Tone Glow 149: Our Favorite Music, January-March 2024
Tone Glow's writers highlight 35 albums and songs they enjoyed during the first three months of the year
Each quarter, Tone Glow presents some of their favorite albums and songs that they heard throughout the year. Anything is eligible: LPs, reissues, songs from decades past. Below, find our writers highlighting 35 different releases that caught our attention from January to March of 2024.
Pinback - “Tres” (Ace Fu, 2001)
No one feels good, ever—at least, not since Pinback released “Tres” on their album Blue Screen Life in 2001. You’ve heard it since then: “the dawn of the internet age,” “the information age,” the age where everyone gets absorbed by their mirror image and starts crying about their feelings. But “Tres” is about my feelings, I know it when I hear it, the song’s waterlogged guitar loop burbling like a music box on the Titanic. “Another drop in the ocean…” Rob Crow warns, his thin voice fading like fishing line. It’s all as hopeless as I am. “There’s a definite feeling / buried down / wrecking itself, taking you with me.” When he sings this, I see the pit in my stomach. I see my phone’s black screen life rippling like silk, tempting me again. But when I’m in the bathtub, my brain never gets quiet; it’s doubtful, dusty. “Tres” has these qualities, too, but it treats them with more gentleness than I usually manage—like fear is pieces of sea glass or stardust, to be arranged in a treasure chest. I find “Tres” noble, so I’ve been letting it carry me off into its seaweed world all April. I’ve been having chocolate with rum raisin and inventing ways to float on top of fear, like Crowe does, like the satiny keyboard melody in “Tres,” which sounds like ballet slippers on lily pads. I could be a mermaid, I think, if I wasn’t so online. —Ashley Bardhan
“Tres” can be purchased at Pinback’s Bandcamp page.
bulletsbetweentongues - The Lights Never Lie (Ephyra, 2024)
Real skramz is back, baby. A new wave of screamo has the genre looking fresher than ever, buoyed by GOATs like Orchid, Jerome’s Dream, and City of Caterpillar reuniting for tours and new albums. Nuvolascura, Sugar Wounds, and Kaiba are steadfast contributors to the neo-skramz wave, and you can now count bulletsbetweentongues among them. What’s so interesting is their willingness to draw upon elements that may have been thumbed down upon in skramz’s heyday. Most notably is the Underoath/Christian hardcore elements that are prominent on The Lights Never Lie, straddling the line between A Day to Remember and Joshua Fit for Battle, like on “I Am With You Always.” It’s not merely genre reappraisal for some ironic kitsch spectacle, but a genuine effort to highlight how those bands had some nasty riffs. With this great debut album and a suitably cringy band name, they’re doing an excellent job living up to the classics. —Eli Schoop
The Lights Never Lie can be purchased at bulletsbetweentongues’ Bandcamp page.
Anode/Cathode - Punkanachrock (self-released, 2024 Reissue)
It was revelatory for me when I learned about Daigoretsu / The Fifth Column a few years ago. In the late Kato David Hopkins’ Rumors of Noizu, he mentions that this collective, which was started by a group of teenage friends, didn’t have a fixed membership and that anyone could use the name. They didn’t play for an audience, either, instead only performing amongst themselves and creating numerous tapes in the process. Founding member Onnyk appears on Anode/Cathode’s Punkanachrock, one of the best known releases in this realm. Recorded between 1975-1977, these tracks range from synth-punk noodling (“Tao Mao Pao, Rub Tub Dub”), early no-wave fuckery (“Collapsed Funk”), and blistering harsh noise (“Untitled”). The reissue features newly unearthed material, including an expanded version of “Man in the Moon,” which this time around made me think of bizarro Kate NV track deconstructed to its barest elements, squirmy and playful in equal measure. At the time, Onnyk considered “noise” to be “anything merely random, or maybe non-musical […] anything that doesn’t make sense.” Listening to these tracks makes clear how any sort of improvisation and lack of coherency makes sense in retrospect; the sloppy basslines, guitar skronks, and simple synth pulses converge into various forms of unbridled cacophony. It’s simple, endearing, and some of the rawest music from its time. —Joshua Minsoo Kim
Punkanachrock can be purchased at Diskono, Soundohm, and Meditations.
guervens - college dropout (Ukiuki Atama, 2024)
guervens is an artist in the proud tradition of prolific, mysterious Bandcamp natives like polarsmokemystic or XoArK, sporting a personal page littered with dozens of mixtapes, demo dumps, shitpost-y aliases, and absurdist cover art. Their music is predictably eclectic, ranging from your usual internet breakcore to blown-out trap beats to watery ambient soundscapes. college dropout, their latest release in a series of EPs for Japanese netlabel Ukiuki Atama, synthesizes a couple of these genre approaches into a suite of interconnected collages that spark with fluorescent mania. Penultimate movement “IV” is the highlight of the collection, a dizzying, polyrhythmic spiral of arpeggiations thrown into a blustering wind of stuttering CD-skip chords and beady squawks drenched in low-bitrate scuzz. The entropic mélange feels like the truest distillation of the personality that bridges all of guervens’s disparate musical interests; the effect is something akin to sonic jungle juice, a noxious concoction that’s averaged out its dozens of haphazardly measured constituent parts into a sugar-sweet, vaguely threatening, but compulsively drinkable mixture. Filling up your cup again and again is practically a guarantee; and, of course, it’s damn easy to get drunk off. —Maxie Younger
college dropout can be purchased at the Ukiuki Atama Bandcamp page.
archie - here, this is happening (ohhu, 2024)
If the entire history of Korean music is centered around the ability to bring different musical ideas together in a way that is both accessible and harmonious, then here, this is happening is the most Korean album of the year. You have “Lens,” a romantic café-ready R&B track that could accompany walks down the Han River. There’s “After Gazing Sun,” which is a shoegaze song that feels in line with the country’s other underground acts, though it throws in glossy synth atop the fuzz before transforming into dreamy ambience à la Ulla. “Lovers’ Hands” and “Alone in Tokyo” are equally intent on creating the same sort of juxtapositions, albeit with a supple guitar instrumental. Alone, these individual musical strands would feel chintzy, but together they transcend into a sentimentality that is comfortingly domestic. What is most impressive about here, this is happening is how all these songs come together to inform one another; a track like “Soon?” would be your typical stripped-down duet when heard on its own, but to hear it after the Midwest emo guitars on “Notes on Family” broadens your understanding of its sincerity. Best of all is “Sing Me to Sleep,” which tastefully allows reverberating synths to flit amid gentle vocals—it’s the best indie pop song this year. —Joshua Minsoo Kim
Here, This is Happening can be purchased at archie’s Bandcamp page.
AceMo - Moblu (self-released, 2024)
Raw sound. Sounds like: lighthouse in early morning fog. Emerging sleek noise like light passing over particulates. Exposing. Exposed. We say “sound collage,” we say “ambient music,” but we never seem to get around to saying “sound painting.” We say “soundpainting” sometimes—that gets into the kinda zone when talking around Moblu, about the new AceMo. There’s an odor of insistent emerging, a seeking nothing-wrong-ness in Walter Thompson’s wiggling generation of “soundpainting” that’s not at all antithetical to the New York bass plumb, the “Voices From the Deep” of Moblu. But “sound painting.” That sounds more stylus-based, an écriture with letters the size of beats and silence, writing and rewriting the club until it takes on a texture, stacking paint and beat so you can feel the passage of time and material in how you feel it. Listen, AceMo isn’t standing in front of an orchestra making gestures. He is not painting.
The sound does it. He makes the sound, sure, and moves it around and organizes it to sit a certain way, now echo now end. But he sets it free, or has set himself up to set it free. It is volatile and it is sliding. I think he has done this because each song has a desperate tangibility of memory, a specific notion of a time and place it first got heard. Sixth grade canteen lip balm breath. Summer music bumped from a passenger side window passing at rush hour. Your grandma’s favorite song. That dead pastor’s reedy tenor and the click of computer gears the classroom word processor used to make. I think AceMo has remembered all the sounds, or remembered that all sounds render memories. The musician or the genre or the album or the word “Moblu” are just the stylus, the motion to get back. —Frank Falisi
Moblu can be purchased at AceMo’s Bandcamp page.
Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet - “On the Horizon” (Palilalia, 2024)
In recorded form, Music for Four Guitars reads as grid-like, built on the tenets of short, repeating melodies laid forth in classical minimalism (and performed solo by Bill Orcutt, then layered later). But live, the piece transforms into a living being, evolving into new shapes as Orcutt’s tone melds with the different approaches to guitar of his quartet-mates Wendy Eisenberg, Ava Mendoza, and Shane Parish. “On the Horizon” exemplifies the group’s fluidity: The track finds each member split off from a dusty looped phrase at the top, meandering into a series of slowed, meditative melodies that pare down and stretch out Orcutt’s originals, eventually swallowing it all up and spitting it out in a fit of raucousness. Within musical structure, there’s always room to play, and “On the Horizon” shows us how to let loose. —Vanessa Ague
“On the Horizon” can be heard at various streaming services.
Vijay Iyer, Tyshawn Sorey, Linda Oh - Compassion (ECM, 2024)
Since Manfred Eicher founded ECM in 1969, the label has become a greenhouse of carefully curated a-e-s-t-h-e-t-i-c jazz. Vijay Iyer doesn’t deal with aesthetic. He speaks in politics through piano, crafting instrumentals about racial injustice in America or the Flint water crisis, leaving the pretty (empty) ambient jazz to others. There is no shortage of piano trios on ECM trying to leave their own unique imprint on the overcrowded trio format, but that comes naturally to Iyer. The pianist first came into prominence for his ACT trio work with Stephan Crump and Marcus Gilmore that produced Historicity and Accelerando, formidable albums that made the case that hip-hop-adjacent acts like Flying Lotus and M.I.A. could be part of the jazz repertoire, before he moved to ECM.
Compassion is his second album with his new trio consisting of bassist Linda May Han Oh and drummer Tyshawn Sorey, and it reveals its pleasures instantly, and is continually rewarding with each new immersion. Sorey, a genius long-form composer that moonlights as a drummer (or is it the other way around?), is deeply sympathetic to Iyer’s cause, forming the heartbeat behind Iyer’s incredibly nimble fingers. It’s Linda Oh, who hadn’t recorded with Iyer prior to 2021’s Uneasy, who is the MVP of the trio: her basslines alternate between accenting Iyer’s explorations to conversing with them, offering sharp ripostes and witty jabs as she lays claim to being one of the best bassists around. I was initially wary to hear Iyer creating a new trio when Uneasy dropped because I loved his old trio work so much, but Compassion makes it clear that he can test out new players to forge new sounds. —Marshall Gu
Compassion can be purchased at the ECM website.
Eva-Maria Houben + John Hudak - Paloma Wind (LINE, 2024)
Paloma Wind is one of the year’s most mystifying albums, and it makes sense given the uncompromising vision of the artists involved. John Hudak is, among other things, a field recordist who is uninterested in any semblance of purity. Some of his most arresting pieces feature mangled field recordings that turn ordinary landscapes into cryptic terrain. His collaboration with Merzbow considers everyday sounds as a source of disorienting noise. In 1998, he released a track called “Winter Rain Watching the Sky From My Window” and it arrives as little more than austere, glitching electronics. Composer Eva-Maria Houben has numerous works that are simple, spacious, and long, providing opportunities to lean into the very minute qualities of a given instrument (she has released music on Edition Wandelweiser). And while her albums have featured the sounds of nature, some have been more deliberately focused on environments: 2013’s Landscapes contains one composition for “organ and train,” while Seascape from the same year is 75 minutes of water in various states of movement.
What immediately stands out about Paloma Wind is that it feels like a decidedly different sort of album than the ones that either artist typically makes. “Paloma Wind 1” has field recordings that are garbled and repeated. There are multiple rhythms constantly overlapping: a shuffled movement, gong-like bells, the patter of water, various birds and insects. It creates a sound collage that allows for different layers of perception: the more you focus on an individual facet, the more you realize it is intermingling with another one.
“Paloma Wind 2” is more spare but no less interesting. The bell-like sounds appear again and dot the landscape, and it sounds like little more than having your recording device capture a relatively still environment. Concentrating on the hum of the air is fascinating: it requires effort to focus on its quiet buzz, and doing so magnifies the gravity of every other sound’s kinetic energy. It feels like all this sound is rushing into your ears.
The following two tracks are illusory, causing one to reflect on their differences from previous tracks. “Paloma Wind 3” sounds like everything is recorded from across a giant industrial space, and that sense of distance makes it easy to revel in the way every single note reverberates. “Paloma Wind 4” sounds a lot like what we heard in the second track but clearer: the noise floor is higher, the bells and creaks are louder in the mix, and even the typical field recordings pop out. It is simultaneously the most easy to decipher—you get a real sense of the clatter being made in real-time—and most deceptively beguiling. There’s a sort of magic to the way the chimes ring out, and you feel how weighty it is when the album fades to silence and you contend with the sounds in your own immediate surroundings. —Joshua Minsoo Kim
Paloma Wind can be purchased at the LINE Bandcamp page.
Loog - CountyBoat (self-released, 2024)
The sort of Jersey club music that thrives on SoundCloud usually doesn’t lend itself to the album format. It’s optimized to grab your attention off the rip, firing off as many gunshots, bass-blasted kicks, and recognizable cartoon samples as it takes to keep you from scrolling through. Though Philadelphia producer Loog adheres to the scene’s raw fidelity and fragmented song structures, he favors breezier arrangements that neatly slot into full-length projects. His latest long-player, CountyBoat, is a warm, minimalist affair: Dreamy Rhodes chords, canned strings, and clipped syllables float above ceaseless sub-bass patterns, often reminding me of RP Boo’s more impressionistic cuts. Tracks like “Rock” and “Just Keep” are meditative highlights, decorating ambient loops with the minimum percussion needed to get a groove going. That said, I can’t stop returning to “Praise the Lord,” CountyBoat’s liveliest cut. Layering gospel choir harmonies, electric guitar riffs, calls to prayer, and that Pastor Shirley Caesar clip that makes the rounds every Thanksgiving, it’s a euphoric study of worship music that’s both hilarious and sincere. Hearing the tambourine loop drop into the mix about halfway through feels like a religious experience every time I spin the track. —Jude Noel
CountyBoat can be heard at various streaming services.
Container - Yacker (Alter, 2024)
This is the Container album to end all Container albums. Ren Schofield’s work under the moniker has always had a primal energy, but they’ve never been this pure in their delivery of unwieldy electronic carnage. “Abrasion” begins with a hip-thrusting groove that’s just a straight beat for 168 seconds—there’s slight variations in the kick, but the joy otherwise comes from hearing short bursts of noise accent all the calamity. “Eraser” sounds like a track from EVOL’s Headshrinker was thrown into a blender and came out as a party-ready rager. “Onion” feels like the soundtrack to driving your car into a brick wall. This is Alan Vega’s Station without the vocals, this is the sound of someone min-maxing electro-indebted synth-punk. It takes about three seconds to understand what any of these songs are doing, and the thrill never dies. —Joshua Minsoo Kim
Yacker can be purchased at the Alter Bandcamp page.
Luciano Maggiore + Louie Rice - Whistle Posse (901 Editions, 2024)
When a sculptor works in a given material, their object is to exploit its inherent properties. Take steel for instance: each curve, flex, combination, and successive act of forming is determined by way of the material’s physical characteristics.¹ How does it want to be formed? What procedures does steel suggest to the sculptor? The sculptor works in a manner consistent with the natural state of the material. As artists, we adhere ourselves to the material’s singular qualities, its otherness; we attempt to act in accordance with its topography, its form, its construction.
Sounds are no different: they have a form just like any physical material. And yet, very few musicians work with a sound’s inherent properties. Most bring with them a series of assumptions about how music should be, whether the result of generic norms and codes, concessions towards specific modes of dissemination, or a cynical adherence to the market’s expectations. These assumptions about sound so often determine their working procedures. It’s in part why so much music today seems to do the exact same thing. To quote Amacher:
“composing usually amounts to procedures of simply rearranging and modifying existent musical figures, that is other men’s tunes & giving them a personalized framework in time. (‘notes without ears’).”
It is as if we’ve turned off our ears! But how surprising is this really? As artists, our work in sound mediates the social world. In this moment of near total desocialization, is it so shocking that we would treat our materials so callously, with such a lack of empathy, ethic, exchange, or receptivity?
I write this because it was with great pleasure that I encountered Luciano Maggiore and Louie Rice’s Whistle Posse, an exceptional work that brings to the surface the worlds teeming within each material, inside every single sound. Scored only for two sounds—whistles and a synthesizer presumably producing a low kick through a subwoofer speaker—Rice and Maggiore work with absolute focus as they attend to the myriad sonic possibilities contained in those two sounds. In the process, they make clear how much can emerge when we commit ourselves fully to our materials.
In “WP #4 (whistles, synthesizer, subwoofer),” Maggiore and Rice’s two sounds make contact within a continuously shuffling grid. First sounding in unison, the whistles and the subby synth are gradually pulled apart with very slight rhythmic modifications. The perceptual force of this push and pull around the regular rhythmic figure of the kick is nothing short of incredible. In a way, the rhythmic character of “WP #4 (whistles, synthesizer, subwoofer)” and “WP #6 (whistles, synthesizer, subwoofer)” presages the perceptual aspect of this work: in this instance, perceptual listening is, in fact, a consequence of time. By extending proportions beyond our sense of the musically correct (which we know to be nothing more than years of cultural disciplining), Maggiore and Rice move the listener out of a purely musical register and into a perceptual one. This extended proportion sets the listener in motion: we begin to hear various transformations occurring within the material. I heard: a kind of sonic smearing, high frequency melodies emerging out of a blur of sound, rich harmonic content, complex tonal shifts and phasing as kick and whistle made contact.
Sound is infinitely aspectual—it contains so much. In fact, every single sound contains this world and others if only we would take the trouble to listen. I was heartened to hear Maggiore and Rice’s Whistle Posse: no matter what we can rest assured that somewhere the pair is listening with utter focus, presumably in the process of making something new, magical, and strange. —Dominic Coles
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¹Of course we can imagine a piece that does the opposite! In this scenario, the artist would seek out formal procedures that work against the properties of the material. I can’t help but feel that at a certain point the artist might realize: another material would be better suited to their work process?
Whistle Posse can be purchased at the 901 Editions Bandcamp page.
Reishu Fukushima + Satoshi Fukushima - Inter-Others (Experimental Rooms, 2024)
My appreciation for the shakuhachi is rooted in its ability to transform an entire space into one of immediate quietude. The celebrated recordings of Kohachiro Miyata are striking for how the clarity of his playing illuminates the purity of silence around him. So too is this true of Frank Denyer’s works, whose albums on Another Timbre understand how the instrument’s delicate tones can readily intermingle with other spare sounds. Inter-Others, a collaboration between Reishu Fukushima and his son Satoshi, does not provide time for such reflection in the same way. Instead, the latter processes the former’s shakuhachi playing on a computer in real-time, conjuring misty landscapes of diaphanous ambience; there is rarely any time where some sort of sound isn’t heard.
Opener “#33” begins normally, but soon takes on a buzzing pulse that leads to a relentless kick. That thwack sounds so dry that it feels confounding amidst all the pretty, airy sounds. But as it continues, it eventually feels familiar and quotidian. Strangely, the most obviously digital sound here is the source of an everyday beauty you would find in a typical shakuhachi performance. Inter-Others always finds these backdoors to display the shakuhachi’s various properties. “One” sees Reishu’s playing repeatedly layered, and the fluttering is highlighted whenever juxtaposed with the wavering sounds that are digitally produced. “Theme and Variations” is more about timbre and brings the meditative tones of the shakuhachi to the fore through sustained notes. “Improvisation in different time-spaces” is the most traditional of the bunch, and despite its relative busyness, feels both resplendent and introspective because every digital flourish is directed towards making the shakuhachi sound like the unexpectedly magical instrument it is. —Joshua Minsoo Kim
Inter-Others can be purchased at the Experimental Rooms Bandcamp page.
Chief Keef & Mike WiLL Made-It - “Dirty Nachos” (RBC, 2024)
Effortlessly cool. It’s easy to forget that Keef is an OG now—such is his grip on the zeitgeist despite being wholly uninterested in playing the industry game anymore. We are still waiting for Almighty So 2, but when he’s putting out projects like this, can you blame his tardiness? [Editor’s Note: Almighty So 2 came out before Joshua Minsoo Kim finished this issue]. Two minutes is all the legend needs over a sturdy Mike WiLL beat, casually flexing while hinting at doing tax evasion. As reliably as he will push back release dates, so too will Keef give us heat to tide us over. —Eli Schoop
“Dirty Nachoes” can be heard at various streaming services.
Cindy Lee - “Demon Bitch” (CCQSK, 2024)
Unlike most artists in 2024, Pat Flegel dropped the latest album from his Cindy Lee project—the two hour plus, 32-song Diamond Jubilee—without advance singles or a press campaign, and most importantly, without making it available on the most notorious music subscription services. Instead, fans can stream the album for free on YouTube, or send Pat $30 for .wav files through his clunky yet stylish Geocities site. This kind of “direct to consumer” transaction is the closest online analog to handing an artist $5 for a 7” at the merch table directly after their set, and that’s a beautiful thing. Whether it’s safe to call the moment of a self-released album receiving a 9.1 on Pitchfork an In Rainbows Mark 2.0 is yet to be seen, but it’s painfully clear there has been a growing dissatisfaction within the global communities of artists, indie labels, and listeners for years. And just like Pat did with the sound of his deeply influential band Women in the early 2000s, he has once again pointed a new way forward.
Born in Calgary, Alberta but based in North Carolina since 2020, Flegel is the brilliantly autodidactic singer, guitarist, and producer behind the gender-bending Cindy Lee project. Due to his frustration with record labels, digital distributors, and other money-grubbing middle-people, he self-released this massively ambitious collection on March 27th, 2024—after mentioning it in an interview with Gimmie Gimmie Gimmie Zine at least four years earlier.
I’ve listened to Diamond Jubilee front to back over 10 times now and I’m not even close to understanding all of its mysteries. “Demon Bitch” is the song I’ve chosen to highlight here simply because it seems to encompass everything that Flegel does so uniquely. Singing in both his traditionally masculine and feminine registers, he describes himself as a “loudmouth punk,” “foolish clown,” and “demon bitch speaking in tongues” before launching into one of the album’s many gorgeous, emotionally resonant guitar solos. Cindy Lee doesn’t need words to get the feeling across, but these kinds of vague mea culpas are peppered all throughout the lyrics of Diamond Jubilee. I can only speculate based on what Pat has said in past interviews, since he’s not doing them at the moment, but he seems to be going through some kind of personal reckoning. From what I’ve read, he’s thinking about the ways he’s lived recklessly over the years, not taking enough care of his mental health, and how that was reflected in the noisier, abrasive ends of his musical output.
Diamond Jubilee is melancholy in tone, but it’s also the happiest and most emotionally centered collection of songs Pat Flegel has ever put to his name, even/especially if that name is Cindy Lee. It feels honest in a way that’s contemporary, even if some of the music is four years old, or if it sounds decades older. It feels like the album we need in our lives right now, an honest expression of an entire person, released in a manner that can inspire and empower us to be the same way in the years to come. —Jesse Locke
Diamond Jubilee can be purchased at Cindy Lee’s website.
Rat Heart - U Can See Alex Park From Ere / Picky Eater (Modern Love, 2024)
Tom Boogizm reduces his Rat Heart project to its most unassailable melodic sensibilities here. The A-side is all hypnagogic sophisti-pop, utilizing the entire world’s supply of reverb on his guitar, voice, and sax so that all you get is woozy daydreaming. His guitar playing is soft and romantic, positioning him in the realm of introspective songwriters like Mk.gee and ML Buch, while the gooey textures harken back to Jai Paul’s wobbly confessionals. There are nice surprises, too: field recordings of children grant the song some nostalgic lift, and harsh tones highlight the pain of sensitivity. For five minutes, you’re left drifting in thought, and then it comes to a halt with a whirring bass synth. The B-side is lighter, all fluttering guitar melodies punctuated by bluesy notes—these moments transform the pained singing into something beyond self-flagellation. Boogizm constantly stretches the limits of how sweet his music sounds before sounding overwrought, tempering himself to keep things grounded. I’ve been telling people it’s a beautifully crude midpoint between Graham Lambkin’s “Abersayne” and John Mayer. —Joshua Minsoo Kim
U Can See Alex Park From Ere / Picky Eater is currently unavailable to purchase.
Lil White Bitch - Crack Up at the Funeral (Sweet Wreath, 2024)
I recognize that riding for an artist named Lil White Bitch puts me squarely in the crosshairs of a “Goop on Ya Grinch”-style dunk; so be it, I like the music. The moniker refers to a shadowy maybe-collective of two or more Birmingham, Alabama-based artists with a predilection for stop-start rhythmic tension that casts an unearthly glow over their mercurial breakbeat grooves. Crack Up at the Funeral, their debut for Sweet Wreath, heightens this tension to blockbuster-level drama. Tracks fizzle and warp between fragmented passages as though communicating over tin cans and string, dropping lines mid-inquiry to explore interludes that loop suddenly back to their starting points. A distinct off-kilter humor animates these compositional twists: “Cosmic Bowling” transitions between segments with a toilet flush; “Bumby” overrides its patient intro with a hard cut to a plodding MIDI bassline before upscaling into a beat anchored around a clammy, warbling synth moan. The album is propelled by roguish insouciance, harnessing the lurching adrenaline thrill of laying train tracks directly in front of its own wheels; every new measure is a rise, climax, and fall unto itself. —Maxie Younger
Crack Up at the Funeral can be purchased at the Sweet Wreath Bandcamp page.
Future - I Be U (Epic / A1 / Freebandz, 2014)
Before I had access to my own mp3 player, I would take pride in getting lost in whatever was playing when my mom picked me up from school. Before 2013, I lived in Olathe, Kansas—the local stations primarily played pop songs (that have much more character than the ones now) and Queen-adjacent classics. My understanding of what rap music could be was essentially caricatural; my step-father occasionally played Bell Biv Divoe’s “Poison” and DJ Jazzy Jeff’s “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.” TLDR: Hip-Hop meant niggas with flattops and spray paint.
My family’s decision to move to Prince George’s County, Maryland, was very spur-of-the-moment; my grandmother had just had a heart attack, and my mother insisted we should be closer to her in case it developed into something worse. At the time, PG County was finding itself in a national limelight of sorts. Its rapid economic growth, along with migration trends, deemed it as a Black American utopia. Culturally, it was richer than ever, since the suburbs were influenced by the formerly black, always vibrant Washington D.C. It was the place to live for Black families who had a little money and wanted to replicate scare quotes The American Dream without having to deal with scare-quotes whiteness.
Things developed in the typical child-has-trouble-changing-schools fashion, but mostly because I was Black and everyone around me now was Black and I didn’t know shit about what it meant to be Black. Before my first day of school, my stepdad took me to the barbershop and literally had me get a flattop! It was fucked up. Luckily enough, my peers heartwarmingly nudged me in the right direction—the OSIRIS’s were switched with Jordans, I adopted PG County slang, and I locked the fuck in when it was time to ride in the backseat of my mom’s car.
Future was my first love. “Turn Off the Lights” was the first Future song I heard, and it was the craziest shit I couldn’t wrap my head around. Promises of endless affection were interspersed between quick flashes of luxurious flexes. As I began crushing for the first time, I was being affirmed by laser synths and offerings of diamond accessories. Being Black started to feel more like an oddity, but in a way that made me feel like Black love was as whimsical as the extraterrestrial. Future’s ability to shift culture by forming supernovas out of the Black mundane made him so great to me.
I only heard “I Be U” for the first time a few months ago. I consider Future to be one of, if not my favorite, artists of all time, so this might sound crazy. In my defense, his discography is so deep, and a good portion of it was released when my access to Future was limited to the backseat of my mom’s BMW.
“I Be U” is a worthwhile deep cut. At the start, a muffled pad flangs around before a light shines on center-stage Future, confidently warbling out a confessional letter as if there’s no audience around. When the drums come in, they enter as background dancers, filling up empty space while egging on his charmingly romantic escapades. Scenes of drinks on trays and hotel rooms in Venice set the mood before the drums cut out and let him shoot his shot. He sings “I’ll be there / I’ll be you,” a gorgeous commitment to love, the feeling of wanting your partner’s struggles and victories as your own. It all sounds like a score of a sci-fi film. “I Be U” is why I fell in love with Future forever ago. —Rae-Aila Crumble
“I Be U” can be heard at various streaming services.
Alessandro Bosetti - FasFari (Xong, 2024)
Bosetti’s characteristically evocative extended vocal techniques continue apace with FasFari, an 11-track LP from the phenomenal record label Xong. Each song feels like a satisfying experiment. “Fas” has a drone that sets the foundation for the track as flitting mouth sounds, hisses, and whisper-whistles float above it; as the six-minute opener, it stands as a shining example of how much can be done with the human voice. “Facies” features voices that are on the precipice of forming a melody, and they cast a moody atmosphere over the track as hiccups and drawn-out tones abound (the latter has the exact demenaor you’d expect from a hypnotist). Voices sound like flies across “Afasia,” they create sacred harmonies throughout “Factus,” and they arrive as disruptive yelps on “Fari,” a track that is otherwise a familiar exercise in minimalism. It all ends with “Facile,” a similarly austere exercise in the overlapping of various syllables, though the longer it goes on, each noise starts to feel absurd. As always, Bosetti understands the ridiculousness of the human voice, both in the scale of how much it can convey, and how silly an instrument it really is. —Joshua Minsoo Kim
FasFari can be purchased at Soundohm.
Jlin - “Summon” (Planet Mu, 2024)
I have to imagine that Jlin is aiming to be a horror movie composer with “Summon.” This is a better version of the recent Candyman remake: tension and release juxtaposed amidst the maddening clack of a tambourine and string section. Jlin’s ability to summon footwork from the most unlikely of instruments is stunning: with a combination of ingenuity and grit, she makes the music fit into her paradigm. You can almost feel Tony Todd ever so menacingly creeping towards you, your life becoming forfeit. Once again, Jlin warps reality to suit a vibrational moment, serving as lord and master of higher sounds. —Eli Schoop
“Summon” can be purchased at the Planet Mu Bandcamp page.
Kavain Wayne Space & XT - YESYESPEAKERSYES (Feedback Moves, 2024)
In a recent interview I conducted with Seymour Wright, he noted that footwork involves the presence of a bass frequency that appears “as a zone, like a carpet.” Go to any footwork show in Chicago and you’ll see how once the music starts, the venue immediately transforms into a playful battleground, one where the local footwork dancers come to show their chops. Kavain Wayne Space aka RP Boo’s music with XT (saxophonist Wright and drummer Paul Abbott) is a peculiar beast because it proposes an interesting idea: what happens when the all-consuming world of footwork is ruptured by the sounds of improvising musicians? It is thankfully less “Party Music Meant to Entertain Stuffy Art Folks” than it sounds. It is clear, though, that this is not the sort of dance music that immediately envelops; the presence of a drum kit and sax change the tone, as the sounds from physical instruments collide with the synthetic in a disorienting manner.
What happens over the course of this album is an abstraction of what is known and unknown: RP Boo’s skittering synth pulses brush up against Abbott’s drum rolls, and there are points when the layered drums turn everything into pure timbre and texture. Amusingly, I’m not always sure who is playing those hi-hats. Wright is a more obvious presence, playing sax stabs that feel appropriate for footwork’s characteristic stuttering. But to muddy the proceedings, YESYESPEAKERSYES seems to begin with a sample of Diamond Terrifier’s “Adamantine,” a track from 2012 that folded saxophone into footwork. Check the credits: Abbott is credited with “real and imaginary drums,” Wright with “actual and potential saxophone.” When these three come together, they conjure a cycloning mass of noise that leaves you dizzy. —Joshua Minsoo Kim
YESYESPEAKERSYES can be purchased at the Feedback Moves Bandcamp page.
Lolina - Unrecognisable (Relaxin, 2024)
“Deconstructed club” always felt fine as figurative language but maybe minor compared to a more tangible problem no less unimaginable: what happens when they destroy the clubs? Unrecognisable picks up Lolina’s speculative(ish) fiction about weaponized buildings, bombed-out London, and dubbed-up dialogue. It starts with the rebirth, a pitch-damned voice announcing “From the ashes of Lolina and Inga Copeland, rising like a heartbeat, meet Geneva Heat and Paris Hell” and proceeds over nine songs, part monologue, part diatribe. Lolina plays both characters and pens them—and the entirety of the album—through her SK-200, a sampling keyboard with 1.62 seconds of sampling time. Flanging and fucked like digital rubble, like an internet, interactive graphic novel, the SK-200 becomes to Lolina like the Steinway CD 318 to Glenn Gould, like free indirect discourse to Austen. It’s an essential constraint, one liberated by a total exhausting of its possibilities. It’s like a body in the club, bending through space until every pose and gesture is achieved, until all that’s left is switching voices. Variably invoking Mica Levi, Tirzah and the ruinous bridge between The Death of Rave and Watching Dead Empires in Decay, it’s not reductive to say “it’s all Lolina.” If she deconstructs her, it’s because she refuses to be only one in a sound. Which is the why of rave and club. Which is why “Dejavu,” a partial flashback to a past is worth being speculative for. Which is why the fiction, characterization, voicing, resisting, goes on. —Frank Falisi
Unrecognisable can be purchased at Lolina’s Bandcamp page.
meth. - SHAME (Prosthetic, 2024)
The flowers and smiles in the promo photos for meth.’s new album SHAME are a misdirection. As ever, the throbbing pain and uneasy bleakness at the center of their music is unrelenting. The palette and texture of the songs are familiar: motion-sick metalcore riffs and martial percussion ooze with discordant noise and the ghostly screeches. But the seven songs on SHAME are among their most disorienting and unsettling—the sort of music that shreds up your inner ear with static and noise. The crushing sound is fitting—as vocalist Seb Alvarez uses the occasion to grapple with some truly heavy subject matter: the specter of addiction, the lifelong struggle of grappling with your mental health, and the lingering trauma of a religious upbringing. On the title track, he screams about the creeping weight of the void as “the son of a preacher who never bites his tongue.” His lyrics are opaque and unsettling, another layer of these songs of anguish and turmoil, wrung out of a band who’ve never been afraid to push themselves further into the pain. —Colin Joyce
SHAME can be heard at Prosethetic’s Bandcamp page.
Prize Horse - Under Sound (New Morality Zine, 2024)
I’m not one to put on Red House Painters’ Down Colorful Hill anymore; it’s too drab and morose, like a reminder of a time when wallowing in self-pity could be a confused form of comfort. It’s impressive, then, to hear an album that recalls Mark Kozelek’s early years without being tediously depressive. Prize Horse’s Under Sound has a delightfully queasy sheen, every second filled with a Deftones-like guitar tone as a conduit for punishing melancholy. Jake Beitel’s vocals are crucial: every word is stretched out and sluggishly delivered, as if he’s lying on his couch waiting for something to happen. It makes each lurching drum beat feel more piercing, each brooding bassline more heavy. These songs hit you and feel like everything and nothing—it is the sound of wandering aimlessly, of being content with the smallest reminders of your existence. At times, a guitar riff will rise above the noise and be a momentary relief. —Joshua Minsoo Kim
Under Sound can be purchased at the New Morality Zine Bandcamp page and at Prize Horse’s Bandcamp page.
Romance - Endless Love (Ecstatic, 2024)
I’ve been thinking about gauze and haze and perfume’s silage. I like the way your lingering is atmospheric, like our longing got catalyzed amid breathable stuff. I like the idea of writing “Romance’s new release” because it makes it feel like an entity—a designation—is making pop music. I’m still romantic about how music is always happening in the air even when we don’t hear it, how maybe it’s a gradual corralling of everything instead of a spontaneous composing of something that attunes us. Because then you’re like Diana, like Lionel, Mariah, or Luther—not something losable so much as conjurable. With a nickel in the jukebox. With a jewel case or wax paths. With a midnight mp3 binge, downloading folders full of copied pop because maybe one of them has your smell. Romance means love song as pH. Romance says Endless Love is an “epic slow-mo power ballad” which I think is so romantic. Because “epic” goes all the way back to Aristotle and contrasts with “tragic.” Because where tragedy seeks the singularity of constraint (“one revolution around the sun”) epic poetry has no limits of time and no trouble poking into stories and smells in the margins. Spiral and tincture, swizzle and undo. Romance makes us endless. I’ve been thinking about the clarity that comes from sensing where in the room your body was. —Frank Falisi
Endless Love can be purchased at the Ecstatic Bandcamp page.
Weston Olencki & Laura Cocks - Music for Two Flutes (Hideous Replica, 2024)
Ceòl meadhonach is Gaelic for “middle music” and refers to a style of bagpiping that sits between ceòl mòr (“big music”; typically complex) and ceòl beag (“little music”; typically straightforward and befitting popular dances and marches). It is strange to hear Weston Olencki’s composition of the same name and wrestle with its meaning as there are no actual bagpipes present (as the album title indicates, he and Laura Cocks play the flute). One of the most distinct features of the instrument is the low, humming drone that appears an octave below the rest of the tones, acting as a steady foundation for the rest of the playing. What Olencki and Cocks do is different: the notes they play are usually abrasive and sustained and uninterested in maintaining this range in pitch. It is impressively immense, however, and sounds like they’re mustering every bit of lung power to project these tones as loud as possible. At times, it is as if the only thing they wish to do is recreate that low drone, except magnified to monumental proportions. At others, a melodic sliver will arise and feel unexpectedly pretty. The most striking passages are when the two are paired to create the semblance of malfunctioning audio, like one’s computer has frozen and left an eruption of cacophonous noise.
SLUB, composed by Cocks, is an equally intense showcase of their strength. I listen to all the heaving, all the squawks they wrestle out of their flutes, and start worrying for their lungs. It’s a much more delicate number, lower in volume but more active in the way that every little noise takes on a percussive role—and it’s not like they’re filling this up with key clicks and tongue rams either. Their playing takes on a deeply emotional tenor; at one point, we hear a flute quietly squirming as Cocks sounds like she’s gasping for air. It’s an evocative showcase of extended vocal techniques, one where the overlap in sounds—the humanness of the instrumentation, and the actual sound of the humans bringing it together—results in something hyperreal. —Joshua Minsoo Kim
Music for Two Flutes can be purchased at the Hideous Replica Bandcamp page.
Morton Feldman (perf. by Ensemble Avantgarde) - Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello (MDG, 2024)
One might think that a composer who spent years writing music with complete disregard for traditional development, melody, harmony, rhythm, and even volume would eventually hit diminishing returns. Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello proves otherwise. It’s the last piece Morton Feldman published before he passed from pancreatic cancer. PVVC is kindred to Piano and String Quartet (also with viola and cello), except the piano has been reduced to whispered half-motifs. And like all non-solo Feldman, it is not recorded nearly enough because the intense concentration required on all its performers, plus the telepathy required between them to navigate Feldman’s constantly-changing time signatures. So thank you, Ensemble Avantgarde, for this. The strings burst together in strange clusters (they sound more often like bells than strings), arriving arhythmically against the piano’s shore. With the volume turned down low per Feldman’s instructions, the results feel intimate: swelling, pulsing, breathing. Tough it out until the end and you’ll be greeted with a minute or so without them, only a piano that eventually gives out from broken heart syndrome without the people that have been playing with it for so long. I often wonder how many more of these one-movement, hour-long, ppp pieces Feldman might have composed if he didn’t die in 1987. But then I think about how many butterflies there are in captivity. Thousands, I’d wager, waiting to be heard. —Marshall Gu
Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello can be heard at various streaming services.
Drippin So Pretty & xaviersobased - “Flex Dis Hard” (self-released, 2024)
Over the past decade, Drippin So Pretty has amassed an impressive Rolodex of colleagues among cloud rap’s eccentric fringe, dropping solid collabs with dudes like Lil Peep, P2THEGOLDMA$K, Black Kray, and ATL Smook that display a chameleonic ability to compliment his featured artist’s style. It was just a matter of time before he cut his teeth on the nascent jerk rap scene—surprisingly, doing so has resulted in his best output since GothBoiClique’s heyday. February’s “Famous,” which blended kitschy synth arpeggios and effortlessly hooky flows, would’ve been on my shortlist for inclusion in this post if I didn’t like “Flex Dis Hard” even more. Recorded with Xaviersobased, the latter is all gloom and grime, with phlegmy saw synths piercing 808 sludge. The two emcees groan and sigh their way through the mire as if sinking into quicksand, stunting watches and B.B. Simon belts as they’re slowly sucked into oblivion. For 120 seconds, gravity’s pull feels noticeably more pronounced. —Jude Noel
“Flex Dis Hard” can be heard at various streaming services.
squillo - IT’S XOLD OUTSIDE (self-released, 2024)
squillo’s IT’S XOLD OUTSIDE is relentless. It’s filled with the unconcerned cacophony that defined the rapper’s previous releases, but transcends any perceivable gimmick by having production that more deliberately meshes with his vocals. On releases like Nuxlear and Venom, tracks would often sound like he was simply rapping atop blown-out bass, the short runtimes unable to salvage the suspicious feeling that he was a one-trick pony. And while Cool Mint and Punch Bros were exciting projects, they mostly revealed that he was a livelier presence when collaborating with others. IT’S XOLD OUTSIDE proves he can hold his own, and its first two tracks immediately announce his growth. “CHOPPA” has flashy carnival synths that dot the track, offering textural and emotional variety amid the sampled growls and rumbling bass—his guttural voice is elegantly offset. It’s a nice contrast with “STFU,” where he doubles down on the aggression, his voice buried in the beat as to feel like a two-pronged assault when they blow up in your face. “I’m tired of this shit,” he sings before delivering a short melodic taunt.
Even when squillo provides a full-out assault, there’s a giddiness to what is actually happening. “Yo” is less than a minute long and a ball of pure energy; its rapid synth flurries and brutal synth bass hit hard, but they mask the fact that his delivery regularly slips into an amusing nonchalance (the classic “plugg!” sample finds a slick sparring partner in squillo’s tossed-off “yoooo”). That’s the general appeal of these tracks: that despite their monolithic feel, little details abound. The flute on “SLAUGHTERHOUSE” is hilariously meditative for how much the synth bass flagellates, and his voice across “HAVE YOU EVER MIXED” teeters between death metal growls and a cartoonish hurl. Centerpiece “Lockdown” is the longest track here, and doesn’t see him switch up his flow so much as change his voice, moving from a conversational anger to a ferocious yell. It’s a nice summation of IT’S XOLD OUTSIDE’s success: more than ever, squillo understands the art of restraint. —Joshua Minsoo Kim
It’s Xold Outside can be heard at various streaming services.
Otyken - “Belief” (self-released, 2023)
There’s sometimes nothing more fun than being out of your element, and Otyken use this to their advantage. Assisted by TikTok, YouTube and some high-profile live performances, the Siberian band have arrived on the global stage over the past few years, with a stated mission to promote folklore and languages from groups like the Chulym Tatar and Khakas peoples by employing traditional sounds – jaw harp, komuz, throat singing, leather drums – in ostentatious pop songs geared toward a wider listener base. Their slower, more contemplative output works well as modernized folk music, but I’m most impressed by high-energy tracks like “Belief” and “Genesis,” which make me think of industrial bands like Ministry and Front 242; I hear it in these songs’ unrestricted creative energy, the way they manage their controlled chaos underneath an impulsive vocal style that can touch on both singing and rapping without being either, and their structure of interlocking a series of unconventional sounds to build thumping, immediate bangers. In the video for “Belief,” Otyken throw a “rave party” across the river from a large city. String plucks rattle the camera, and eventually some dudes wearing puffers, jeans and sneakers hop on a bus to come join the band in the mix. You’re encouraged to appreciate the contrast.
Otyken has been many people’s ostensible first encounter with Indigenous Siberian folk art, so the thoughtful listener’s first instinct might be to wonder how these local artists’ work has kept an international audience in mind – and how the audience has minded its own distance. Assembled, produced and managed by the non-indigenous director of an ethnography museum in Krasnoyarsk and bearing a keen sense for the art of viral surprise, the band’s members are clearly intentional about their image as ambassadors.¹ “It’s hard to perceive folk music without visualizing it,” noted lead singer Azyan in Vogue earlier this month; their videos and live shows present their heavily stylized instruments, dancing, (subtitled) language and attire as a complete package. YouTube comments often split the difference between mystified awe (“I have no idea what's going on but I'm addicted to the energy this group is putting out there”) and cross-cultural appreciation (in a quick scroll, I see Serbian, Mexican, and Cherokee fans showing love, plus many proud Russians). Personally, I look forward to being befuddled by the promised Xzibit remix of “Belief.”
I suspect the biggest potential hurdle for the Tone Glow readership apprehending this band will not be the language barrier, or even the style of music being performed, but the overall sound and presentation of their records: big, polished, vaguely electronic, proudly professional. As with anything positioned as “world music,” some reservations regarding how Otyken’s work is exhibited are likely warranted, given its origins as an outside ethnography project and the threatened position of indigenous Siberians in Russia generally. The band’s marriage of traditional instrumentation and cinematic, EDM-ish production reminds me of Lindsey Stirling: a violinist, dancer, and America’s Got Talent contestant whose well-choreographed wielding of old kinds of performance could only have blown up in the newer context of online video, and a favorite of every middle-school orchestra teacher trying to convey the coolness of bowed instruments to a perhaps unreceptive crowd. But although I find Stirling’s crossover approach pretty gimmicky and sterile, I like Otyken’s music.² By emerging out of an unfamiliar background with such an assertive sound and image, they, like many great pop musicians, end up leading their audience’s tastes instead of following them. —H.D. Angel
~~
¹Recent events amid the Russia-Ukraine war have put Otyken in an uneasy position politically: sanctions blocked their PayPal account, and an invitation to perform in the opening ceremony of the 2022 World Cup in Qatar was rescinded after a European Sports Committee ban on Russian participation.
²The tension between Otyken’s branding as an idol-style group and their claims to represent or preserve a tradition are difficult to resolve critically since there’s been very little in-depth reporting on the group’s history—and especially difficult for me since I don’t even speak Russian, let alone any of the other languages they attest in PR materials. I suggest readers apply the same healthy skepticism that all mass-market cultural products deserve, anywhere in the world.
“Belief” can be heard at various streaming services.
History of Unheard Music - Hear Us Again For Whatever Reason (Les Giants, 2024 Reissue)
History of Unheard Music were a group from Lower Manhattan consisting of Books Williams, Charlie Mendoza, and Beo Morales. Throughout their short run in the early 1980s, they released a couple cassettes and a 12-inch filled with fourth-world collages. When performing live, each member would operate a “station” featuring synths, guitars, keyboards, percussion instruments, tape decks, and more. You can get a sense of how that may have played out from hearing their music, which often sounds like an overlapping of various noises: field recordings of nature and industrial clanging, traditional percussion rhythms and queasy synth squelches, new age ambience and new wave guitars. When there are vocals, they teeter between warped mutations of traditional singing, the campy deliveries of late-night game show hosts, and more typical vocalizing that nevertheless has an uncanny peculiarity. This one’s for anyone wanting music that hovers between the Residents, Sun City Girls, and “DIY world music.” —Joshua Minsoo Kim
Hear Us Again For Whatever Reason can be purchased at the Les Giants website.
Eyes of the Amaryllis - The Show Must Go Under (Horn of Plenty, 2024)
This limited edition, tour-only cassette from Eyes of the Amaryllis sees the Pennsylvanian trio leaning into lazy afternoon, outsider pop detritus. “Stay A While” sets the tone: periodically strummed guitar chords, a barebones drum beat, singing that’s all warbled. For a lot of The Show Must Go Under, the band’s three members—Jesse Dewlow, Jim Strong, and Goda Trakumaite—largely go about on their own, coming together to form songs as if by happenstance. On one track, a piercing synth tone squirms alongside a deeper one, and Trakumaite’s voice starts as glossy texture before emerging alongside squealing guitar noodling. The presence of an actual beat grants it the semblance of a slowcore song, albeit one where the lo-fi sensibilities, lack of structure, and meandering instrumentation soundtracks those dull days when you feel utterly powerless to move. Even “Stranded Waltz,” the most song-like track here, has a driving bassline that feels like it’s ready to collapse at any moment. They throw in bubbling synths and flutes to fill out the song, but it’s the twangy guitar melody that suffuses it with a touching melancholy. These tracks readily congeal into a grey murk, and to end with overt wistfulness ties everything together—like a reminder that you can still feel something amid the drabness of life. —Joshua Minsoo Kim
The Show Must Go Under can be purchased at Bandcamp.
Armbruster - Can I Sit Here (Dear Life, 2024)
The violin has never shied away from its romantic, melodramatic side—Tchaikovsky’s violin concerto, anyone?—but here, it emerges in all its grit and glory, engulfed in electric haze. Armbruster takes the sweet, cavernous melodies of his 2022 album, Masses, and blows them out, transforming his Irish fiddling-influenced drone music into pure shredded noise. The best part of distorted, sprawling instrumentals is letting them take you wherever you need to go; in Armbruster’s arpeggiated melodies, pulled taut by his heavy bow, I hear grief transformed into hope, anger turned into catharsis. “Playground” grows from hymnal-like chords surrounded by smog into the shrieking alarm bells of “No other news,” which gradually fade away into wisps like a feeling as it turns into a memory. By the time the last track, “Can’t wait to be chillin’ again,” rolls around, all that’s left is a few dreamy plucks, laid-back slurs, and one last gasp of distortion that gestures towards a brighter future. So, to you I say turn up the volume and let the music speak for your aching heart, let it whisk you away into a world razed by fire and reborn in the fire of electric violin. When you return, you’re sure to find somewhere new. —Vanessa Ague
Can I Sit Here can be purchased at the Dear Life Bandcamp page.
Various Artists - Music · Perspective Vol. 1 (Music · Perspective, 2024)
Music · Perspective Vol. 1 is the inaugural release from the label of the same name and stands as one of the most enthralling compilations in recent years. It features artists from a multitude of musical scenes (there is, to be sure, no other album to ever have both Lutto Lento and Black Kray). Lolina’s “What is the Audience” begins the proceedings with a minimalist exercise in vocal processing and loopy rhythm creation, and it finds a perfect follow-up in Sarah Feldman’s charming arrangement of percussive bibelots. The entire album continues in this manner: Barkley Bandon’s moody R&B curio has a rumbling kick that segues nicely into DJ GONZAGA’s moody baile funk. Austin Williamson’s track sounds like a noise rock rehearsal session recorded from an adjacent room, and that playfulness feels at one with Tori Kudo’s track filled with woozy guitar playing and fast-talking almost-rap. Best of all is Kat.d’s “Silence,” an evocative outsider pop masterpiece that has the same unsuspecting command of romanticism and propulsive songwriting that has defined the musician for more than 15 years. So much of Music · Perspective Vol. 1 is about breaking down these borders of genre, of recognizing the links that tie all these different artists together; the surprises abound both within and between these tracks. —Joshua Minsoo Kim
Music · Perspective Vol. 1 can be purchased at the label’s website.
Choi Joonyong/Devin DiSanto - “Strange Skills” (Erstwhile, 2024)
The piano is a drum (or, like Wilmer on Taylor, eighty-eight tuned drums) and therefore in pressing a key you are already marking out time. The keys themselves and the stable, predictable intervals between them form a kind of visual timeline: each key is the same, almost anonymous, like each passing second taken in abstraction—yet each second is also utterly unique, an ephemeral, infinitely complex convergence of countless contingencies that can never be recreated. I make this tenuous preface to emphasize the piano’s inherently radical properties; there is a reason that Amacher turned to the (un-prepared!) piano after a lifetime researching extreme psychoacoustic phenomena and the limits of human cognition.
—Sunik Kim, liner notes to John Wall’s [Computer]-[Piano] Part II
Strange Skills is the latest of a number of recent experimental releases that I can’t help but consider together for their “return” to the piano as a sounding body; John Wall’s [Computer]-[Piano] and Graham Lambkin’s Aphorisms come to mind. The piano can be prepared, amplified, mechanized, disassembled, incinerated, demolished, excarnated into pure frequency—all nooks, crannies, acoustical composites and machinic intricacies laid bare—yet its piano-ness stubbornly remains. I also think of how piano teachers often ask their students to voice different parts of a composition in the manner of various other instruments, or how one can write a reduction of an orchestral score that still feels aesthetically whole and true—the piano in equal temperament approximates an equidistant relation to every other member of the universe of tone colors, and it seems as if this stays true for the piano in extension vis-a-vis sound in general: it probably can’t produce every single sound imaginable, but it can sound like just about any/everything. That’s why we can’t get rid of a piano’s piano-ness, no matter how many stories you drop one from; activating it is tantamount to activating the world, and the world is a machine whose ghost persists past any potential deconstructions.
I kept asking myself while listening to Strange Skills: do I like this so much because it sounds different from other Erst-core/processual-experimental stuff, or because it’s just a particularly good “one of those”? The sound material in DiSanto’s work is of diverse and often unclear provenance, and it’s determined by rather opaque decision-making structures. Choi’s set-ups (and those in Korean EAI more broadly) tend to be simpler, even if not always obvious, and his music is more structurally legible as improvisation. Their work together, then, is predicated on two acts of trust: (1) a transparent admission of the nature of the sound material (a la Choi/contra DiSanto), (2) a withholding of specific information on the nature of the processes (a la DiSanto/contra Choi). It’s a chiasmus whose point of intersection is one where the ludic joy of dematerialization and a commitment to the material meet—there’s a refreshing lack of either slavish “devotion to/investigation of The Instrument” (a hackneyed avant-gardist trope that always signals predictability) or fetishization of procedural opacity as an incitement to awe (a vulgar post-conceptual modus operandi that equates mystery with Truth). Not that this characterizes either Choi or DiSanto’s previous work, but their collaboration marks novel territory; they coax out the possibilities of the piano by both internal means (i.e. exploration of its resonant properties) and external ones (i.e. setting up interactions between it and other objects/themselves/the space they all inhabit), the way a good doctor would encourage both the use of prostheses (chemical, mechanical, etc.) as well as various strategies for acting upon one’s own body/mind. By neither demanding the auto-manifestation of aura nor expecting one to emerge of its own blind accord, Strange Skills joins a growing list of experimental records that compellingly animate the ghost that, despite all our labors, still remains in-/outside the piano-machine.—Jinhyung Kim
Strange Skills can be purchased at the Erstwhile Bandcamp page.
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 about a treasure trove of Sun Ra tapes preserved by the Creative Audio Archive for I Care If You Listen. She also wrote reviews of Kelly Moran's Moves in the Field for Pitchfork and Elaine Mitchener’s Solo Throat for the Quietus.
H.D. Angel wrote some thoughts on Tommy Richman for the Finals blog.
Ashley Bardhan reviewed Wisp’s Pandora EP and Bnny’s One Million Love Songs for Pitchfork.
Matthew Blackwell went long on Meat Puppets’ Meat Puppets II for Pitchfork’s Sunday Review series. He also wrote a review of [Ahmed]’s Wood Blues for Pitchfork. He wrote reviews of Carme López’s Quintela, Garth Erasmus’ Threnody for the KhoiSan, and MAREWREW’s Ukouk: Round Singing Voices of the Ainu 2012–2024 for Bandcamp Daily. He highlighted 10 field recording albums for his monthly column.
Rae-Aila Crumble wrote reviews of claire rousay’s sentiment and GiGi FM’s “Gabriella” for Resident Advisor.
Alex Fields wrote a feature on the eclipse films of Kevin Jerome Everson for In Review Online. They also wrote two posts about 3D films for their newsletter.
Sam Goldner reviewed Spencer Clark’s H.R. Giger’s Studiolo Vol. 1 & Vol. 2 for Pitchfork.
Marshall Gu wrote reviews of Mount Kimbie’s The Sunset Violent and Broadcast’s Spell Blanket - Collected Demos 2006-2009 for Resident Advisor.
James Gui reviewed Arushi Jain’s Delight for Pitchfork. He also wrote a feature on Parannoul and the new generation of Korean indie artists for Pitchfork. He highlighted ten international folk-adjacent albums for his monthly column on Bandcamp Daily.
Michael Hong has started a new blog called Sino Sounds where he will be writing about canonical Chinese albums.
Colin Joyce went long on Bark Psychosis’ Hex for Pitchfork’s Sunday Review series.
Joshua Minsoo Kim wrote about Fishmans’ Long Season for Pitchfork. He also wrote reviews of new releases from Still House Plants, Demdike Stare x Dolo Percussion, Tyla, and Vanessa Bedoret.
Jinhyung Kim wrote about 8 sound poetry releases in his quarterly column for Bandcamp Daily.
Jesse Locke reviewed Jon McKiel’s Bobby Joe Hope for Bandcamp Daily. He wrote reviews of Jon McKiel’s Hex and Broadcast’s Spell Blanket - Collected Demos 2006-2009 for Flood Magazine. He interviewed Myriam Gendron for Stereogum and recounted the story of Porno for Pyros’ “Tahitian Moon” for Paste.
Ryo Miyauchi released a special issue of their newsletter about music in anime, featuring fellow Tone Glow contributor Shy Clara Thompson alongside other writers.
Eli Schoop wrote about Yowie’s Cryptooology for Bandcamp Daily. He also interviewed Julia Holter.
Shy Clara Thompson reviewed a compilation of jazz-funk from Japanese label Electric Bird for Bandcamp Daily. She also assembled a list of 50 Japanese art pop albums from the ‘80s for Shfl and has been posting lists of her favorite Japanese albums from the ‘90s over on her Twitter.
Thank you for reading the 149th issue of Tone Glow. Maybe music is… good?
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