Tone Glow 123: Writers Panel & Recommendations Corner, 2/7/2024
Our Writers Panel on NÂN's 'XT-TX' and Marc Baron & Mark Vernon's 'post-chance'. Also: Our Recommendations Corner on Andrew Haigh's 'All of Us Strangers' and more.
Writers Panel
For our Writers Panel, Tone Glow’s 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.
NÂN - XT-TX (self-released, 2024)
Press Release info: None.
Streaming/Purchase info: XT-TX can be streamed on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music, and Tidal. The album can be streamed and purchased on Amazon Music.
Michael Hong: Good pop is sticky, comprised of hooks with teeth and moments of catharsis that root in your conscious. XT-TX has teeth—its production is filled with jagged SOPHIE-esque basslines and sharp ascending strings that run counter. It’s so roughly textured that each piece of its clockwork production is sharply felt: the thud of a piano key pressed too hard makes a dampened ripple that interrupts the faint conversation at the forefront. NÂN’s voice is equally insistent. She uses the shape of her language to roll every syllable into a resplendent curlicue, while offering a softer contrast to XT-TX’s harsh surface. Sweetly congenial on “HÔM NAY EM CẮT,” her delivery switches from stifled giggle to dreamy coo. ON “BẬT MÀN HÌNH - TẮT TÂM TRÍ,” her voice is transformed into glassy baubles, the words “on” and “off” strung like glowing orbs before the song swivels into music-box synth melodies and the incendiary whir of bass. These clanging mechanics are a snare: here, NÂN’s presenting the worst of disposition and hoping the sprockets will catch and tear you if you turn the other way. On “CRY-BABY,” she settles into an expanse made of the flutter of delicate wings and the bright chirp of birds, the ripping sound of static and the slicing of strings—“so I can smile for you just one more time,” she sings, a sigh of release as she lets the chaos run rampant through her mind, deciding to still dress herself in something beautiful.
[7]
Jude Noel: I respect the risk-taking on XT-TX: Each of the record’s tracks is a lavish, often linear suite that places equal importance on the mechatronic texture of its production and the timbre of NÂN’s vocals. So much contemporary club-inspired pop music is content to pair one attention-grabbing instrumental concept with an anthemic phrase or two and move on. Here, however, NÂN and her producers take a proggy approach to songcraft, threading ambient interludes and wonky bass drops into (relatively) lengthy pieces. It’s impressive work, but unfortunately I’m not always sold on the actual sound of the album itself. The hooks on “BẬT MÀN HÌNH - TẮT TÂM TRÍ,” which fuse festival trap with massive SOPHIE-lite sound design, hit hard but sound dated and extravagant, distracting from moments that are actually inventive, like the bluesy chorus of AutoTuned wails that NÂN arranges in the track’s coda. I feel the same way about “CRY-BABY,” which backs kitschy music-box melodies and cinematic strings with similarly glitchy percussion. Her lyrics concerning young adult angst (“For nineteen years of my life, I learned to eat, I learned to cry, then I gouged out my eyes with harsh words.”) are cosmic and heart-wrenching, but the individual elements of the composition fail to gel. I do love the rap verse in the second half, though.
My favorite moments on XT-TX make more subtle use of the record’s cyborgian sound palette. “VÒNG LẶP” and “ẾCH NGỒI ĐÁY GIẾNG” use pillow sub-bass to offset some of the metallic clang and clatter, drawing the listener closer to whispery vocal performances. I particularly enjoyed the latter track, with its DJ Snake-gone-gothic melodies, full of reverb-soaked oohs and aahs. The restraint makes the concluding bass drop, which arrives with little warning work really well, primed for maximum emotional impact. Without the language barrier, I think I’d like this one more, because my Google Translated examination of XT-TX’s lyrics revealed sbeautiful, self-mythologizing imagery that probably justifies the album’s larger-than-life sound. However, I just can’t see myself returning to this with most of my focus directed to the production.
[5]
Jinhyung Kim: In pretty much all the Vietnamese pop I enjoy, the sound of the language sets distinct parameters for the music. The firmness and clarity of enunciation that Vietnamese favors lines up with the historical prominence of balladry, whether we're talking about older styles like bolero or the diva pop of the ’80s and ’90s (which had its roots in the American diaspora prior to the post-Fall of Saigon re-establishment of the country’s native music industry). The singer holds a wide center stage, with the accompaniment definitively in the background, or sometimes following the topline.
XT-XT is a treat because it still works with the qualities of Vietnamese song and speech, but in a new way. NÂN’s music is contemporary R&B at its core, but with strong EDM inflections: heavily tripleted rhythms and light harmonic contours are fleshed out with blasts of overblown beat synthesis and thick smears of bass; the dynamic contrast between verse and chorus (or “drop”) also takes cues from EDM. It’s a mix of subtle and in-your-face that’s very consistent and compelling, as well as interesting to consider vis-à-vis two important poles of Asian pop since the ’00s that, while occasionally juxtaposed, are rarely integrated—not to mention with such class. The vocals entwine with the music with equal seamlessness, emphasizing its swing and punctuating the termini of lines with steady sway and precision at certain times or a belting, full-bodied lean at others. NÂN’s singing projects a sense of physical space that’s mirrored and embodied in these songs in a way that feels bespoke to the language she’s singing in—a feat whose confident accomplishment typically signals promise for any given post-colonial country’s music scene at large.
[8]
Joshua Minsoo Kim: No other artist in the contemporary landscape of Vietnamese pop music better embodies its next generation than NÂN. On the surface, her debut album XT-TX is extremely legible to the Western ear; this is deliciously indulgent art-pop for theater kids, so obviously indebted to Melanie Martinez that one song is titled “CRY-BABY.” There are metallic synths that flagellate, and EDM drops that could fill stadiums—so yes, it also exists in a post-TNGHT, post-SOPHIE world. But look back into V-pop’s history and you can trace these songs to Hà Trần’s sweeping, introspective epics across Đối thoại 06, or Triple D’s cinematic productions for Sơn Tùng M-TP and Hoàng Thuỳ Linh. What separates NÂN from her forebears is that there’s a real tortured bent to her work, as evident in her quavering, manipulated voice across “CƠ THỂ PHẢN BỘI.” She finds solace in a jagged synth bass, the kind you’d associate with drill, though it occasionally wobbles long enough to read as dubstep.
It is a thrill to hear an album that places these sonic elements—so tied to regionality, past eras, and particular scenes—in arrangements that are at once familiar and beguiling. It is in these small differences that the sounds feel stretched like putty, forcing you to consider how alien something can be with small adjustments to scenery. “CHƠI?,” for example, aims for cabaret dorkiness before the song has strings, whirring synths, horns, and other clattered sounds battling for attention. It’s audacious and quirky, a combination of words I rarely use to describe any art positively. There are also songs that sound “off” in fascinating ways. “ẾCH NGỒI ĐÁY GIẾNG” is too slow to feel like club music (and not referential enough like “Ditto”), too brash to be as seductive as it suggests (which, for whatever reason, is channeled via bubbling drill-like synths), and then ends with industrial clangs that don’t allow enough time for catharsis. This messiness feels right for an album about grappling with one’s past, flaws, and uncertainties. But also, I am sure that any artist who knew the “correct” things to do—who would nail what these songs should sound like—would make a considerably less compelling album.
[7]
Gil Sansón: Pop music is hegemonic in nature. Once it reaches absolute dominion, it stagnates. It’s the realm of the young and pretty, high in sugar and artificial light. In the West, it’s currently offering stale product. This is the bias with which I evaluate pop music regardless of country: I won’t fall in love with it unless there’s something uncanny about it, something subversive as well as seductive. As we get old, we find that each generation has its X and Y, tailored to the sensibility of its time. Soon, faces blend into one another.
In my first encounter with NÂN and Vietnamese pop in general, the first thing that strikes me about her music is the level of craft and work in the songwriting and arrangements. Simply put, there’s a lot more substance here than the majority of pop coming from the West, which is strong in production but weak in songwriting. If I have to be subject to pop music at coffee shops, I would much more appreciate the music on this album compared to the typical star being pushed down our throats by the two or three labels that control everything. Yes, I would force-feed you NÂN if I was your barista.
[8]
Rae-Aila Crumble: What’s the difference between a car and an album? A car can never be too polished. Perhaps NȂN juxtaposes maximalist pop aesthetics against the occasional traditional opera element to place XT-TX in a modern Vietnamese context, but there’s not enough of the latter to convince me that this isn’t just a project comprised of Melanie Martinez demos. Busier-than-a-bee production channels OIL OF EVERY PEARL’S UN-INSIDES at its highest moments, though NȂN’s vocal performances are too textbook to get me to feel anything other than a little sexy. And when I say a little, I mean a little. “CRY-BABY” is a glimpse into what the entire album could’ve been—a tactful arrangement that takes turns trading off music boxes and strings for 808s—but the guest rapper finding more interesting pockets than the lead artist.
On a more optimistic note, there are risks taken here that do pay off. The attention to sound design on NȂN’s voice is how I imagine body horror would present itself in audial form, whether it be a dismembering into echoes or trembling flangers that sound like chainsaw hums. There’s always something going on there. Also, is that a #jerseyclub moment in the first half of “ẾCH NGỒI ĐÁY GIẾNG”? Sick. As my introduction to NȂN and Vietnamese Pop as a whole, I’m definitely intrigued and look forward to hearing more. If NȂN adds some weirdness to her vocal delivery that matches the production a little better, she could seriously be on to something outstanding.
[6]
Maxie Younger: XT-TX’s blunt, mushy contortions of stuttering digital matter, bass wubs and stop-start dynamics—like a fifth or sixth-generation iteration of the “Pop” beat after successive neural network scrambles—aren’t very interesting to me, which is almost fascinating in and of itself. It’s funny to think that production as ostensibly dramatic and conspicuous as this could still feel so featureless. Part of the problem is simply my inability to understand Vietnamese. I don’t have the frame of reference to know whether the bawdy instrumentation is amplifying or undercutting the subject matter (either approach could work, I think), so I’m left with a slew of disjointed tracks whose overproduction doesn’t contribute to anything in particular.
What I do know is that I find the album more successful and communicative of real emotional stakes when it scales down its arrangements, giving its incessant sound design flourishes a heftier and more corporeal presence in the mix. “VÒNG LẶP” is the best result of this downsizing, its gaunt, chugging thumps and glass-marble plinks lending the track a consistent, addictive momentum; “CRY-BABY” acquits itself well, too, with brief excursions to a walled garden of sampled birdsong and warbling pads that coat NÂN’s vocals in foggy, sticky-smooth mystery. Field recordings and atmospheric noise seem to be something of a minor fascination here, in fact, cropping up again in “TỈNH TÁO”’s conspicuous loop of nighttime insects and “CHƠI?”’s opening din of faraway crowd chatter. It shows a predilection toward the staging of songs—situating them in carefully drawn environments, juxtaposing the pathos of lived realities against the neon glare of hokey DAW wizardry—that suggests XT-TX’s shellacked histrionics might be the first step toward a truly original pop concoction somewhere down the line.
[4]
H.D. Angel: There’s a natural affinity between the flourishes in this kind of vocal pop and the growls, hangs and drops of deconstructed club. Both have an inherent drama, a drive to get from point A to point B in the most surprising way possible without losing course. NÂN pulls from a century of pop approaches along her path through XT-TX. She’s got a core of ’90s and 2000s R&B savvy, some jazzier melodic tendencies that seem informed by traditional pop and ballads, and a haughty sing/rap/scoff register characteristic of a zoomer. In that way, she reminds me of a lot of TikTok-age singers in the West, whose unsparing treatments of well-understood pop templates help them get across a frankness that they couldn’t access with something more subtle or tasteful. The instrumentals are a bit too manipulative and by-the-numbers for me, overly reliant on wayward “art pop” cues, but they give NÂN cool terrain to navigate. (I would love to have been in the studio to see how they made this.)
Expected moments of emotional release, where NÂN’s vocals find crests and valleys at the same time as the beats, come rarely on XT-TX. Instead, much of the album, especially the first half, has an implacable tone, like one song is playing atop another and clarity is just out of reach; I can’t decide how much this actually deepens the experience of the music, but it’s a worthwhile exercise. Paradoxically, NÂN finds her surest footing in moments of total melodic and rhythmic uncertainty, when I have no idea how she’s going to resolve a phrase or what she’ll be faced with next. XT-TX often feels more like a clinic in what can be done with these styles, or a stage for NÂN to show off how deftly she can manage her toolkit as an artist, than an arresting, self-contained pop “statement,” but I’ll chalk that up to my unfamiliarity with V-pop and appreciate the journey.
[6]
Frank Falisi: The advantage of a propulsive pop music is that it carries away the singer’s voice and the hearer’s heart with such rigor that no body gets to (wants to) stop and calibrate. A certain commingling occurs in the rush. Are you stuck in my head? Am I pumping you? “Are you wasting my time?/ Are you just being kind?” The Hanoi singer NÂN conjures such a pop on XT-TX, an album that pushes the impellent feeling of a body pushed by beat and spout to the fore. An intro track is the come-on that welcomes the noise terrain that lines the album, the jutting synths and the converged clicks of the club. And then her voice. “BẬT MÀN HÌNH - TẮT TÂM TRÍ” pulls all the would-be-glitched noises together into a single forward-moving backdrop for NÂN to spin over. She bends it, yups and gulps. Late on the track, a strain of sound emerges bright off the backing track. Is it a synth, a guitar, some fusion? It solos, it sings. Who’s leading who?
XT-TX sports this kind of push-pull production throughout, a singer’s album that flares and lasers around the human voice as much as it centers and enters into the tissues and nerves that make a voice make itself. “CRY-BABY” stands out, pushing the singer’s voice in all directions, playful, peaked. I imagine what it would look like to dance and then I experiment in the mirror. XT-TX makes the case that to make a singer’s album of pop music, the voice should dance atop and inside the other sounds that make a song. Sounds imagine and a voice makes good on a fantasy. Are those mechanical found sounds somewhere in the midst, a birdscape, a cheep? What wild beast slouches into the beat-breakdown flange of “ẾCH NGỒI ĐÁY GIẾNG”? The clanking jazz of “CHƠI?” soon enters the same push-pull space, not a deconstructed thing but a celebration of materializing a self in the song, of not needing it to last longer.
Like the best pop albums by Rihanna and SOPHIE, NÂN shows that to be a singer is to conjure. Pop is alchemical. It shifts in the friction that creates a voice and ear-crunch that makes a sound. Perfect pop is imperfect inasmuch as it susses want out of mid-air. It seizes un-actualization and sounds it. It is incomplete because it needs us. It unseats meaning as any kind of ultimate measure of the cultural object. What does it mean? It means the way she sings it.
[7]
Average: [6.44]
Marc Baron/Mark Vernon - post-chance (Erstwhile, 2024)
Press Release info: None.
Purchase info: post-chance is available to purchase at the Erstwhile Bandcamp page.
Frank Falisi: The biggest lie around is that music only moves in one direction. Music doesn’t mirror our body’s sounding as a mortal thing shuffling from inception towards silence. We don’t make music in our image. To be sure, the play of decay is involved: sound advances forward in time. Press “PLAY” on the tapedeck, plunk the strings, buzz the lips, cleenk the anvil… sound occurs as time does. It’s feeling that moves in reverse. Feeling—a delirium inherited from the span between memory and fantasy—is the process whereby we write a sound. Where does a sound or silence go when it happens? The air. Where does a feeling go? Less clear. It’s not a vibration, it’s a sensibility.
Marc Baron and Mark Vernon wanted to write a sound together. They set some parameters. Their collaboration would recreate some element of the distance between two people who had not yet met. They had not yet met (and would only do so at the project’s end, in finally piecing it together) so they would create according to their conditions. “In the exchange of materials and ideas something is inevitably lost along the way—whether it be misunderstandings due to interpretation language, slippage of meaning or simply things going astray,” Vernon writes. This loss would be part of the sounding. Marc and Mark recorded sketches, impressions, and experiments onto quarter-inch tape and mailed them to each other. Sometimes they would place a magnet in with the tape. Erasure occurred, less by virtue of choice than by chance. The ensuing cultural object would be pieced together over time and space with all the interventions of occurrence and intention. post-chance. It feels its time.
As an audio experiment, post-chance shares the terrain of Alvin Lucier, John Cage, and Leyland Kirby, each designers of deep silence that vacillates between oppressive and liberated, spiked by drone and drag. Beyond the devised-ambience these sounders share (Lucier through a room’s natural state, Cage with the audience’s shuffling, Kirby in degrading time’s occupants), post-chance overlaps with a certain sensibility of collaboration. We return to these sounds, composed and decomposing alike not in spite of their suspicions toward the infinite peace of being, but because their contemplations of fracture and split invite a sounding on our part. To imagine an ambient conversation with a stranger is one aspect. To enlist all the strategies of chance-emboldened degradational artmaking is another. To share the sounds with an undisclosed set of other strangers is just a reminder: music doesn’t move forward, it moves between bodies, sounding us all the while.
[8]
Marshall Gu: Alas, John Cage passed away in 1992 and so never got the chance to hear William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops, or else he might have done something like this: mail out tape with a magnet and let indeterminacy be determined via disintegration. I am not a fan of Cage nor Basinski, and while the process of post-chance is cool, it also feels like that’s all there is to it. Process as end-result, instead of results as end-result. The fragments are too quick and too unorganized for my ears to grab onto any particular thing, and when they stumble upon a texture that is rewarding and makes me jolt up in attention, those sections last whole seconds at most, miniscule fractions of an hour-long album. And then they’re often followed by large swaths of silence. Mark Vernon’s description of post-chance ends with an open-ended question: “Up until the point [that we met in person], neither of us had any clue about how these elements would sit together, whether the juxtapositions would work or not, whether the process would bear fruit or turn out to be a complete disaster.” Let the listener decide! This listener says no, it didn’t work and it didn’t bear fruit, but had I worked on this for a year, I’d probably send it out into the world regardless.
[3]
Rae-Aila Crumble: Drones speaking through Morse code. Malignant waves crashing on top of collect-call thrums. Cardinal Bishops acting as vessels for the Holy Ghost and three-inch porcelain girls spinning on plastic plates. On post-chance, Marc + Mark get so lost in the universality of shedding histories that they temporarily forget their relationship as strangers.
Jon Abbey kickstarted Erstwhile Records back in the late ’90s, fascinated by the dynamics birthed when two artists are brought together to create. 20 something years later, the same process is used, and the focus here is on the act of destruction. post-chance puts the English-speaking Mark Vernon in contact with the Frenchman Marc Baron—their intent is to make sense of communally-crafted rubble. In the CD booklet, Vernon details the process of sending tapes back and forth, including magnets in the packages to purposely erase parts of previous recordings. It would then be up to the other to record the sections that were tampered with. I am reminded of the “Exquisite Corpse” game played by iconic Black French Surrealists Aimé and Suzanne Césaire. Taking after surrealist Andre Bréton, the game focuses on the way subconscious feelings are drawn out and analyzed; the first player would write a question, and the next player would write an answer to that question without having seen the question to begin with.
Maybe Marc + Mark see themselves as following in this surrealist tradition, receiving sonic solutions to the most challenging questions life envelops them in. Perhaps the act of removal drives them to focus on bonding, forcing one to place trust in the other to meet them halfway. Whatever the case may be, the musicians create something worthwhile by tapping in to the nature of each other—first as humans, beings subject to change and adapt, and second as artists, beings subject to make noise.
[8]
Jinhyung Kim: The best Ersts are often ones where the process behind the music is vibrantly manifest, whether in a legible form (e.g. the improvisational spur of the EAI stuff) or a more riddled, illegible one (e.g. the ludic or performative conceits of Disanto/Hoffman, Unami, etc.). Affect straight and simple works too (Lambkin and Revert/Rossetto’s collages). This latest Erst is none of these: the sounds themselves are the point, with nothing but the listener’s flagging attention to hold them together. The press blurb blabs about “slippage” and “the passage of time” in relation to “degraded, partially eroded tape fragments,” but this reads as an arbitrary exegesis of a particular sound and not something actually present in the form of the work. The chance operation used to arrange the recorded material, besides being totally unevident in the music itself, is an undynamic and unilateral decision that only flies if the material you’re working with is already conducive to meaningful permutation and recombination, like Lego or Mad Libs—otherwise, you're better off through-composing. post-chance is nice enough for enriching one’s aural environment with a charcuterie of sputtery drones coated in tape static. But for music, look elsewhere.
[3]
Jibril Yassin: A fascinating collaboration that plays like listening to a conversation already fading from memory. The shifts in timbre and texture are a welcoming jolt—you can discern the interplay between Baron and Vernon as recordings are deployed, panned, and distorted to turn into something more wraith-like. While there’s darkness to be found in post-chance, it’s not pervasive. This recollection becomes one of intrigue: a choir of spirits released from quarter-inch tape.
[6]
Vincent Jenewein: I don’t hear anything except dull and played-out tropes. Oh, here’s loads of intentionally boosted room noise so you know we’re playing real intimately, here’s some random field recordings so you know we’re with our field recorders in real spaces, here’s some vinyl crackles and warbly radio broadcasts, and we recorded this on degraded tape so it’s all very HAUNTOLOGICAL, and everything is hard panned because these records always love to hard pan everything, and here’s some random bells so you know we’re exploring lots of different instruments, and then it’s really quiet but then really LOUD suddenly, with some random synths so you know we’re cool with synthesizers, and then it drags on way too long and doesn’t get to any point whatsoever, so you know it’s improvisatory, and there’s parts that sound like recorded conversations the artists had while making this, so it’s very INTIMATE and COLLABORATIVE, and there’s no coherency whatsoever between the randomly stitched together parts and performances, and it always ends a section as soon as it might get to anything interesting, and then it bores you with sounds of clocks and dial-up modems and typewriters—it’s an exploratory, intimate, experimental improvisatory dialogue, or something.
Honestly, I don’t even specifically dislike this record, but it embodies all the problems with the tropes that this type of record tends to have. There’s nothing inherently wrong with tropes, but these tropes have no staying power. You know how a lot of music becomes more interesting the more you listen to it? This type of record becomes less interesting the more of them you listen to. Because once you get over the novelty of it being improvisational and intimate and experimental and using noise for musical purposes and yada yada, what’s left? Not much—it’s too subtle and experimental-for-experimental’s sake to make for a good background listen, and just too dull, unfocused, and pastiche to make for one that’s more engaged.
I’m not doubting that the artists involved had fun recording this, but in 2024, I’m simply not having fun listening to it. Sure, this isn’t bad music, so I can’t give it a [0], but it’s really, really boring and I know the people making this kind of stuff can do better, so they need to drop it already. Or—if they for some reason have the uncontrollable urge to keep making these—just stop releasing them and keep them on your hard drive or mail them out to your friends or something, so I don’t have to listen to another hour of randomly stitched together, unguided, unfocused electroacoustic improvisatory wanking. There’s a part here that sounds like someone’s blowing into a balloon and it kind of sounds like farting. Please stop farting in my face.
[2]
Gil Sansón: As with certain US-based artists working in this area, the boredom and ennui that liminal spaces and non-places evoke is used as material to contrast with shorter, more eventful moments, often suggesting malfunctioning intercoms, laundry rooms, motels by the side of the road—little here offers impressions of home. The process of sonic abstraction and alienation highlights the artistic potential of non-musical sounds, and the events are episodic; structurally, there seems to be a logic to the silences following each event. Over the course of this hour-long piece, horn-like sounds emerge as if announcing something important, somewhat faintly at times, at others quite insistently. Their recurrence and melding with other sounds gives the piece something of an understated symphonic quality, but it is handled in a way where the listener is not thinking in terms of instruments and their processing, but of fragments assembled into a large tapestry. At times, it gives an impression not unlike early Cubism—an object examined through many angles. There are acoustically generated noises, whistling, snatches of conversation, humming, analogue electronics that whir and wheeze, a few brief snatches of recognizable sax, and then quiet, pregnant pauses that grant plenty of tension. The unity of aim between Baron and Vernon is remarkable; it’s only somewhere in post-chance’s second half that I remembered that this is a duo with two distinct personalities, creating the music through artistic dialogue.
[9]
Chloe Liebenthal: An experimental work defined by indeterminacy where the process of composition is more interesting than the album itself? Stop me if you’ve heard this one before…. Well, post-chance isn’t “good” in the sense that it provides an enjoyable or even interesting listening experience, since it’s pretty much just a heap of fuzzy crackles, bloops, and other miscellaneous artsy noises. But, of course, nobody is listening to this because of the way it sounds. The compositional process post-chance represents is much more exciting, as it elegantly literalizes the uncertainty and tentative moments of empathetic connection experienced by two artists working together for the first time, discovering the unique character of their newborn collaborative entity.
I play a lot of improvised music, sometimes with people I’ve never met before, and the process explained in the post-chance booklet asks me to pay more attention to what it is, exactly, that my collaborators and I are communicating to each other when we play music together. Sometimes improvised music is a communication between the musicians and their listeners, and sometimes it’s a conversation between the artists themselves, which listeners may eavesdrop upon if they please. post-chance is very much the latter, and I admire music made for the musicians and not me; it doesn’t mean I want to listen to it, though. I could see a version of post-chance presented as a text score instead of a drab album with a thought-provoking booklet, and I think I would like that version of this work a lot more.
[2]
Leah B. Levinson: In Samuel Delaney’s 1975 sci-fi classic Dhalgren, the book’s protagonist—a vagrant, laborer, and hobbyist writer named Kidd—meets a fictional lauded poet named Ernest Newboy. Upon their second encounter, the two have a brief exchange in which the more successful Newboy asks the sapling amateur poet if he may one day read some of his unpublished work. Kidd agrees under the condition that Newboy will tell him if he thinks the work is good. Newboy hesitates, launching into a long-winded story about meeting two separate writers on two separate occasions. In each instance, he describes, his impression of the writer’s work was fundamentally altered after hearing the writer’s voice.
One—whose brief article Newboy initially regarded to be as “impenetrable” as a phonebook—was revealed to be “lucid,” “delicate,” and graceful on the page after the two had a brief, mostly logistical conversation of less than one-hundred words. The writer’s genial and candid demeanor gave Newboy a sense of his gracious attitude and the rise and fall of the writer’s speech gave Newboy a sense of where in his prose emphasis and rhythm might lay.
The other writer—a critic who Newboy regarded as generous and insightful in her praise of his work and whose lines left the impression of “measured consideration”—became virtually unreadable to him after becoming one of his closest friends. To him, her remarkable “intelligence” and “analytical facility” remained perfectly intact, but her fast-paced and excitable manner of speaking impeded upon his impression of her written voice as careful and deliberate, the elements of her work that he most enjoyed.
When Newboy returns to the conversation at hand, he confides to the young protagonist that, given their conversations, he has already lost the ability to tell him if his work is any good. “We’ve met. I’ve heard you speak,” he informs, warning, “I have not even broached the convolved and emotional swamp some people are silly enough to call an objective judgment, but merely the critical distortion that comes from having heard your voice.”
Considering this passage alongside post-chance—a record made by two collaborators who, for the majority of the process, had not spoken to one-another before—, I’m mostly left with questions:
What happens when two collaborators remove the intersubjective element of having met one another? What happens when they then maintain an element of aesthetic choice in their process? Does their collaboration open up a new objective capacity through which they might remove all the messy subjective remnants aleatoric procedures intend to avoid from the start? Does the passage between them act is its own sort of purifying apparatus, cleansing their creative decisions with an affect of the impersonal? Or are they really gazing at one-way mirrors, alternately perceiving one another but ultimately met with their own predilections?
Regardless, I’ve never met either artist and I received these abstracted and dilapidated sonic fragments alright. They’re tastefully incoherent and mildly evocative, a gray wash with the tried-and-true comfort blanket that is formal regularity. At the end of the day, you have to fill the runtime, and, I suspect, given the likeness between Baron and Vernon’s names, it’s largely beside the point whether the two would have met in the first place.
[6]
Nat Bergrin: When confronted with music this nonlinear and process-based, I tend to think of the experience as more of a “space” than as a “track”—something about the latter feels like it entails a narrative, a start-to-end progression, which gets obscured by the more vertical, rather than horizontal, approach to sonic art that comes with an album like this. Baron and Vernon make no secret of their process-based intentions, which involved passing tape samples between them via mail, alongside magnets that would progressively degrade the material over the course of each round of broken telephone. As such the space filled by post-chance is full of holes, a sponge of silences hanging in the air that make any remaining sounds highly unpredictable and clearly indeterminate.
A piece so without linearity or artistic agency, at least in a traditional sense, frankly leaves a void not only in its silences, but also in its impressions on me. I found myself mentally scrambling to connect the dots between its disjointed moments, to no avail. I typically try to maintain a significant degree of focus when listening to more abstract electronic music, since it tends to operate on a micro-level: individual constructions of momentary textures, feats of sound design, fleeting atmospheres that quickly dematerialize. post-chance’s source material, however, proved often too minimal to allow for any fine-grade attention to stay engaging. None of the pre-degraded sounds on display, some of which still remain intact for long periods, are particularly unique, or extensively manipulated. post-chance presents mainly low foghorn drones, flat sheets of noise, the occasional sine waves, or unedited speech samples, all of which feel like building blocks, not coherent pieces in a more complex tape construction. The few moments when a more multifaceted sample breaks through the ocean of tape hiss, only to warp and cut out, are far more interesting than when the same process happens, far more frequently, to sounds touched by only the barest bones of synthesis.
Ultimately, I find it difficult to truly praise any work where indeterminism plays such a major role. I do listen to albums for the narrative they lay out at least to a degree, and without any real point of reference to grab onto across the 56-minute runtime, I wonder if my engagement with anything here would have been nearly as active in the first place had I not read the Bandcamp page’s outlines of its intention before pressing play. After all, post-chance tested patience even as an exercise in deep listening, due to the simplicity and incoherency of its source samples. I do appreciate when any work of art can truly speak for itself, which frankly doesn’t happen at all given the formatting of this release. And so I find that, even as someone who regularly listens to electroacoustic compositions, I didn’t engage with this album as a listening experience so much as a test of my own attention to dig for momentary pearls in a sea of voids.
[3]
Joshua Minsoo Kim: My relationship with silence continually changes while listening to post-chance. At first, I understand it as a tasteful repose, as an opportunity to feel a sense of longing for the music that is just heard. This is familiar territory for me: Marc Baron’s Hidden Tapes, one of the finest electroacoustic records of the 2010s, makes you feel that ache within the first minute—a rock band plays in the distance before noise comes to the fore. Then, everything disappears.
Similarly, the silences across post-chance arrive in dramatic, unannounced fashion. To hear a delightful texture and then its immediate absence is to experience whiplash—like the violent response a child has after being stripped of their favorite toy. It grants weight to the silence, but also to the sound that precedes it; you recognize just how much you valued this noise only in its subsequent lack. But the more that a silence lingers, I find that I move into a stance of anticipation. I feel myself growing impatient, maybe even a little anxious. This, again, is a moment to confront the relationship I have with the sound at hand—a bond that involves the physiological; when I’m awaiting a new noise, I can sense my heartbeat quicken.
Most impressive to me is that my relationships to sound and silence eventually swap. About a third of the way through post-chance, sound persists for longer than it had prior, and there comes a time when I eventually long for silence again. These silences are something I begin to appreciate as their own material, as something having their own texture, as a “sound” complete with source and signification. Even my understanding of silence evolves, as not just the absence of any noise, but of the presence of room tone, or even droning passages where little activity is present.
During my first listens to post-chance, I appreciated it as a feat of minimalist patchwork, but revisits have revealed a decidedly linear experience. It’s a very contemplative record because of this structured engagement, and it made me think about the ways in which we consider one’s art or life as “successful” by what it (or a person) does or does not do. When someone passes away, we say they’ve “lived a full life” because they did have a beautiful family, or they didn’t have regrets, or they did accomplish much and didn’t let circumstances stop them. Art succeeds in this checklist manner for many of us. But what post-chance made me do is reconsider sound not for what it contains or achieves, but for the very simple fact that its constituent parts are irrefutably entangled. That’s maybe the best way to understand if a person is meaningful, right? When our lives feel so enmeshed with theirs? There is a sense of completeness and vitality to that bond, and to get that same exact feeling from an album—one constructed by two people who had never met—does feel like something beyond serendipity, beyond chance.
[7]
Shy Clara Thompson: For the past year or so, I’ve not really been able to get back to anyone in a timely manner. Following a rapid succession of changes to my life (for the worse), I’ve been left with little desire to socialize, but a mounting loneliness that reminds me I should occasionally try. Whether it’s texts from my mother, messages from friends, or emails from editors, the time it takes me to psych myself up to respond varies—and each increment comes with its own set of problems. If I wait hours, the enthusiasm might go cold; my conversation partner may have decided to do something else, immediately creating a dead end. Following days of silence, the pressure of urgent matters begins to mount; gentle reminders about deadlines turn into exasperated demands to get it done. After several weeks, threads of the discussion wear thin and begin to snap; one or both of us may forget what we were saying, or worse—decide we don’t care to pick up where we left off. In some cases, it’s even taken the better part of a year to get back in touch. In those cases, dying feels preferable to the embarrassment I might have to endure.
The central idea of post-chance concerns the effects of distance and time on the process of correspondence and the challenges they can pose, and with that concept in mind I found the experience of sitting with it to be compelling. As Baron and Vernon mail musical fragments back and forth on their extended timetable, ideas fall away and new ones crystallize in the moments they revisit the material. I doubt they intended for this piece to speak to my particular variety of isolationism, but the baggage I brought into my listening made every lull feel uncomfortably tense. A strong magnet was packaged alongside the tapes, introducing a controlled—yet unpredictable—guarantee that some of the work will be “forgotten.” Its presence weighed heavily on my mind, causing me to search for self-inflicted sabotage in every corner. That probably says more about me than the record, but hey—I decided to send off a few emails while they were still on my mind.
[7]
[N/A]
Average: [5.33]
Recommendations Corner
For our Recommendations Corner, Tone Glow’s writers have the chance to write about anything they want that’s caught their interest.
All of Us Strangers (Andrew Haigh, 2023)
What’s in a happy ending? A touch of resolution, though not the remarrying kind common in comedy. “Satisfaction” is a tempting assignation but should be avoided—both Aristotelean and bummercore (Derek Cianfrance, Wong Kar-wai, Charlotte Wells) forms of tragedy elicit a feeling of settling from the falling. Happiness is complicated, sort of like contentedness with a twist. Like sexiness, who gets to say how deep it goes, what goes into it? Break it up then: a happy ending is one part termination to two parts novelty of pleasure. If the story has ended, the possibility for feeling beyond its limits has not.
The happy ending finds itself under extra collapsing scrutiny inside queer cultural objects. Between Lee Edelman’s No Future (2004) and José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia (2009), what other shapes for our ends emerge? What’s in a happy ending? Isaac Julien’s Looking For Langston (1989), at once languid speculation and insistent memorial, turns its lyricism to that most dependable of narrative stalwarts near its end. Conflict gets meted out though steadily rising tension signaled by hallways clomped through by homophobic boots. And then the film reveals its complete banishment of conflict. Our ballroom angels are saved, their would-be bashers frustrated by the magic only an edit can give: they were never really there—they’re not there anymore.
Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers (2023) deliberately mixes our ontological and spectatorial ability to separate memory from revision, happy from sappy, melancholy from memorial. Adam (Andrew Scott) is a screenwriter facing the blank-history of the white page, a loneliness mirrored by his existence in cold neon apartment nowhere. In the process of wrenching a script from his head, he rebuffs the advances of his universe’s only neighbor, Harry (Paul Mescal). Adam soon retreats into the weird space between memory and fantasy, which is to say, “cinema.” He finds himself the hero in a screenplayed history of his own devising and we witness him find his deceased parents (Claire Foye and Jamie Bell) at his childhood home, impossibly younger than he is, impossibly really there. What follows is a sequence of lost possibilities: Adam comes out to his parents, shares a drink and a song and all the lost I love yous with them. Hello and goodbye and all the writing in-between. Its with these reconnections that Adam re-meet Harrys, who becomes more than a lover and less than beloved. He becomes a presence, like the parents—he exists for Adam to exorcise himself through.
These encounters between Harry and Adam are deeply sexy, filmed through Giallo cools and club-haze passages that seem to always culminate in a crossfade. Erotic time takes on the same specificity of soundtracking in Haigh’s film, a selection of songs that ply us with fantasy cues from Adam’s vinyl youth even as it confronts us with improbable saccharine sounds in the scenes with his parents. Beyond the impossible sentimentality of Adam’s diner-side, string-soaked farewell to his parents, Frankie Goes to Hollywood becomes a kind of anchor to nowhere, which is comic-literally where the film ends.
Is the ending happy? A refrain surrounding Haigh’s fantasia is that it’s overly sentimental and preposterously plotted. An ending revelation is indeed preposterous, less stopping then it is overly-devised, both imperfectly deployed and on the nose. But it is the ending Adam writes for himself, just as he writes unexplored possibilities of erotics and grief. Everything in the film,save for the first lonely outreach from Harry a few hallways down, exists in the no-space of half-fantasy: a screenplay in progress. Haigh shows us cinema’s scrutiny of it. All of Us Strangers plays aloud the feelings Adam’s screenplay conjures, with the catharsis at having this kind of opportunity with deceased parents or another shot at a crush you turned away, and so, the film makes us feel these feelings, contradictory or indulgent as they may seem. We write to recover our indulgence. But Haigh’s film—as opposed to Adam’s—is ultimately the story of a man too subsumed in his own tragedy to return the connection offered by a person who’s really there. He spends the rest of the runtime writing connection instead of feeling it. This is an understandable position to take.
“Now we think as we fuck this nut might kill us” Essex Hemphill wrote. Hemphill is—with Bruce Nugent and James Baldwin and the dare of Langston Hughes—one of the figures Looking For Langston seeks to recover, or at least imagine an encounter with. Julien’s ending isn’t capitulation to inevitable-seeming tragedy or goopy earnestness. It’s a recovery of lives to be lived outside of the film’s frame. In All of Us Strangers, the fuck that doesn’t really happen reveals itself just as narratively terminal as the fear that connection could kill us. Fantasy becomes a vampire with music to match, and writing a way to eradicate any body, monstrous or beloved. It’s a uniquely estranging position for a film to enact, seizing on both the worst instincts of sentiment and despair. I think it’s also a warning from Haigh. The film takes just as much pain to show the possibilities afforded by commingling as it does the tail of pain. —Frank Falisi
Chandler Groover’s Eat Me (2017)
Recently I’ve been exploring the world of contemporary interactive fiction, an artistic medium that evolved from some of the very first computer games, such as Adventure and Zork. While there was a lively industry surrounding interactive fiction in the ’80s, the rise of computer graphics killed the medium’s commercial viability; as such, the modern interactive fiction scene, in which most games are available created by hobbyists who distribute them for free, is a glimpse into an alternate timeline of technological and artistic development. An interactive computer interface provides authors with literary possibilities that can only be fully realized through the medium of interactive fiction, and I’ve had a great time exploring those possibilities over the past few months.
For readers looking to dip a toe into modern interactive fiction, I’d like to recommend Eat Me by Chandler Groover, a modern classic that’s very welcoming to newcomers. This is a sumptuous fairy tale adventure in which the player guides a perpetually hungry child through a castle where everything is edible and oh-so-delicious. Groover’s luxurious prose brings the environment to life with an incredible attention to detail that totally immerses you in a bizarre setting and its often-brutal fantasy logic (try instructing the child to smell things—almost every object in the game has a unique description of its scent). In a novel, the prose’s nonstop maximalism could easily feel cloying, but presented in an interactive format where the player sets their own pace, it’s more like a banquet of mouth-watering descriptions and witty turns of phrase. Eat Me’s interactivity also allows for a surprising and delightful narrative interplay between the player, protagonist, and narrator, which subtly introduces thematic questions about consumption, fulfillment, and maturity.
The game takes about two hours to play, and there are two different endings. One thing you should know going in, which is true for a lot of interactive fiction, is that drawing a map throughout the game is very helpful. —Chloe Liebenthal
Eat Me can be played at the Interactive Fiction Database website.
Neo-Futurists’ Switchboard (2024)
Switchboard, the newest show from the longstanding experimental theater troupe the Neo-Futurists, is loosely centered around the SS Eastland disaster of 1915. Despite being tied to the dock, the ship—lovingly nicknamed the “Speed Queen of the Great Lakes”—capsized in the Chicago River, leading to the untimely death of 844 passengers and crew members. Upon entering the Neo-Futurist Theater, I immediately clocked that the rectangular performing space was a perfect fit for a story about a boat. Would we, the 80-something attendees sitting in three long rows, be participating in a recreation of this event? Would I die tonight?
Not exactly. The show, directed by Anna Gelman and created/performed by Annie Share and Sivan Spector, does not spend its hour-long runtime aiming for a historical retelling. Instead, it uses this story as a way to ruminate on memory, meaning, and relationships that we’ve had with ourselves and others. We hear stories about an old partner, we’re asked to share thoughts about someone we once knew with the person sitting next to us, and we watch as puppets are used for moments of greater self-reflection. (The presence of a puppet—a non-living thing—forces greater rumination. Regular ol’ acting can be a bit slippery in its maneuvering between the real and unreal. With a puppet, everything is unreal and we’re asked to believe it is real. This act of translation is a sort of re-animation, and in thinking about my past, I revisited a self no longer familiar to me—a dead self that was resuscitated through contemplation.)
One of the most fascinating aspects of Switchboard is perhaps its most subtle. At various points when Share or Spector are talking, they hang up various objects on carabiners that dangle from the ceiling. Most memorable is an iPod Nano—an object that, while discontinued less than seven years ago, feels so distant given the advent of music streaming. At first, I considered these moments to be insignificant beyond the way they directed my eyes and attention, but it was only through the course of the show that I started to recognize their weight. The actions we make and objects we acquire soon accumulate to the point that they define our lives. We don’t notice it in the moment, much like we don’t notice how these small trinkets become integral to the set design, but our life does change over time—it’s only in hindsight that we see the gulf between what was and what is.
There is a moment in Switchboard when the composer, Spencer Meeks, suddenly interacts with Spector and assumes the role of a performer. They had spent the rest of the show playing with various electronics and doing sound design, but here, they take out their phone and play something from the Voice Memos app. We hear a years-old demo that they’ve never listened to since it was recorded. (It’s unnamed, too, meaning it is impossible to reference or revisit unless they have an incredible memory for dates.) They state that they’re unable to erase this already-forgotten music; this confession serves as a reminder that we are, in some ways, transcending time through our obstinance. Our past and present selves can always commingle through the things we hold onto, whether precious or perfunctory, material or abstract.
Switchboard also has moments that are surreal and humorous, but a large chunk of the script involves Share and Spector relaying facts about the SS Eastland. These are texturally interesting since the lines are delivered in a more matter-of-fact fashion than their conversations with each other. At times, it sounds like the sort of stuff you’d read on a Wikipedia page. This is crucial because it helps to bridge the cerebral with the emotional when they or we as audience members think about our lives. It also helps us recognize the ways in which we narrativize ourselves. We start to wonder: What is important to us? What is important to us that we want others to know? What is important to us that we may not even consciously recognize? Switchboard probes these ideas to make clear the flux nature of identity, memory, and history, and how those three things are forever intertwined. —Joshua Minsoo Kim
Information about Switchboard can be found at the Neo-Futurists’ website.
Further Ephemera
Our writers do more than just write for Tone Glow! Occasionally, we’ll highlight other things we’ve done that we’d love for you to check out.
Vanessa Ague wrote reviews for Jürg Frey’s String Quartet No. 4 (perf. by Quatuor Bozzini) and Telo Hoy’s Rubber Wing for The Quietus.
María Barrios has started a Latin Music column for Bandcamp Daily.
Billdifferen contributed to No Bell’s list of Best Milwaukee Rap of 2023. He also wrote a Jersey Club Starter Kit for his blog.
Daniel Bromfield wrote a review of Microstoria’s init ding + _snd reissues for Pitchfork.
Frank Falisi wrote about Blake Williams’ Laberint Sequences for The Brooklyn Rail and Wes Anderson’s The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar for Bright Wall/Dark Room.
Vincent Jenewein wrote a piece titled “Manifesto for a New Formalism” for his blog, Infinite Speeds.
Joshua Minsoo Kim is still making weekly lists of his favorite K-pop songs. He also wrote about some of his favorite 2023 K-pop songs for Pop Excellence, and is writing about various pop songs for the revitalized The Singles Jukebox (the website that inspired Tone Glow’s Writers Panel).
Leah B. Levinson’s band, Agriculture, released a new single titled “Living is Easy.” It is the title track off their forthcoming album, which is out on April 28th.
Jesse Locke wrote about Sonic Youth’s Walls Have Ears for Bandcamp Daily.
Shy Clara Thompson wrote a review of Joe Hisaishi’s The Boy and the Heron soundtrack for Pitchfork.
Thank you for reading the 123rd issue of Tone Glow. Stay tuned for more V-pop coverage on Tone Glow very soon.
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