Tone Glow 130: Writers Panel & Recommendations Corner, 3/6/2024
Our Writers Panel on Harry Gorski-Brown's 'Durt Dronemaker After Dreamboats' and Kim Gordon's 'The Collective'. Also: Our Recommendations Corner on the films of Shirley Erbacher
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.
Harry Gorski-Brown - Durt Dronemaker After Dreamboats (GLARC, 2024)
Press Release info: “Songs from a long time ago sourced from various places.”
Purchase info: Durt Dronemaker After Dreamboats can be purchased at Bandcamp.
Matthew Blackwell: Harry Gorski-Brown wants to scare you away. Don’t let him. He interrupts Durt Dronemaker After Dreamboats with a bunch of electronic noise and digital voices and generally puts up roadblocks across its first third. This stuff is there to signify that these aren’t just traditional Scottish Gaelic songs, but modern or maybe postmodern takes on them. That’s fine as far as it goes, and the early tracks even have their own ragtag sort of beauty. But these songs have stood the test of time and should be trusted to stand up for themselves still; when Gorski-Brown strips them bare and lets them be, they are gorgeous. For proof, skip ahead to “Òran eile air Latha Chùil Lodair,” a fiddle-and-vocals tune that remains pristinely un-fucked-with and the better for it. His voice, given room to roam, does so with relish. Some of these songs are live, and we can hear hints of his showmanship as well. Like Richard Dawson, he can translate some pretty difficult material to an audience who are readily convinced to be thrilled with it. The album ends with a frankly chaotic cover of “I Wanna Fight Your Father” by The Rubberbandits. It’s brilliant in its simplicity—when Gorski-Brown gets out of his own way, all he needs is his voice.
[6]
Alex Fields: The Irish and Scottish folk scenes have produced a flood of adventurous recordings in the last few years that expand the vocabulary of traditional music. These artists have been called “experimental,” “drone folk,” or “dark folk,” and none of these labels are wrong per se, but they exaggerate the extent to which most of the music departs from tradition. Listen to the Doc Watson and Jean Ritchie live recording of “Go Dig My Grave” from 1963 and then listen to the version that opens the Lankum album from last year. Doc and Jean didn’t have electronic drones, but their rendition nevertheless had an eerie, droning quality. Lankum incorporate sounds from other contemporary musical traditions, but follow precedent closely.
The same is true for the songs on Harry Gorski-Brown’s debut album. These are all traditional Irish songs, familiar from various other recordings. The arrangement here of “Òran eile air Latha Chùil Lodair” sounds very much like the classic recording by Captain Donald Joseph MacKinnon, who sang it unaccompanied, with the addition of a Stetson-ian arpeggiating violin accompaniment. Other tracks similarly follow source material while introducing some new ideas, which has always been how traditional tunes move through generations. In fact, the album is at its least distinctive when it leans most heavily into ambient and drone. The ethereal floating vocals and pipe drone of tracks like “’S daor a’ cheannaich mi ’n t-iasgach,” “Dùthaich MhicAoidh,” and “Tha sìor chòineadh am Beinn Dobhrain” are similar to the recent work of Brìghde Chaimbeul, but compare unfavorably; Chaimbeul is simply a more dynamic piper and arranger, her de- and re-constructions of harmonic and melodic materials more radical.
At times Gorski-Brown incorporates stories and self-reflections drawn from skewed live recordings or spoken word with robotic voice modulation. These too are but a riff on the long tradition of folk musicians telling stories about their tunes and where they learned them. Some of the tools used here were clearly learned from musical sources much more contemporary than the aging rural fiddlers and ’30s field recordings that folk musicians often reference, but they all fit nicely into that framework of tradition. This is far from the best recent album in this vein, but an album this good being middle of the pack speaks to overall strength of the Irish scene, especially relative to the hokey Newgrass sounds that still dominate the progressive wing of Appalachian folk.
[6]
Rae-Aila Crumble: Mixing traditional folk sounds with digitized, electronic elements to position oneself as post-human is a technique tried and true; think Chuquimamani-Condori’s past decade run, with works like Smile or DJ E. This structure of reimagination becomes very personal very quickly, as it begs the artist to grapple directly with their modern-day participation in a long lineage of culture. Multi-instrumentalist Harry Gorski-Brown uses pipes, fiddles, and organs against drone synthesizers to shape an imagined and displaced Scottish narrative. Scottish Gaelic slips off Gorski-Brown’s tongue in steep cadences that mimic the flow of the sounds produced by the instruments themselves. If anything, Durt Dronemaker acts as a convincing study on the relatedness between the language’s phonetics and quickly developing sound techniques. Occasional uses of English text-to-speech on tracks throughout the album further interrogate this theme by automatizing the English language in contrast to the warbling, chorus-heavy Gaelic in Gorski-Brown’s fervent vocal performance.
What disappoints me the most about Durt Dronemaker After Dreamboats is the lack of structural difference with a fair amount of the tracks. More abrasive drones are typically reserved for the tail-end of the songs. While this works for the first track “Mo bhò dhubh mhòr” by way of catching the listener off-guard, it becomes a predictable move that slows the album from doing anything stylistically left-field. Despite this, Gorski-Brown finds success in the operatic dynamic range, intentionally off-putting vocal chains, and meditative flutes that wax and wane. Those ecstatic last-minute climaxes feel hypnotizingly comforting, like the recurring dream that finds you falling off a cliff and growing wings right before you hit the ground.
[6]
Frank Falisi: The first time I ever saw a set of bagpipes played, I could not square how the human mouth made it sound. The hands synched with the changes in sound but the breathing followed no such rhythm. The player blew until they breathed in. They gulped and then they blew. The noise didn’t come from the mouth stuff or even the vibration that makes a voice. It all came from somewhere deeper.
Why drone? How long? The perception of the presence of a sound pings our mortality sensors—this noise has a life like me and so will end like me—but what about the noise that seems endless, comes from somewhere endlessly? What is the origin of a noise which occupies eternity? Sometimes when a song on Durt Dronemaker After Dreamboats finishes, the drone is still in the air, lingering like sun-shock after jamming your eyes shut to brilliance. The drone is a loop. It started before the song and continued after it, a segment of something in repetition forever. And the drone is a riff, an idea of something in repetition for as long as the song sustains it. Endlessness and expiration.
The Glasgow-based artist Harry Gorski-Brown calls Durt Dronemaker After Dreamboats “songs from a long time ago sourced from various places.” It’s a formulation as tossed off as it is assumed. It is disposable and perpetual. The song origins wobble as much as their sounds: the definite pipes of “’S daor a’ cheannaich mi ’n t-iasgach” become subject to the intoning of the human voice. You can tune the bagpipes but the grain of human vocal-cord drone is less settleable. Another cord, the fiddle bow, takes on a Cale-like done-sweep near the end of “Buain na choirce.” But then it glitters into shape on “Òran eile air Latha Chùil Lodair”, plasticine—what is it? Fiddle plicks? Something electronic? That voice again.
Improbably, Durt Dronemaker After Dreamboats is an album for human voice. What do I mean? I mean that in tending landscapes of disparate timbre and always looping his body’s cords into the texture, the thing that lingers (after the ear closes, past the end) is that wavery, shimmery, breaky voice. The loop and the drone and the riff prepare the ear for the idea. Here, the idea is the sound from long ago from various mouths. It’s not humanism, it’s drone theory processed through the body. We instrument the world.
[8]
Joshua Minsoo Kim: Durt Dronemaker After Dreamboats is the sort of album that makes you feel its length. No track here is under six minutes, and these drones serve as foundations to appreciate the songs’ other elements. On “Dùthaich MhicAoidh,” it is the evolving melodies atop the bed of buzzing noise that are most significant. They repeat so often that they blur into their own sort of drone, becoming another layer of evocative texture in the way the vocals do. On “Tha sìor chòineadh am Beinn Dobhrain,” the singing and instrumentation feel in lockstep, and it is the former’s emotive core that makes every shifting note feel like Gorski-Brown is tearing out his heart. (It was no surprise that, when I looked up the lyrics, the song is about wailing and weeping). The most typical bouts of experimentation only reveal how much I don’t care for them. “Mo bhò dhubh mhòr” has regrettable text-to-speech that renders the instrumentation a pretty bit of ambient and nothing more; this balancing of the contemporary and traditional sometimes leads to a supplanting of the latter, really. It recalls, in various ways, the good and bad elements to Joe Rainey’s approach to Indigenous songcraft. The album ends with its most illuminating track. “Bha mise raoir air an àirigh / I wanna fight your father” settles into a long, noisy drone that thankfully leads into a moment of relatively unadorned singing and playing. These moments of genuine folk music feel so uncommon in my life that I find them more invigorating than anything else that’s here.
[6]
Jinhyung Kim: The electronics on Durt Dronemaker After Dreamboats organically extend the bagpipe drones that permeate and ground these songs; they thicken the already rich frequency ranges to an intoxicating and enveloping shimmer. Gorski-Brown doesn’t really need to change up the structure or flow of Scottish folk music to give it a contemporary charm; a lot of trad-crossover introduces (for example) some functional harmony filtered through the bespoke instruments of whatever tradition the artist is drawing from, ostensibly to make it more legible for untrained ears, or to have it not be “just folk." Dronemaker largely sticks to those good ol’ pipes, fiddle rounds, and melodic unisons between voice and lead, maintaining all the rudiments while undergirding them with a wall of sound that applies a magnifying glass to their intrinsic mesmerism. There are chords proper, but they serve to modulate the texture moreso than define any progression. The tensile power of that texture is made especially evident in the first minute or so of “Tha sìor chòineadh am Beinn Dobhrain,” during which the drone sporadically fizzles out like an unstable digital signal; it’s so jarring as to remind one of just how much space that drone can fill.
The droll silliness grafted onto the music—often found in spoken descriptions of the traditionals Gorski-Brown is adapting, in his own voice or via text-to-speech—doesn’t feel necessary, but does feel inarguably genuine. It conveys the type of personality that can’t help but peek out from behind every corner with a pair of googly eyes (and that finds it uproarious every single time). While the relentlessly vocal-fried “cover” of The Rubberbandits’ “I Wanna Fight Your Father” that concludes the record could’ve easily been insufferable, it sounds so consistent with everything else that it passes as wholly sincere. It’s a swarthy testament to how robust the atmosphere built over Dronemaker’s runtime is.
[7]
Leah B. Levinson: Home recording is a bit of a misnomer at this point. With the advent of free, mobile, and/or illicitly-accessible DAWs, the availability of portable microphones and audio interfaces, and the capacity to collaborate with others remotely, the act of DIY record production may happen in a studio, on the road, in a library, at a park, at a friend’s house, online, on stage, or anywhere else one could imagine just as well as it may happen at home. Additionally, “home recording” has expanded in myriad ways across genre, fidelity, and method to the point that it can’t necessarily be identified with any singular aesthetic, market, or tradition. What was once the creative realm of outsiders and hermits is now the domain of hitmakers and critical darlings as well.
Still, the legacy of tinkerers, experimentalists, and the demo-obsessed of the ’70s and ’80s lives on in modern artists who position themselves outside of genre, market, and scene. The idiosyncratic practices of at-home artists such as Arthur Russell, R. Stevie Moore, Patrick Cowley, and Larry Heard (to name a few), were largely characterized by their unique fixations (musical idioms, wry imitations of popular music, a unique outlet, and technology, respectively) rather than their fidelity or approach. When a practice revolves primarily around the unbounded creation of a piece of recorded music (rather than the creation of a marketable product or the capture of a live performance practice), it often benefits from limitations.
Enter Harry Gorski-Brown. Durt Dronemaker After Dreamboats is a collection of mostly traditional songs from various sources performed on bagpipe, voice, and various other instruments, and strung together with extraneous sound design flourishes which ultimately take over the gestalt. Here, the source material, while clearly of importance, is merely the backbone to a much larger and more expansive work exploring drone, longform song, and nonphysical spaces. The process and result are most immediately reminiscent of works by Chuquimamani-Condori which integrate recordings of popular and folk music into the fabric more abstract, dense, and forward-thinking works. In both cases, the artist’s free range of control (and adept technique) allow them to mine inspiration and particular qualities from their source and transmute them such that the source’s initial meaning and context need not be directly relayed. The work is both rooted and immediately accessible, available to anyone who may reach for its fruit.
[8]
Average: [6.71]
Kim Gordon - The Collective (Matador, 2024)
Press Release info: “On this record, I wanted to express the absolute craziness I feel around me right now,” says Gordon. “This is a moment when nobody really knows what truth is, when facts don’t necessarily sway people, when everyone has their own side, creating a general sense of paranoia. To soothe, to dream, escape with drugs, TV shows, shopping, the internet, everything is easy, smooth, convenient, branded. It made me want to disrupt, to follow something unknown, maybe even to fail.”
Purchase info: The Collective can be purchased at the Matador website and at Bandcamp.
Jesse Locke: I’ve been thinking a lot about “late period” artworks recently: Scott Walker’s stretch of albums from Climate of Hunter to Soused; William Friedkin’s Bug and Killer Joe; David Lynch and Laura Dern’s Inland Empire; Lou Reed and Metallica’s Lulu; Georgia O’Keeffe’s The Beyond; Kim Gordon’s The Collective. Each of these projects allowed their creators to push the boundaries of what may have previously been deemed acceptable or accessible, leaning into the confrontational elements and hoping fans will follow. Not all of them comment on the artists’ mortality—listen to Blackstar, Donuts, or Purple Mountains for that—but they do highlight the passage of time, with everything that implies.
So how does Gordon, who celebrated her 70th birthday last year, fit into this pantheon? She first connected with producer Justin Raisen to create the trunk-rattling sound of her 2016 solo single, “Murdered Out.” Three years later, their first full-length collaboration, No Home Record, still contained trace elements of Sonic Youth-esque noise-rock. The Collective ditches “rock” arrangements altogether, accenting Gordon’s familiar spoken word delivery with the kind of grinding, guitar-heavy trap beats you might expect from Ken Carson or EVY.
The Collective is “late period” art of the highest order, striving for newness and fully committing to the bit, like Michael Shannon as a traumatized vet who believes the insects crawling under his skin were put there by the American government. On the nightmarish centerpiece “It’s Dark Inside”—namechecking Pussy Riot and Pussy Galore as Gordon’s voice is warped with AutoTune—it feels like she’s conjuring untold horrors. “Dream Dollar” sounds like Nine Inch Nails produced by Das Kabinet. “I Don’t Miss My Mind” sounds like the nightmarish netherworld below Panda Bear’s Person Pitch. “I’m A Man” sounds like ESG’s “U.F.O.” hovering into hell.
While the men of Sonic Youth look backwards, Gordon gazes ahead, just as she always has. Even when the combination of Raisen’s productions and her vocals veer towards self-parody (see: “BYE BYE” and “The Candy House”), their attempts are impressively bold. “It made me want to disrupt, to follow something unknown, maybe even to fail,” writes Gordon in the album’s press notes. As a response to media misinformation, vapid celebrity politicians, and other contemporary opiates of the masses, The Collective is the pissed-off wake-up call we need to pick up.
[8]
Rae-Aila Crumble: Kim Gordon litmus test: Is it mumble crap when the 70-year-old white woman does it? Or is it a legend venturing into new territories as a brash late-career “fuck you!” to the critics who counted her out? There’s a very specific art to rapping without a pen—you have to graze a level of sincerity that displays something inherently special about yourself. I don’t expect Kim to give us fleshed-out nightlife recollections when her bedtime is probably before 10 pm. Hell, I don’t even expect perc rap. Maybe she really does just have a grocery list to recite. But so many of these tracks are so void of character that I start to question if The Collective was her way of fulfilling a bet she lost.
When “BYE BYE” dropped in January, perhaps I was too naïve to be genuinely interested in her new artistic direction. We allowed ourselves to get caught up in buzzword soup—I admittedly giggled too hard at ”Kim Gordon Opium” this and “Destroy Lonely vibes” that. It could’ve been more beneficial to ponder Al Pierre’s words a little more, specifically him saying, “I’m not even sure if it’s actually good or if she’s just really cool.” He’s right on the nose. Explaining to others that this is THE Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth making THIS music was the most satisfying thing to come out of this listening experience, and isn’t that an issue?
What I’m really attempting to get at is the crushing cynicism in trying to hide behind an IDGAF mentality. Performing a poor LARP of OsamaSon is only cute to older white people who are also so displaced from the source. Otherwise, it comes off as cheap, tacky, and a little bit insensitive to the artists in the sound who get constantly shit on for actually having something to say. What will be a “point and laugh along” experience for many ends up as a frustrating one for me. And the beats suck, too. You not tdf.
[2]
Jinhyung Kim: I’ve heard very little Sonic Youth, and what little I have has failed to stick with me whatsoever. SY are obviously one of the gateway bands for people who love weird shit—which, as with most big gateway bands, means that taking any other route to the underground makes listening to them afterward much less interesting. I’m disclaiming this not to qualify my aesthetic judgment of this album (which I’m confident in), but to explain my limited ability to tell whether or not Kim Gordon’s lyrics were always this laughably on the nose. Like, am I just paying attention more because of their incongruity with the music? The words to anything from the ’80s and ’90s with punk in its genealogy are most certainly "on the nose," and a side-by-side comparison of SY lyrics and verses off The Collective doesn’t yield an immediate verdict. But there’s something to be said for the concordance between deadpan invocation of late capitalist propaganda and noise rock’s jagged propulsions that goes deeper than learned association; the persistence of the former amid signifiers of a contemporary sound underscore how long it’s been since late capitalism successfully absorbed the last traces of irony into every crack in its edifice.
This distance is further illuminated by one of its (perhaps?) unintentional effects: by parroting images and lingo from a very general understanding of “the culture” today, the songs on The Collective read as if this is what Gordon hears when listening to trap—i.e. kids rattling off their favorite consumer products and using “pussy” to modify every other turn of phrase. I'm pretty sure this isn’t what she meant, because she actually listens to and likes this stuff. But the wonky optics of it just point to how deep the generational gap runs, even if it’s self-aware.
That said, I don’t think the problem is that Gordon should have stuck to her roots or refrained from trap appropriations: it’s that she didn’t go far enough. “BYE BYE” and “The Candy House” are the best tracks by far because they most shamelessly articulate generational dissonance. I don’t expect Gordon (or any boomer) to really get whatever the kids are up to these days—hell, I don’t—but she’s trying something novel by melding her sound with rage beats and honest-to-god Memphis phonk. It’s like watching your dad fumble his way through a multi-step handshake with one of your friends, or why the Northern Boys are good. On most of the album, however, the production isn’t as consistently trappy, and the words (and their delivery) aren’t so overbearingly pointed; the contradiction that makes The Collective compelling at first gets buried under dollar-store SY lyrics and instrumentals where the crossing of 808s with noise and feedback just circles back to old school industrial.
I can’t help but think of The Collective as Gordon trying to pull off what Low did with Double Negative, but falling short. Both records are a second round with a new producer with pop/indie cred (this gets even funnier when you compare BJ Burton and Justin Raisen’s Wikipedia pages) who helps the artist venture into uncharted waters of digital distortion; Low succeeds where Gordon fails in how far they pushed it, manifesting latent qualities in a songwriting craft they’d been honing for decades. Even the cover of The Collective, with its pink backdrop and phone silhouette in the foreground, bears a suspicious resemblance to Double Negative’s… tinfoil hat aside, my disappointment stands. Don't waste your time on the entire record, but definitely check out the deep Playboi Carti voice on “The Candy House” before dipping out.
[4]
Frank Falisi: Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins is perhaps an unobvious choice of comparison for Kim Gordon’s The Collective. The former is an especially thorny work from a musical theater composer known for his thorns, a one-act nightmare revue that tracks every figure who tried to kill a sitting American president. The latter is the second solo album from one of the most oleic figures of American rock music, a miasmatic soup of trap-sunk overdrive and kitsch-smirk spoken-word. Both pieces are wordy. They glean meaning from their lyrics’ cutting vacance (“Gordon: “I’m not ideal, I’m a person / I won the war but lost my way / But I can buy as much as anyone”) and drilling insistence (Sondheim: “Everybody’s got the right to be happy / Don’t stay mad, life’s not as bad as it seems / If you keep your goal in sight, you can climb to any height/ Everybody’s got a right to their dreams.”) Gordon’s “I’m a Man,” which sinks her now-trademark, still-deliriously-original contralto drone, is exactly the kind of character-inhabitation that makes Assassins sing; who is this narrator, fractious and leaking self and world-loathing, warranting our dismissive giggles as much as he earns our fear? “I wanted to express the absolute craziness I feel around me right now,” Gordon says of The Collective. The collective at the heart of Assassins exercises the same American wretch: every now and then the country goes a little wrong.
Sondheim puts that purposefully understated state of our union in the mouth of one of the musical’s direct-address figures, the Balladeer. The character opposes the musical’s other metatheatrical emcee, the Proprietor; as the Balladeer urges the would-be assassins with that most useless chestnut, “our better angels,” the Proprietor insists that these disenfranchised Americans deserve their prize. The Balladeer is typically cast as a figure refracting some psychic American songhood: a folk singer in the Classic Stage Company’s recent production, Neil Patrick Harris channeling Will Rogers in the 2004 revival, a microphone-wielding lounge singer a la Patrick Cassidy in the original off-Broadway rendition. To cast the Balladeer is to suss out some kind of American musical consciousness, one that can thrill and fall, contort and curdle. The Collective is not a musical. It features no such identity fractured around an ensemble like Assassins. But on the 11-song throb, Gordon makes the case for herself as our chronicler of confusion. Her songs annotate and then narrate elements of how we fog around the world, through our pleasure’s clang (“Psychedelic Orgasm”), our consumerist reprehension (“BYE BYE”), our mismanaged connection (“Shelf Warmer.”) It’s at once funny and full of fury, louche and puncturing. It contains itself. Something the country, it says. And then it goes a little wrong.
Kim Gordon as Balladeer means exacting noise. As on No Home Record (2019), she dredges the noise-rock pop riff of Sonic Youth for drum hits that percolate and cough, for guitar as overdriven air. Produced by past collaborator Justin Raisen (with additional production from Anthony Paul Lopez), the beats beat up against the melody, push it. The most galling distortion of Sondheim’s career as an arranger of not only word but sound too comes late in Assassins. After the Balladeer is transformed into an onstage Lee Harvey Oswald—a crow-angel cowed by a chorus literally led by John Wilkes Booth—this new Oswald fulfills his future: he pulls the trigger on the rifle aimed out the window of the Dallas Book Depository. The rifle shot is loud. The ensuing sound is louder: “Hail to the Chief” in chordal brass assault, something we recognize, maybe affectionately, pushed to its sonic limit. You can rip a sound when it plays, almost to the point where you pinch the world you’re singing. Gordon executes a similar crunch on “BYE BYE,” bashing electric guitar past discordancy into pure air-abrasion. It happens on the first song. It mission-statements the piece, confusion, compassion, collecting. I feel the sound in the space above my molars, right between where I think about and where feeling can only express thoughts in raw sound.
[9]
Eli Schoop: Who introduced Kim Gordon to raging? Why is she so good at it? Is she really tapped into the culture like that? Do you think she reads No Bells? This shit is really crazy. I thought “Paprika Pony” was a fun, unexpected novelty, but this turn is just unreal. She does a Young Thug flow on “The Candy House” over an early Three 6 Mafia-type beat, pens an anti-incel anthem on “I’m a Man,” and channels Dreamcrusher and Dälek’s dark industrial on “Trophies” and “I’m Dark Inside.” It’s even wilder when you realize The Collective was executive produced by collaborators on the newest mediocre Drake and Lil Yachty albums.
I can’t believe I’m praising a white woman who qualifies for AARP benefits making grimy trap shit. It feels like a sequel to James Ferraro’s Skid Row, a naked look into the bacchanal metropolis of Los Angeles. Kim’s recognition of how rap is the one genre that can truly turn a mirror on our infested, sickened culture is dope as hell. We need her to do a show with Axxturel and SpaceGhostPurrp as soon as humanly possible. What a legend.
[9]
Joshua Minsoo Kim: “I think this might be a little too wild for Playboi. But it could be cool for Kim.” These are the words of producer Justin Raisen describing “Bye Bye,” the lead single for Kim Gordon’s The Collective. He paints his creation as something truly experimental when the reality is that he probably just didn’t have the connections to land a beat for Carti. Instead, he has spent the past few years working with artists who excel in something like alt-pop: Lil Yachty and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Yves Tumor and Sky Ferreira. All those artists, regardless of your opinion of them, are working in a mode of songwriting that adds in simple flourishes to give tracks a semblance of edge. In other words, their experimentation is less about the actual process of creating than a simple textural component that “elevates” them (people’s response to their works isn’t dissimilar to how people consider A24 films better than standard genre-film fare). The subversions are shallow and often the least compelling things about them. And when I listen to The Collective, it is hard to shake the fact that this is just like the appeal of another Rainer-produced artist: Teezo Touchdown. It’s novelty masked as substance.
Ultimately, The Collective often fails because it feels like an awkward middle ground: the beats aren’t abrasive enough to compliment Kim’s spoken word, and her vocals prove too simple to make the songs feel expansive. Songs like “Tree House” find Gordon warbling in a way that feels at one with the unwieldy guitar figures, but it eventually feels like a tedious exercise in atmosphere. “Shelf Warmer” is especially egregious, the tremolo-picked guitar and random spurt of AutoTune highlighting how this is just a hodgepodge of signifiers around what is “cool.” It is certainly exciting to see Gordon operating in slightly different modes that feel true to herself, but it is rare that I am listening to one of these songs and swept up in the music and not the act of thinking about what is happening.
There will much love, rightly, for Gordon’s Carti voice on “The Candy House,” but my revisits have mostly been about waiting around to get to that point. Better is “I’m a Man,” which collapses the line between rage and industrial music and makes her straight-ahead lyrics feel acerbic. Few tracks feel so fully realized here, and “The Believers” is one of them, adding some bite to all the clanging—the beat serves as an emotional continuation of her howled vocals. Otherwise, it’s just about individual moments: The metallic screech of “I Don’t Miss My Mind,” the Suicide pulse of “Dream Dollar,” the pretty singing across “Psychedelic Orgasm.” It’s definitely cool, but that only gets you so far.
[5]
Marshall Gu: Sonic Youth’s songs could be about religion, infidelity, Charles Manson, and 9/11, but the lyrics themselves were often vague and besides the point, which was the glorious hum of New York City nights. The exception was Kim Gordon’s lyrics, which were about being sexualized, being anorexic, being alone; all-in-all, being a woman. There’s a braveness to her music that just isn’t there in Thurston Moore’s songs, which also applies to her solo career: it’s braver to mix up industrial noise with trap/rage beats than to churn out Sonic Youth-lite songs. “The Candy House” could have been a Pi’erre Bourne production while parts of “Psychedelic Orgasm” make me think of Travis Scott circa-Birds in the Trap Sing McKnight (specifically “the ends”); the drum programming on “Trophies” sounds like it’s reaching for Kanye West circa Yeezus. Thurston Moore makes a point in his recent memoir Sonic Life about enjoying rap music and sampling, but neither came into play in their actual music together barring the Chuck D ad-libs on “Kool Thing” and the Ciccone Youth album, whereas Kim Gordon’s two solo albums thus far are deeply invested in both. Of course, it’s still tempered with noise, the language that Sonic Youth knew best.
Gordon isn’t rapping over these beats—thank goodness for that—and she’s barely singing either which makes sense: she’s 70 years old now, and her strength as a vocalist was in knowing her limits and working within them. While it might seem ridiculous that she’s reading off items to pack on “Bye Bye,” it makes the song uniquely hers whereas if Justin Raisen gave it to the generic rapper du jour it probably would have sounded like generic rap. Disappointingly, “I’m a Man” reads a little too closely in basic sentiment to Taylor Swift’s “The Man” (Gordon claims ignorance on that front, saying “I couldn’t tell you what her music sounds like”). Considering how direct songs like “Kissability” and “Swimsuit Issue” previously were, I’d much rather hear Gordon groan about the price of potatoes on “Psychedelic Orgasm” (“$20 each?!”). So much has been made about the similarities of hip-hop and punk rock—mostly the attitude—but here’s someone who was on the frontlines of New York City’s art-punk scene now making hip-hop her own way: with lots of noise. Don’t forget your vibrator (one of the last items to be packed on “Bye Bye”): they make noise too.
[7]
H.D. Angel: In principle, I’m a fan of aging music legends making wild detours just to see what happens, but I can’t get into “BYE BYE” or “I’m the Man.” Musing about gender and reciting her shopping list over rage beats, Kim Gordon seems sincere enough, but she’s not curious about this music—she rarely attempts any of the technical elements of 21st-century rap that might sustain the initial glee of the concept, especially where the rapping itself is concerned. She doesn’t punch in or ad-lib much on The Collective, often recording a song in long, tedious takes and leaving lots of empty space in the mix. Apart from some anonymous smears of AutoTune and thirty seconds of “The Candy House,” her performances behind the mic feel preserved in amber from an older alternative-rock era; some of the beats on this album might flaunt their contemporary scuzz, but the vocals could have been recorded decades ago.
It both helps and hurts The Collective, then, that many of the songs take a more direct electro-industrial approach. Despite restrained, talky performances from Gordon, tracks like “It’s Dark Inside” and “I Don’t Miss My Mind” at least leave an intense impression, even if they lack the shock factor of the singles. The album’s production aesthetic is its most interesting feature, and the closest it gets to the accidental spontaneity I was hoping for. You can feel Gordon and her collaborators being pulled in different directions on “Shelf Warmer,” as rock studio dynamics swirl around the tighter bounce of what could be a random type-beat ripped from YouTube in 2019. The sound and pacing of The Collective recall one of my favorite oddly-assembled pop records, Sleigh Bells’ Jessica Rabbit, where frantic drums and engineering from Aftermath Records’ Mike Elizondo lent the band’s arena-rock bombast a hyperreal sheen without succumbing to PC Music-style pastiche. Messy, clashing styles only land if you can back them up with intention, though. This album doesn’t have the songs or personality to justify its blind excursions.
I can’t imagine another artist being inspired by any ideas here that aren’t better expressed in Kim Gordon’s older work or that of the younger artists she’s borrowing from, and I have no idea which artists those are to begin with. That’s a shame, given how sprawling and complete the best Sonic Youth records feel today—how they seem to already understand all the ways their audience will pull at their different threads while still blazing with the spirit of their specific milieu. The Collective, by contrast, is fussy and withdrawn, too in love with its own instincts to connect with anyone who doesn’t buy into its narrative.
[4]
Average: [6.00]
Recommendations Corner
For our Recommendations Corner, Tone Glow’s writers have the chance to write about anything they want that’s caught their interest.
The Films of Shirley Erbacher
This past Sunday, Sweet Void Cinema—a microcinema in Humboldt Park—hosted a program of films by Shirley Erbacher (1933-1999). Erbacher was a Chicago Public Library employee and lived in Hyde Park from when she was 17 until she moved uptown much later in life. Those who look up the filmmaker on the Film-Makers’ Coop website will notice that she is credited as a New York artist (via Wheeler W. Dixon’s The Exploding Eye). This is incorrect, as per the intro from Chicago avant-garde film historian Josh Mabe, who programmed and projected these works.
When I visited the Coop last year, I made an attempt to watch some of her shorts given that I was doing my own programming related to cine-dance; she has eight films titled Dance. It was a surprise, then, that dancing didn’t really feature in much of these works at all. We watched them chronologically. Dance 1 (1966) was a simple, silent diary film that saw the camera moving around: a simple showcase of flowers. It was shoddy, unable to capture the depth of a space in the way that, say, Ed Emshwiller’s George Dumpson’s Place (1965) does, nor did it feel invigorating in its simplicity like Marie Menken’s Glimpse of the Garden (1957).
Things improved with Dance 2 (1968), which was largely defined by darkness. There’s some movement that we see from a goldfish, as well as the image of a framed portrait. Erbacher’s description for this film calls it “…a part of a memory,” which highlights how well this work was able to connect a person’s presence to a particular place. There is light shining through a window, capturing a soft intimacy in the way that Barry Gerson’s films might, but this is less about the pleasure of a pure image than creating a linkage. The lack of meaning here, and the occasional inability to make out what is being seen, was the point: it’s the sort of film that you know means far more to Erbacher than anyone else, and it is in her searching that the film finds its emotional core.
Dance 3 (1969) was the perfect follow-up: a film with actual living people. We see a family sitting around opening presents with superimposed shots of Christmas lights. The spirit of celebration and joy is present in what those decorations represent; something that wouldn’t be so readily clear given that this is a silent film (as all of the films tonight were), and because the faces were rarely exuding dramatic feeling. It was subtly affecting. The same was true for Dance 4 (1969), which saw two siblings—one boy and one girl—dancing in front of open windows. The top half of the frame was relatively dark for much of the first half, which felt like a little bit sloppy; I rarely felt that there was careful attention paid to the construction of these images. That soon changed as we saw images of purple-pink flowers, all soft-hued and diaphanous, superimposed over the kids’ movements. Suddenly, the ideas present in the three previous films regarding people and place and unspoken emotion all snapped into place. Dance 5 (1970) was more intentional about this merging of human and environment: superimposed images of flowers and dancing were more carefully coordinated, allowing the bodies to occasionally look like they were being framed by the flora. That the people largely appeared as shadows made the images more picturesque. Notably, the dance was choreographed by a family member named Korah Erbacher.
Dance 6 (1970) was an exercise in color and texture, with red and white smears and skeletal-looking structures constantly filling the frame. At the end, we see someone flipping some sort of book, showing the source of what’s been filmed; it’s a nice reveal that showcases film’s ability to draw evocative images out of the barest of elements. And really, it felt in the lineage of countless avant-garde films that capture sculptural work. Dance 7 (1971) often saw the camera shooting outside the windows of trains, as if you were a passenger contemplating life. Frequently, a portrait of a man would appear along the lefthand side of the frame—a call back to Dance 2. The inside of any vehicle is of course, an interesting space—one that can feel personal but is constantly on the move. The way you hold onto a memory can feel like that: on the edge of feeling totally concrete. Dance 8 (1972) was the most perfunctory, revealing shots of tree branches and snow. It was cute if only because it was spare, and it appropriately closed the loop with the similar efforts made in Dance 1.
There were five other Erbacher films that were shown this night: Playground (1965) had shots of a merry-go-round and jungle gym. She would give a sense of verve to the moment of the former, and highlight the physical features of the latter by tracing the length of their structures. It was most delightful, though, when I couldn’t quite tell what playground structure I was actually seeing. Snow (1965) was exactly what it said on the tin, and was only really evocative when it used these sheets of white as a chance to toy with negative space. I was chuffed by the title card at the film’s end, as it was just a white notecard that looked scuffed up with “end” written on it. There were black smudges, as if highlighting the purity of the snow we had just seen prior. Black & White (1969) starts with portraits of a man (one the negative of the other) with the title above them. We see people dancing, painting, and jumping rope atop a trampoline, as well as random inserted shots of nature. There was a seductive blue light near the end, and its glow cast a poignance to all the images that preceded it, as if suggesting a mystique was present to the banal activities we just saw.
Chiaroscuro (1971) was my favorite of the night. It was very similar to all the Dance films in the ways it dished out diaristic images suffused with meaning—all without being too precious—but it also had an evocative way of conveying time. We see shots of a boy with a camera, playing with it while lying on the floor. With fast and thoughtful edits, we move from image to image—often in domestic settings or in nature—and by the film’s end, there is a man standing next to a car. It felt like flipping through a photobook in real time. Kyle (1972) was the most direct: just shots of a boy moving around, walking atop a tree that was leaning somewhat parallel to the ground. As the final Erbacher film of the night, it was a reminder that filmmaking is incredible in that it reinforces the beauty of seeing: it’s easy to overlook the beauty of everything that is always in front of us.
After these films, Mabe showed some of Brakhage’s Songs. These works made clear the influence that he had on Erbacher’s films. In fact, the first reel, Songs 19 & 20 (1965) was especially apt, as the first film had people dancing in a domestic space. Songs 28 & 29 (1969) were minimal, both featuring flashes of gauzy red lights that were barely imperceptible. It was like Erbacher’s Dance 2 but less about emotion than pure abstraction. Songs 21 & 22 (1965) was mistakenly shown last and not immediately after 19 & 20, but this was fitting as they were the least like Erbacher’s films. They were, however, exactly what you’d expect from Brakhage: the former is one of his painted films but ends with a red light that shows people in a dimly lit setting, merging the emotion of abstract visual images with that of flesh; the body, when abstracted, has a similar ineffable provocation. Song 22 had flickers of light reflected on bodies of water—a joy in any and every Brakhage film. —Joshua Minsoo Kim
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 a review of Armbruster’s Can I Sit Here for the Road to Sound. She also wrote about Erika Angell’s The Obsession With Her Voice for the Quietus. She wrote an interview feature with Arushi Jain in the latest issue of The Wire.
Ashley Bardhan wrote about the “final girl” trop in horror movies for the Roger Ebert website.
Billdifferen has made a list of his favorite albums of the past two months.
Matthew Blackwell wrote a review of Rafael Toral’s Spectral Evolution for Pitchfork. He also wrote about 10 different releases for his Field Recording column at Bandcamp Daily.
Alex Fields wrote about the films of Nour Ouayda for Ultra Dogme. They also wrote about Liu Jiayin’s Oxhide II for OVID.
Sam Golder wrote about Staś Czekalski’s Przygody for Pitchfork.
Jinhyung Kim has started a sound poetry column for Bandcamp Daily. He highlights eight new releases in its first dispatch.
Joshua Minsoo Kim wrote a review of Mk.gee’s Two Star & the Dream Police and Faye Webster’s Underdressed at the Symphony for Rolling Stone. He is also still making lists of the best K-pop songs each week. He also made a list of his Top 25 Japanese Albums of 1995 on Twitter.
Michael Hong wrote about Mom’s “Bad Days on Fire” for This Side of Japan.
Colin Joyce has released a new album titled one day away from home feels like a hundred.
Jesse Locke interviewed Laetitia Sadier for Bandcamp Daily. He also wrote a review of Ruth Goller’s SKYLLUMINA for Aquarium Drunkard. He is one of 20+ people who wrote about David Berman for Hell World. He wrote about the Vancouver-based Dandelion Records for SPIN.
Ryo Miyauchi wrote about rowbai’s Naive and more for their newsletter, This Side of Japan. Also for the newsletter, they wrote about Yamamoto Sho and did a round-up of Japanese albums they enjoyed from the first two months of the year.
Jude Noel wrote about Linda Smith’s Nothing Else Matters and I So Liked Spring for Bandcamp Daily.
Eli Schoop wrote an essay about his relationship with country music for No Bells.
Shy Clara Thompson wrote about Mixmaster Morris, Jonah Sharp, and Haruomi Hosono’s Quiet Logic for Pitchfork. She also made a list of her 25 Favorite Japanese Albums of 1995.
Thank you for reading the 130th issue of Tone Glow. “YSL, Eckhaus Latta, rock Balenciaga too, bitch.”
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