape. It has its little mouth open and I had it with me this whole summer.
The way I started learning about this religious worship that involved venomous snakes was that I went into this Wikipedia hole looking up venomous snake bite deaths in the United States. I saw all these entries that were like, “killed during religious service.” And the reason I fell upon that page of snake bite deaths was from looking into a case. I saw in the news that a teen boy had committed suicide with a venomous snake. His family owned a pet store—he worked there. He filled his car with a bunch of animals from the pet store, and I think some of his own pets as well, and he drove to a parking lot behind a Lowe’s. He took the snake out and had it bite him. He succumbed to it and then the snake got out of the car and slithered through the parking lot—it was a cobra, so something that was obviously not meant to be there—and then it was run over by a truck and it was killed. That story really stuck with me and I thought about the tragedy of losing this boy and then this snake. This boy probably had a relationship with this snake—he cared for these animals and decided to surround himself with them when he ended his life.
It reminded me of The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. In that, the little prince is from another planet and comes to Earth eventually. He talks to this aviator who’s crashed and the aviator realizes that this prince has made this arrangement with a venomous snake in the desert; in order to return to his home planet, he can’t do so in his current corporeal form, so the snake agrees to bite him. And that story was important to me and I’d read it a lot as a child. That was maybe my first encounter with an image of what it meant to have a relationship with a snake.
This is fascinating! I’m so into it, and it was really unexpected. Thank you for sharing all that. There’s one question that I’d like to ask you that I always end my interviews with: Do you mind sharing one thing you love about yourself?
Oh, that’s so sweet (laughs). Hmm, what should I say… (pauses to think). I love that I have this attention to things, and that it brings into sharper focus the miraculous experience of daily life. I can be so attuned to a sound, or the collage of ambient sounds around me, and feel that so deeply. It feels like such a special way of connecting with the world at any given moment. I feel lucky to be able to experience that.
Lauren Tosswill’s “1, 2” is out now on Hard Return. Lauren Tosswill’s performances can be found at her website.
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.
Lauren Tosswill - “1, 2” (Hard Return, 2022)
Press Release info: “1, 2” is an improvised work performed in two iterations by Lauren Tosswill. The sources of sound are Lauren's live vocals, amplified but otherwise unaffected, and the unamplified sound of approximately forty metal folding chairs. In both performances, repetitious speech and gesture are catalysts for automatic decision making. These automatic decisions carry suggestions of the shape of invisible, internal processes. Rather than an exploration of personal interiority, these internal processes reveal the shape of conspiring forces of nature, history, and culture, and offer the body as a point of intersection for these forces. The performances speak to a belief in the potential of sound as a vision that reveals both the past and the far away entangled with our present here.
The performance hall where the performances took place was arranged in this way: the chairs for the audience were located in the middle of the room in a configuration of concentric squares. This same kind of arrangement of chairs can be found in performances of Sacred Harp, a traditional Christian choral music that originated in New England and was later preserved by and associated with the American South. While Lauren Tosswill performed both iterations of “1, 2”, she was obscured from the view of the audience by an opaque partition dividing the expansive performance hall in half.
Purchase “1, 2” at Bandcamp.
Sunik Kim: This is a new kind of minimalism whose fulcrum is the gradual and sometimes imperceptible morphing movement between sets of repeated phrases. The ratcheting and crackling of folding chairs that arcs through and across the knotted words bear a genuinely startling digital sheen that gives the piece a fully “valid” existence as a slab of audio divorced from the live context—a quality that, honestly, most performance-based art lacks (whether by intention or not). In this deceptively rich textual morphing mechanism I hear a rare compositional concern with color, narrative; but, further, this concern is exploded, folded into the dizzying rush of the living ritual itself, the latter of which is simultaneously hermetic and hellbent on roping the uncertain listener into the core of it all. It is from the carefully tuned tension between this inward and outward focus that the work draws its power; our role continually transforms—spectator-skeptic-participant-listener-critic—as the performance hurtles to its fixed, inevitable conclusion.
[7]
Jinhyung Kim: One thing I always loved about Thom Yorke is that I couldn’t always tell what he was singing; being able to hear a lyric multiple ways multiplied its meanings, made it more meaningful overall. The semantic potential of slippage is a hallmark of sound poetry as well—like ink blotches and graphite smudges of handwriting rendered into audible phenomena. “1, 2”’s novelty lies in the brevity of Tosswill’s phrases and how their forceful repetition and muddled amplification make the slippage and gradations between those phrases the listener’s primary object of attention. The basic principle, of course, isn’t novel at all—gradual, locally imperceptible change is the bedrock of most minimalism.
But Tosswill eschews the linearity of direction and movement that most minimalism falls prey to: the breathless strain and agitation of repetition is as much a variable in her enunciation as the shifts from phrase to phrase, and the irregularity with and degree to which her enunciations congeal into morphological legibility keeps the listener constantly on their toes; also notable is the way a group of syllables can, in the course of repetitions, conjure the illusion of multiple phrases within a rather narrow phonetic bandwidth. There’s little way to predict what the next phrase will be, and there’s no hint whatsoever of a final destination—despite a formal resemblance to processual minimalism, “1, 2” is engineered to generate instabilities at all the nodes that minimalism typically prefers to fix in advance. I’ll admit that, like most conceptual performance, the novelty starts to fade after the first few listens. But the formal generativity and visceral impact of such a simple twist on a well-established compositional mode promise a host of fecund directions sound poetry might take in the future.
[7]
Marshall Gu: When I first started writing poetry, one of the early pieces I attempted in university was based on repetition. I wanted the poem to look like slanted rain by slowly modifying where the spaces fell. It would have looked something like this if I hadn’t deleted it immediately after writing it:
The rain fell The rain fell Ther ain fell Thera in fell Thereai nfell
You get the drift. It sucked. Not helping was I was also wary of changing any of the words, let alone changing the entire phrase, because on paper, any modifications would stick out too much:
The rain fell The rain fell Ther ain fell And thera in fell And therai n fell
On Lauren Tosswill’s “1, 2”, she does exactly what I wanted to do in a spoken performance. The words “one two” are chanted, the two syllables swished around and then slowly morphed almost imperceptibly. “One two” seems to become “want to,” repeated to convey a deep longing as if to say “I want to.” And to the question of what it is they want, she eventually answers by subtly changing the words again: “want you.” By emphasizing or deemphasizing certain sounds, she’s able to get a lot out of two common words in the English language. In addition to these, I also hear “adieu,” “would you,” “it’s long,” “inside,” “it’s sight,’’ “it’s you,” “gets you,” “(a)gainst who” and “(a)gainst you.”
The effect is mesmerizing: a weird monologue of wants and needs, of warnings and goodbyes compounded by almost nothing else happening aside from the occasional squeak of a metal chair. Perhaps my failing was that rain is not as interesting as these things, but then I remember Lauren Tosswill never started with “want to”: she began with “1, 2,” and proved that she could go to unexpected places far away with just two numbers.
[7]
Gil Sansón: Reviewing documents of performance and sound art is always puzzling. For starters, this recording is an aural document, limited to the sonic components of specific actions. The performance here includes spatial considerations that don’t translate as efficiently as sound; the visual and sculptural elements—concentric squares of folding metal chairs—have to be imagined. Apart from the chairs, the delivery of the sound is given to the voice, and it recites and repeats the same words over and over. The action modifies the sound, and as Tosswill progresses there’s a noticeable shortness of breath that adds drama to the proceedings. The piece was presented twice at Bard College and we get both recordings, with the second being more tense and urgent. I could write extensively about the problem underlining aural documents of sound art performances, but at the same time, I’m happy they exist. In this case, I think I would have rather experienced the action in person or through video.
[6]
Maxie Younger: The prospect of writing about “1, 2” intimidates me because I have a difficult time taking it at face value; my first listen was inundated with flashbacks to Ghost World’s “Mirror, Father, Mirror” as Lauren Tosswill breathily eroded syllables into fractal tangrams of consonant matter. I’m pleasantly surprised, however, at how thoroughly my subsequent listens have eroded my cynicism. The piece—in both its variations—is so timbrally blunt and arresting, punctuated by the skull-rending shrieks of folding chairs and Tosswill’s choking gasps between repetitions, that it has no difficulty commanding my attention from start to finish; it bucks any concerns of dryness or stalling energies one might anticipate from such a minimal matrix of performance strata. Tosswill’s focus on harnessing a simultaneity of past, present, and future in the album’s accompanying text feels quite resonant with how the work here has been collected. Separated as I am from the temporal and spatial reality of these performances, I still feel a visceral connection to Tosswill’s presence and intent within her space; her voice weaves a spellbinding Möbius strip of recursion that swallows itself in peals of blinding, flattening feedback. No matter how many times I begin it anew, “1, 2”’s whirlwind of associations never grows familiar to my ear. It cuts a fresh path out of darkness with each step forward.
[7]
Dominic Coles: I remember a word game I played as a child: it involved repeating a random word over and over and listening as it gradually lost its meaning. It would become strange with each repetition—somehow clunky and foreign in the mouth.
Our language, and our voices as conduits for this language, has something alien about it. Think of the infinite awkwardness of hearing a recording of your own voice! Or take those slips of tongue that make clear we don’t know the actual subject of our speech. And isn’t it strange that when our words do clarify, they seem to only do so in the mouth of another—when someone repeats something we’ve said back to us?
On listening to Lauren Tosswill’s “1, 2” I was reminded of Bruce Fink’s claim about interpretation in the psychoanalytic context. He writes: “Interpretation does not so much aim at revealing meaning as at reducing signifiers to their non-meaning (lack of meaning) so as to find the determinants of the whole subject’s behavior.” “1, 2” stages something akin to this reduction in signification as one word morphs and moves into another, shedding its meaning in the process so as to touch something deeper than meaning, something more structural, more foundational. While the clinical context can feel as if it brackets off the world, Tosswill’s self-analysis allows these ribbons of evolving speech to tangibly make contact with the world. Her speech exists in a non-neutral space and performance context with its own materiality and topography. The contacts Tosswill makes between speech and space arrive in various guises: the shrieking of folding chairs[1], a famous pop song[2], and the audience’s applause.
I really only wanted one thing differently from this music: that it be longer. Material of this complexity and the forms that this material generates require an expanded duration for the sake of its own development and the listener’s ability to properly perceive and process said materials. I would’ve been happy listening to this for another hour at least.
[1] Who could ever have imagined that a folding chair could sound so incredible!
[2] What are we to make of this song?! Insofar as the auditor is attending to the ways in which Lauren’s verbalizations make contact with the world, here her speech slams into it as the song explodes across the auditory plane, masking Tosswill’s speech in the process. I wondered if this moment could’ve been integrated into the form of the piece differently, treated more like the folding chair sounds which interject throughout the work. In the process the chairs develop their own form and as such relate differently to her speech with each subsequent sounding. The song seems to have the function of activating the audience’s applause though, an important breach that also makes contact with Tosswill’s performance in the space—for that reason, maybe the song does need to stay in its current form? I am still unsure about this moment…
[8]
Daniel Bromfield: Basically a one-person free-associative word game played in front of a live audience. The numbers “1, 2” become mush in Tosswill’s mouth, emerging as “want you” or “see you” or “Mon Dieu” until a chillwave version of “Take My Breath Away” pipes through the PA system to let her know her time is up. Though Tosswill’s voice is clearly amplified through a microphone and a set of speakers, the recording seems to have been made from the middle of the audience, turning the usual chorus of rustles and squeaks that separate the spectator from the performer into part of the improvisation. Each phrase Tosswill lands on conjures its own little micro-feeling, and I came out with the sense of a frazzled young brain wrestling with the usual glut of late-capitalist concerns: sex, the end of the world, how disappointing other people are. Yet this material is determined by chance, by one phoneme gradually morphing into another, and you can sometimes hear her raise her voice with surprise at what set of words she’s landed on. It’s fascinating to watch the performer at work, but “1, 2” is interesting more as a document of a performance than as a listening experience, and most of the musical intrigue comes from the sense of space created by the bootleg-level recording quality. More interesting than moving.
[5]
Joshua Minsoo Kim: You can trace everything here back to the Dadaists and Futurists, to Stimmung, to artists like Larry Wendt who brought sound poetry to an interesting, fertile ground in the 1970s and 1980s, to childhood games of telephone, to any misunderstanding that you’ve ever had in passing conversation. The fact of the matter is that language is necessary for most everyone in the world, and an album like “1, 2”, which is gracious in both its conceit and brevity, is the sort of work that is inherently polysemic. Anyone can take something away from this—positive, negative—because the experience of language as ambiguous, shapeshifting, confusing, and unreliable is a deeply familiar one. I’m especially interested in the way other facets of this work help make evident the contours of art in general. Tosswill’s heaving breaths, for example, immediately bring to mind endurance-based performance art despite not actually being that (though maybe it is one in miniature, if such a thing could paradoxically exist). The creaking chairs, shoddy recording quality, and sudden entrance of pop music also spiritually link this with the staged acousmatic sound-play of Teatro Assente. Tosswill’s hitting all the sweet spots here—simple but clever, familiar but abstracted, repetitive but constantly morphing—and the result is two 10-minute recordings that point to the infinite possibilities in our everyday.
[8]
H.D. Angel: It’s easy enough to look back at linguistic history and understand diachronic sound change. A phoneme at the end of the word might weaken and disappear as more people move past it to get to the next one: in English, we used to pronounce a hard /g/ at the end of words like “hang” and “sing,” for instance. Borrowing from Latin, the “im” in words like “im-proper” used to be an “in,” like “in-ability,” but /m/ is easier to say leading into /p/ because they’re each bilabial consonants, produced with closed lips, so the sound changed. Articulatory dynamics don’t tell the full story, though. Perception also plays a role—sometimes, one person will speak a sound, and another person will mishear it as a different sound based on context. If the speech is muffled, and it makes sense in the moment, someone might hear the /g/ that begins “geese” as the /dʒ/ in “Jeep”. When perceptual reanalysis happens at a large enough scale, it can lead to sound change in the language itself. This process reveals language as a complicated dance between our vocal tracts, our brains, and our social expectations. It’s simultaneously a shared community endeavor and an individual attempt to understand a world full of complicated signals, even when people make mistakes, have biases, or lack essential information.
In Lauren Tosswill’s hands, language becomes a viscous substance that she coaxes around, like a lava lamp, to watch catalyze. Vowels curl into nasals, which unspool into fricatives, which dissolve into breath. She’ll snag onto what sound like words, or even schematic setups, that make me wonder about the underlying intention behind the automatic signal—check out the tensely vague thriller-trailer storytelling of “1, 2”’s Performance B: “against you...against who?... the kids too?” The din of folding metal chairs adds to the recording’s raw atmosphere while probing at its deeper mission; many of my most uncomfortable memories take place in ad-hoc meeting spaces in dimly-lit buildings filled with the sounds of these chairs, where no one knows anyone else or their motivations beyond a weak prior commitment to be in the same place doing the same things at around the same time. Sometimes, like when Tosswill seems to repeat the word “anxiety”—anxiously—towards the end of Performance A, her decisions set off “this is too on-the-nose!!” sirens in my head. Recognizing this instinctive reaction made me laugh out loud at my own rush to judgment. I guess that’s the point of this stuff: to isolate the anxious, nonsense politics that sheathe all acts of communication on either side, and maybe get us a little closer to what we’re thinking.
[1+2+1+2+1+2]
Average: [7.11]
Fievel is Glauque - Flaming Swords (MATH, 2022)
Press Release info: Zach Phillips and Ma Clément met while Zach was staying in Brussels, Belgium, where a mutual friend connected them in a bid to convince Zach to make an album during his stay there. While on route to meet, Zach hit his head on a street pole and was in need of care. As a sign of fate, Ma was also a trained nurse and was able to help clear him of any severe consequences of concussion. After a short practice the following day, the two fell into working together and gradually found themselves in a years-long musical partnership.
During the pandemic, Zach moved to Brussels to focus on the band and the two released the mono live compilation God’s Trashmen Sent To Right The Mess. Whereas that compilation was primarily composed of Zach’s writing, Flaming Swords sees Phillips and Clément working together as a composing duo. Adapting to a strongly enforced curfew and limited social contact, the two focused heavily on the writing of Flaming Swords over the next few months. Lyrically switching between English and Ma’s native tongue of French, the lyrics are created in an unusual process involving psychoanalytic dialectic, automatic writing, and interlinguistic translation of apparent gibberish.
“Musically, Ma directed melodic impetus and I directed harmonic and rhythmic framing. Lyrically, we fought and embraced our initial impulses alternatingly; above all, we tried to trust and document the psychodynamics of the process itself rather than attempting to express concrete, prefab emotional or intellectual messaging. This approach to writing is intended to promote poetry while avoiding alibis and the hall-of-mirrors reproduction of excessive self-identification,” Zach comments. Just before Zach returned to the US to resume living in Brooklyn, he and Ma put together a septet and Flaming Swords was recorded live in its entirety over one evening in the summer of 2021.
Purchase Flaming Swords at Bandcamp.
Jude Noel: Freed from the tape hiss and spartan production value of Zach Phillips’ past work, Flaming Swords blows the jazz-pop auteur’s signature miniatures up to cinematic scale. Though his prior collaboration with Ma Clément deservedly bore the hallmarks of a cult record with its lo-fi, low-profile intrigue, the band’s sophomore outing and first studio project transcends the appeal of a warbly cassette you’ve heard rumblings about on music forums, and retains their usual rapid-fire pace while fleshing out the newly-opened space with subtle interplay between a more consistent cast of musicians. They’re also less adherent to the twee aesthetic of their debut, delving into blustery moments of harmolodic chaos on tracks like “Paging Agent Starling'' and “My Rebel,” itinerant guitar riffs and sax lines crashing into one another between verses. It doesn’t sound as unbridled as Ornette Coleman’s Prime Time band, but the two groups share a sense of freedom that highlights the contrast between compositional disorder and pretty, pristine timbres.
Fievel’s core elements—Phillips’ restless trips up and down the keyboard and Clément’s blasé vocal delivery—remain relatively unchanged; it’s their backing band, brought together here for a single night-long session, that takes their new material to the next level, making 90-second tunes sound extravagant. “Less To Be,” for example, just barely eclipses a minute and a half, but manages to make multiple detours between its brisk bossa nova-inspired verses, rattling off scrambled piano improvisation and heaving guitar solos atop rapidly ascending chord progressions. There are so many bite-sized moments I’ve come to appreciate more on repeat listens, like the way the steel guitar and saxophone melt into one another in the final seconds of “Save the Phenomenon” or the off-kilter rhythm of “Constantly Rare” that bobs like a boat on choppy waters. Flaming Swords is a benchmark release in the massive Phillips discography and Brooklyn’s prog-pop scene as a whole.
[9]
H.D. Angel: I’ve had trouble getting into Zack Phillips’ work in the past. He aims for proggy depth and eclecticism, but tends to resolve all that tension into brief, loungey songs that often lack any discernible arc to focus them, resting on mere chords-and-words pretenses that misunderstand better pop music. That’s not the case on Flaming Swords, which is neither under- nor over-written. Orienting the compositions around Ma Clément’s spur-of-the-moment melodies creates an immersive effect where the vocals seem to summon everything else from the ether; it’s like the parts of each song are a series of angels and devils bickering on her shoulders, fitting the apparently psychoanalytic direction behind the album’s writing. This time around, those song-arguments are as dynamic as they’ve ever been. I find myself more clearly understanding the internal logic of Phillips’ style, discovering hooks at unexpected angles and subtle interactions between different moods that more straight-ahead songwriting couldn’t stir up. There are still moments where the proceedings feel curiously inert, as if all the players’ potential energies cancel each other out. But on the whole, Flaming Swords brings the urgency I was looking for.
[7]
Jinhyung Kim: Revisiting Fievel is Glauque’s 2021 album God’s Trashmen Sent to Right the Mess, I found myself humming along to songs I hadn’t heard in over a year—the songwriterly tunefulness ensconced in their RIO-skewed takes on sophisti-pop tropes constitutes Zach Phillips’ greatest strength as a composer. Even when Fievel’s bite-sized numbers don’t hew to structural symmetries or pivot around a recurring hook, every part always carries something infectious: a groove, maybe, or a mantra—or sometimes just a sick sax solo. The band’s ability to turn on a dime from, say, a fast and loose jazz-out to a mellow yé-yé shuffle, matches the wit characteristic of Ma Clément’s lyrics.
On Flaming Swords, however, Phillips & co. have progged things up—but not for the better. Complexity takes precedence over songwriting; the ratio of groove to pyrotechnics has been inverted. These aren’t tunes so much as stunts sewn together with song fragments that come from nowhere and have no time to breathe; abrupt transitions feel less like clever twists and more like self-satisfied sleights of hand. Convention may not always matter to Phillips, but his past records evince a solid grasp of sequence—of the craft involved in mapping a tight linear path from A to B. That sense of direction often gets lost on Flaming Swords, and the songs suffer for it. On “Days of Pleasure,” for example, I hear how the intermittent descending whole tone scales keep things moving—I’m even impressed—but I don’t feel I’m being taken along for the ride. As much as I love when a band leans more into their Henry Cow side, there aren’t enough songs here to weave all the technical filigree together. The result is claustrophobic—an ironic mirror to the tasteful leisure of his previous work.
[4]
Joshua Minsoo Kim: Flaming Swords isn’t my favorite Zach Phillips project, but it’s the first one I’ve heard after reading his impassioned write-up on Uruguayan music, which comes with a massive download of tracks across Uruguayan music history. It’s prefaced by a quote from Mariana Ingold, one of my very favorite Uruguayan artists. I interviewed her years ago, but nothing came of it, and it’s literally only through listening to Flaming Swords that I have felt compelled to actually publish it.
When I listen to this record, I’m reminded of what drew me to Ingold’s music in the first place. The proggy ditties that Phillips and Ma Clément write carry such an overflowing joy that it recalls, for example, the one-two punch of “El futuro no es como antes” and “Sin tus pestañas” on Cambio de Clima. The feeling is of a fleeting jam session, and despite how exciting it can be hear to so many international pop musics coalesce, the real thrill comes in how brief moments of ecstasy surface amid this exploratory, mischievous music: Clément’s Holter-like voice as she tumbles through the end of “Days of Pleasure,” the sudden noisy clamor of “Paging Agent Starling,” the country twang worming its way through the double-time excitement of “Wrong Item.” It can easily sound crass in its polish and virtuosity, and Clément’s voice is a necessary anchor for all the bustling energy, but the short runtimes and overall breeziness make this feel wonderfully carefree.
[6]
Daniel Bromfield: I wonder if one way for prog-rock to go forward isn’t to embrace the aesthetics of the post-GZA chess-and-the-art-of-the-samurai rap that’s enjoying a peak both in NYC and upstate. Fievel is Glauque, the collaboration of New York maestro Zach Phillips and French-Belgian singer Ma Clément, is halfway there. They make intelligent music that’s rigorously averse to bullshit, with their songs’ two-minute average runtime acting as a sort of failsafe. They understand, as well as most rappers but better than most rock bands, how much weight a single verse and chorus alone can pull. They cram their albums with short songs that exist mostly to show off their skill and intellect. They sample stern mid-Atlantic B-movie dialogue about swordsmanship. Clément even raps a bit on “Boîte à serpents.” And at least this far in their career, they seem more committed to honing their sound than splintering off in a new direction. Like 2020’s God’s Trashmen Sent To Right The Mess, this is a bunch of short bossa-prog songs stacked on top of each other, and yet the band seems more confident, more willing to play with structure, more conscious of how one great song can tumble into another and create a giddy chain reaction. It’s a refinement rather than a leap forward, a second album in the classic sense, a sharpening of swords, and probably the last album they could make with this formula before inertia sets in.
[7]
Gil Sansón: Fievel is Glauque’s jazz-pop hybrid instantly brings to mind NYC, but they add a European sensibility that distances them from The Golden Palominos; they have shades of Stereolab and Aksak Maboul and are maybe halfway between the poppiest of Carla Bley’s work and Canterbury rock. (They’d be right at home on a bill with The Sea and Cake or Karen Mantler.) These compositions are compact vignettes that emphasize ensemble playing, and since they’re often less than a couple of minutes, it’s hard not to enjoy them. This is a hard field to truly succeed at on an artistic level, and this is no Kew. Rhone., but the music retains a nice balance between the obvious and the gently subversive. Admittedly, I occasionally wish they’d forgo the jazz club atmosphere and actually exploit the possibilities of modern recording and editing, but there’s an instantly recognizable language here, and it’s the result of intentions that are less singer-songwriter based than cosmopolitan and cerebral. Still, a problem arises: the songs start to sound the same.
[6]
Sunik Kim: This is a collection of cold, airy nothings, each of them circling an empty core. The endless parade of overworked, small-scale spectacles—rapid-fire chord progressions, vocal acrobatics, tricky drum flams—has a manicured, jazz-hands energy that reminds me, more than anything, of Jacob Collier in its fixation on a very narrow, conservative approach to form and technique that seeks to revel in its cleverness at every turn. In fact, this sound is essentially the clownish commotion of the most heavy-handed, hackneyed serialist works—but with vocal jazz (!), not the tone row, as its basic compositional material. The likely notable harshness of my reaction might stem from the fact that the first few seconds of “Flaming Swords” reminded me of Henry Cow’s “Nirvana for Mice,” while the aesthetic and ultimately political framework behind the two—and their manifestation in the music—could not be more resolutely opposed. Cow (and, to a certain extent, FIG’s tourmates, Stereolab), offers a deceptively cloying form—pleasant chord progressions, an absurdist sense of humor—that is ultimately very carefully positioned in tension with both its content and the listener to generative ends. FIG, however, is pure surface—saccharine and grating all the way through.
[1]
Vincent Jenewein: There is joy in babbling nonsense. Babies know this better than anyone. Flaming Swords unashamedly indulges in such joy. Singer Ma Clément channels an intimate stream of bubbly nonsense Frenglish that has the lighthearted lushness of a lover’s discourse—sweet nothings on a Sunday morning. She is backed by skittish, slightly manic drums and varying instrumentation heavy on earthy bass guitar. It has something of a modern take on the ’70s sound: Close, warm, saturated and heavy on modulation effects, occasionally flanging or chorusing the whole mix in childlike joy. I know this will sound odd, but when I say that this record is masturbatory, I genuinely mean that as a compliment. Fievel is Glauque are audibly indulging themselves, and the results are light and joyous like few contemporary records. If there is something to criticize here it would be that Flaming Swords keeps caressing along at the same medium, steady pace. Around the half mark all the songs start blending together and you start wishing they'd speed up or finish already. But perhaps impatience is just further proof of affection. Just kiss me already!
[7]
Average: [5.88]
Thank you for reading the eighty-eighth issue of Tone Glow. Shout out to snakes.
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