Tone Glow 170: Writers Panel & Recommendations Corner, 1/15/2025
Our Writers Panel on Ale Hop & Titi Bakorta's 'Mapambzauko' and Wojciech Rusin's 'Honey for the Ants'. Also: Our Recommendations Corner on cycling jerseys, Standish Lawder, and ake 阿科.
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.
Ale Hop & Titi Bakorta - Mapambzauko (Nyege Nyege Tapes, 2025)
Press Release info: Recorded in Kampala, Mapambazuko pairs Peruvian artist and researcher Alejandra Cárdenas (aka Ale Hop) with Congolese guitarist Titi Bakorta, who locate a balmy junction between their respective approaches. Bakorta’s debut album Molende, released on Nyege Nyege Tapes in 2023, was an eccentric rumination on his years performing a unique fusion of Congolese soukous and folk sounds, and Mapambazuko picks up where it left off, looping Bakorta’s wiry guitar solos around Cárdenas’ psychedelic Afro-Latin rhythms and fractured synths. Cárdenas’ last run of albums have bounced her around the stylistic map: on the acclaimed Agua Dulce, she deconstructed traditional Peruvian rhythms with Laura Robles, while she traversed radically different territory on 2021’s The Life of Insects, imagining an abstract universe from the inside of a terrarium. All this experience—in pop music, electroacoustic experimentation and avant-garde minimalism—is applied to Mapambazuko as she skews Bakorta’s exuberant themes with subtle sound design elements and powerful, uncompromising drumwork.
Purchase info: Purchase Mapambzauko at Bandcamp.
Jinhyung Kim: Having skimmed the Ale Hop discography, I get the impression that Alejandra Cárdenas’ strength lies in concocting textures—her electronic soundscapes have a sharp definition and sense of embodiment. But there’s not as much to hold on to in terms of rhythm, composition, or songcraft; her album Agua dulce with Laura Robles stands out because her collaborator, a percussionist, provides a pulsing throughline on each track that manages to tie texture and structure together. A similar dynamic props up Mapambazuko: Titi Bakorta’s soukous beats and guitarwork are the bedrock of these songs—a foundation atop which Cárdenas adds a menagerie of synthetic bells and whistles that go off in tight syncopation with the rhythm.
As I noted in my review of Aeson Zervas’s Hazlom for our last writers panel, I’m a fan of electronic takes on “traditional” genres that attempt to capture or aesthetically translate the lively social element that the musical tradition in question emerges from; Mapambazuko succeeds in this. The soundscape quality of Cárdenas’ work presents itself as something real rather than science-fiction—the bustle and clamor from a party just down the block. That energy in turn bolsters Bakorta’s guitar hooks, which end up shining all the brighter in moments of melodic effortlessness and grinning all the wider in ones of circusy mock dissonance. My biggest complaint with the album is that I wish it was a little longer—the remixes don’t do anything for me, and a few more tracks might have given Cárdenas and Bakorta the opportunity to experiment with other rhythms that would push Mapambazuko slightly further into proper fusion territory. As it is, it’s nothing radical. But it’s certainly a good time.
[6]
Gil Sansón: Mapambzauko is stimulating and frustrating in equal measure. It tries different approaches, but it also never strays from its familiar world of amplifier emulators, so the music feels like it’s in a distant place—you don’t feel the sweat or the swoon of the rhythms. Maybe I’m bringing misplaced expectations, but in hearing “Una Cumbia En Kinshasa,” the potential for an outstanding release that offers some rhythmic vitality is there from the start. Really, it’s not that hard: take a sick and simple bass line, put it on top of a cumbia rhythm, blast it loud, and add anything you want on top—it’ll all stick because the loop grounds everything. Think Shit & Shine with Latin and soukous rhythms: it’d bring any house down. Mapambazuko has potential, but remains too safe.
[6]
H.D. Angel: I’m surprised by how much this album feels like a well-oiled experimental exercise while mostly eschewing any reflexive attention to artistic “practice” (the atmospherics of the studio, the standpoints of the performers and remixers, the implications of their collaboration, their genre technique, etc.) in favor of FUN. This is ecstatic tunnel vision, with no time to apologize for the things it thinks sound cool. It’s refreshing. I do love those guitar and drum sounds, which seem to get more potent the more you mess with or modulate them. It’s undeniable ear candy. But since this is framed as a dot-connector record, and I’m a dot-connector to a fault, I can’t get as swept up in the reverie of Mapambazuko as I’d like to. I have a sense of where it’s coming from; where is it going?
[7]
Marshall Gu: On Mamabazuko, Ale Hop leads Titi Bakorta’s soukous (Congolese, guitar-based pop music) through a maximalist drum-synth onslaught that feels in line with the insane singeli that Nyege Nyege helped break through internationally. The problem is that the pure pop pleasure of soukous gets utterly lost in the fusion: bright guitar lines popping up only to be subsumed by a big beat—Ale Hop’s contributions are simply not that interesting. Bakorta’s nimble guitar lines on opener “Una cumbia en Kinshasa” have to ‘battle it out’ with synth effects, each more annoying than the last; “Mapambazuko” is a dance beat that slowly devolves into an electroacoustic exercise. Only the second half of “Bonne année” glimpses what could have been when it’s literally just the shimmer of the guitar, the beat, and some horn funk for good measure—it ends up being an enthusiastic craze. Blissfully, Mamabazuko is short even though it’s padded out with three remixes, the most interesting of which is Kenyan ambient musician KMRU excavating beauty out of “Nitaangaza,” proving out that there is beauty in these tracks… somewhere. Was the argument that soukous is not danceable enough on its own? If so, the collaboration was built on a lie.
[4]
Joshua Minsoo Kim: The first track is a hoot: a soukous track whose twirling guitar lines lead into splashy synth accents ad nauseum. It isn’t surprising for a Congolese track to use sound effects to heighten the showboating—check the whirring cars in the iconic “Super K”—but much of Mapambzauko banks on this frenetic sound collage. They detract from the pleasures of a sinuous guitar line or thrusting beat, and I’m left cold. Soukous is some of the most jubilant music in the world, and for it to become something more concerned with sound design presents a different mode of listening that runs counter to my enjoyment of the stuff. And when you strip away the accoutrements, the guitar isn’t that interesting either. The Congolese music I like most, fusion or not, leaves room for spacious arrangements. This openness bolsters the improvisatory nature of the playing, and elevates one’s impression that this is inviting music meant for dancing, and played just for anyone to enjoy. It’s mostly concerned with providing a good time. The stuff at the opposite end of the spectrum here—the dubby “Nitaangaza” and the incessantly whirring “Así baila el sintetizador”—are occasionally amusing, but it’s a type of fun that’s more cerebral than corporeal.
[3]
Rae-Aila Crumble: Jimi Hendrix found alive air-humping in the club. Spongebob almost caught dead in a chase scene. I have no real reference point for this kind of stuff, and maybe that’s why Mapabmazuko is so thrilling for me. “Hyper” would be a word to describe it, but “hyper” starts to insinuate some kind of connection to the World Wide Web, and this is the furthest from that. It’s deeply Afro-Latin, with every groove and glitch radiating the energy of celebratory dance circles, summer sunshine, cool beverages… more dancing, because it is dance music. Titi Bakorta’s guitar reserves any kind of flashiness and instead displays a penchant for an addicted simplicity, heard through shorter phrases modulated and repeated until they stick in your head like commercial jingles. Ale Hop splashes these riffs against pleasing little high-pitched beeps and boops to create tunes that work in both club and headphone settings. On my third playthrough, it starts to sound like how I thought FIFA music sounded when I was eight (a good thing). These tracks are so playful and happy that they sometimes become a little funny.
[6]
Average: [5.33]
Wojciech Rusin - Honey for the Ants (AD 93, 2025)
Press Release info: Honey for the Ants completes an ‘alchemical trilogy’ after The Funnel and Syphon. These albums are informed by mystical and gnostic texts, celebrating the weird, unhinged and occasionally beautiful. In this forthcoming album the tonalities have shifted from mediaeval and renaissance to modernist dissonances. New singers and instrumentalists contribute to an emotional and textural richness achieved in a collaborative process. Distant musical periods, real and fictitious, are nonchalantly interwoven to create a delirious mongrel that salutes the imagination.
Purchase info: Purchase Honey for the Ants at Bandcamp or the AD 93 website.
Michael McKinney: The liner notes for Honey for the Ants describe it as the third part of an “alchemical trilogy.” It’s a hefty notion, suggesting an intertwining of science and magic, a wide-ranging approach to composition, and an earnest (and prolonged) tangling of umpteen centuries. In other words, it’s one heck of a gauntlet to hurl, which makes the record’s successes all the more impressive.
Strictly speaking, there’s rarely many things going on at once here: this is a record of slow-motion orchestral tumblings, of pointillistic choral pieces, of funereal ambience that promises (or, perhaps, threatens) infinities. But Wojciech Rusin’s approach—equal parts new-school electronics and “new music”; simultaneously liturgical and modernistic; bleary-eyed and playful and brain-bending—holds all manner of histories and approaches in high tension, making every temporal and aesthetic jump land all the harder. If this is, indeed, a kind of alchemy, it’s less about the end product than it is the process itself; here, it feels as though the seams, and distinctions—the tensions—are the point.
If anything, with its collagist’s spirit and its eye towards contemporary reimaginings of histories, Honey recalls Giant Claw’s early(-ish) work on Orange Milk, back when the producer was focused on left-field nu-MIDI symphonies. As here, it’s both disorienting and straightforwardly beautiful, a universe of processed and glimmering who-knows-whats. But squint a while: an alien kind of beauty might emerge from the murk. At its most compelling, Honey is downright kaleidoscopic, jumbling up chamber-music motifs, deep-space gurgles, and ancient choral-music sounds until any distinctions almost—almost—dissolve. Is that a vocal chorus or a passing ambulance?
[7]
Gil Sansón: When the digital processing is more obvious, as on “Flesh Eater,” my mind goes back to the 80s and the heyday of new-age music—not in the surface sound, but in how composers of the era treated acoustic instruments when taking them into the digital realm. Wojciech Rusin takes these maneuvers and becomes what Fripp called a “small, mobile, intelligent unit.” And with ambition and vision, the music moves along different moods, all understated and a bit somber, with songs and interludes depicting a larger story. The music plays with distance, as sounds recede to the background and return slightly depending on the flow of the music. While I’m not fully taken by it, Honey for the Ants music creates enough images in the mind—maybe that’s enough.
[7]
Maxie Younger: All the fun conceptual frippery of Gnostic mysticism, bespoke 3D-printed instruments, and speculative genre collage that swirls around Honey for the Ants is difficult to reconcile with the actual music it supports. It is an album that gestures continually at the idea of pomp and strangeness, the feel of imperious, withering oddity, without offering anything particularly freakish or novel; nice noise, for sure, but nothing rooted in a desirable alt-reality or even a compellingly undesirable post-apocalyptic landscape. It’s the fourteenth or fifteenth iteration of one of Homer Simpson’s cursed toaster futures, where things look pretty much the same but everyone eats with prehensile lizard tongues. Some individual moments punch through the haze—the throaty, mucus-clogged blares of interlude “Tools for Humanity,” the seasick, lurching digital squalls that split open the middle of “Carpathian Stone Spinners”—but, packaged into songs, the work loses track of itself, whiling away the minutes on anonymous wibbles and dour verses. As a final act to Rusin’s “alchemical trilogy,” it struggles to close the door on a conceptual framework whose slippery contours resist conclusions; when the last few sputters of choral synthesis ring into blank space on “Even the Moon,” I’m still left wondering if anything’s gotten started.
[4]
Mark Cutler: Rusin closes his “alchemical trilogy” with another album of pretty much the same mix of song types: there are the Senni-esque punchcard-vocal arrangements, lyrical tracks that are usually sung by female guest vocalists, some digital audio manipulation, hired strings, and of course Rusin’s custom-made wind instruments. I share many of Rusin’s academic interests and aesthetic sensibilities, and I suppose I like this album about as much as the last two, but I will say that the larger structural plan has eluded me. The three albums in this trilogy feel so continuous that, if you had told me that Honey was a collection of outtakes from either Funnel or Syphon or both, I would have believed that too. Nothing here makes me feel that a six-year project has come to a close, or that, in a couple more years, it couldn’t be extended to a tetralogy. I hope Rusin takes the opportunity to explore new compositional styles, or perhaps to hone in and really explore one of the seven on display here.
[6]
Frank Falisi: The relative usefulness of press materials tends to exist in direct relation to how uninterested they are in providing qualitative critical judgements; the chummier-sounding a press release, the more a potential listener can forgo the context of words for the immediacy of sounds. But with Honey for the Ants, with its rash of digital effluvia—melty instrumentations occasionally identifiable but more frequently alien and seemingly not-yet-existent—a little context is helpful. According to its Bandcamp description, the album forms the final part in the London-based Wojciech Rusin’s “alchemical trilogy,” a work begun with The Funnel (2019) and continued on Syphon (2022). The music is “informed by mystical and gnostic texts, celebrating the weird, unhinged, and occasionally beautiful.” ‘Beautiful’ (an especially empty word) and ‘unhinged’ (an especially subjective one) can be left behind. ‘Gnostic’ and ‘alchemical’, though, are helpful entry points—they provide both the sounds and listener structures to bounce off of.
A web search for ‘alchemical’ isn’t especially notable. It yields as many figurative stand-ins—a web3 development platform, a Brooklyn gastropub, an architectural firm—as it does dictionary and Wiki- definitions. But adding ‘texts’ to that search opens another kind of e-portal: alchemywebsite.com, gnosis.org, rosicrucian.org. These webpage aesthetics hearken back to the decidedly un-sleek web of a more primordial time, presenting philosophical and proto-scientific texts from between the 16th and 18th century. The forum of Alchemy Website immediately suggests the digital community spaces of a pre-social media world. Here though, a single poster seems to haunt each and every topic. The prevailing feeling is of a space deserted by mass consciousness, wandering in the wing in a digital mansion flanging into decay and preservation.
It’s a not unfitting constellation of feelings to carry into Honey for the Ants (labelled, by coincidence or other means, as “unknown genre” when I play it through my mp3 library.) “Behind the Palazzo,” the first track, seems to be composed mostly of rolling piano, though a clutter of digital buzzes is kept just in the background behind a kind of gauze until it erupts through, overtaking the song at its end. “Carpathian Stone Singers,” the next track, sounds as if it’s made of kind-of flutes, their unknown piping a facsimile of both seabirds and computer freakout. The human voice figures in here, as on “Even the Moon,” chanting almost madrigal-like atop and then under shifting digital and organic compositions. This is the weirdness the album asks us to entertain, not as colloquial dismissal from the norm but the un-real and sublime creations of Leonora Carrington or M.R. James. Forms collide with no obvious center point. The seams aren’t visible in Honey for the Ants, even as we hear the way temporal and textural tonalities shift. Whether or not these times or textures have existed or will exist is immaterial to the fact that we hear them hear. They are, in their own way, alchemized.
There’s plenty of critical precedence for the colloquial use of ‘alchemical.’ And based on the preponderance of non-literal uses of the word in corporate contexts, engagement with actual alchemy feels as alien as some of the speculative sounds on Honey for the Ants. I’m curious as to where the belief sits in Rusin’s project. Is the music asking us to hear it as a figurative stand-in for alchemy? Or is it trying to do alchemy? Alchemy Website’s introductory matter notes that, while some people today still try to perform alchemical experiments, the majority of them may not truly believe in its transmutation as a literal thing. Instead, “most people who take an interest in alchemy use it as a source of philosophical and esoteric ideas, to support the particular belief system to which they have attached themselves.” Honey for the Ants becomes such a source, a support for sounds attempting speculation. Don’t sounds literally transform the air? It’s not such a logical leap to say that they alchemize the air. They turn the atmosphere. By turning their sources and inspirations towards unexplored and unimagined corners, Rusin crafts a theory of experimental music as unknowable as it is simply hearable.
[6]
Jinhyung Kim: The same thing happens with every Wojciech Rusin record: the synthetic voice stuff at the beginning piques my attention and gets me all hyped, and then I get more and more bored with each subsequent track until it’s over. The electroacoustic rendition of early music choral polyphonies is honestly the most compelling part of this project, and I’d take a whole album of just that. The press for this record (and Rusin’s previous two, which together form a trilogy) cites “alchemical,” “mystical,” and “gnostic” texts as sources of inspiration; like the authors of those texts, Rusin goes for a grab bag approach where all sorts of different ideas, elements, and procedures are thrown into the mix.
To extend the analogy: if the author pushes the scope or integration of his syncresis to an absurd limit, the text can sometimes be quite compelling. If not, things get tedious real fast. Rusin’s music, unfortunately, slots in the latter category. Many a Renaissance polymath has lured their reader in by promising initiation into some galaxy-brained truth, only to then deliver prose that’s overwrought well past the point of intelligibility (trust me—I spent my undergrad studying this shit).
I suppose my analogy breaks down there, because this isn’t quite the issue I have with Honey for the Ants—I think it’s actually a little too transparent sometimes. The sung bits about zooplankton and networks and the universe, for one, read a bit overfamiliarly as New Age rather than alchemical/mystical/gnostic or whatever. But on a broader level, if this music is being presented as a grab bag, it’d be nice to hear all the weird and disparate pieces, regardless of how well they came together. Honey for the Ants, however, doesn’t really stray outside the boundaries of what I’ve come to expect from either ambient electroacoustic or contemporary classical music. It’s vaguely pleasant, with the occasional dissonance or odd timbre. But without any real structure to foster and develop these ever so brief glimpses of the uncanny, they remain hollow gestures.
[3]
H.D. Angel: “Alchemy” is right—Honey for the Ants is attempting an impossible task, hoping we’ll trust it might work. Records like Rusin’s have two ways to fail. Either they can be too noncommittal, detached, just ‘bearing witness’ to their musical rituals at an ironic distance, or too caught up in the spectacle of their own work, so obsessed with triggering the weirdest sounds at the weirdest times that the wizard is clearly visible behind the curtain. The right balance makes the process intuitive, hypnotically bypassing the aesthete’s paranoid cliché-detectors without them even noticing. Sounds are divorced from their obvious sources or modes of expression without ever drawing your focus closer to the idea of ‘recontextualizing’ them than to the experience of the sounds themselves. There are moments that pull this off for me (“Carpathian Stone Spinners,” “Magus”), both recognizably human and alien without relying too heavily on heartstring-tugging progressions or shiny computer sounds like other tracks do. I imagine the fabrication of brand-new, 3D-printed instruments modeled off of ancient designs is a key part of the experience, with the potential to open up little contradictions and half-remembered ideas with every timbre.
The question of how to make experimental music that feels ‘real’, like the lived-in mystical tradition of some hypothetical civilization rather than the output of an ‘experimental’ tradition per se, is an analogous dilemma to the one I’ve been encountering as I’ve gotten back into reading fiction this year with a more formalist brain. How do you escape the parameters of a form as well-established as the novel without being too winky, just congratulating the reader for understanding your method? I think back to one of the first ‘smart’ novels I loved as a kid, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, also a work about imagining a vaguely-familiar world where things like alchemy are routine, and reflecting those unfamiliarities back on us; I wonder, if I came back to it today, if I’d be less impressed by the magical-realism technique—or more impressed, now that I’m more aware of how hard it is to do well. Worldbuilding seems almost impossible sometimes, but we have to do it.
Hegel has another name for Reason. He calls it “speculative truth,” a marvellous phrase. You speculate, you create truth. Notice how he constantly finds opposition in the very phrases.
For ordinary man, truth is the reverse of speculation.
In the smaller Logic, he says, as bold as brass, but without heat, “Speculative truth, it may also be noted, means very much the same as what, in special connection with religious experiences and doctrines, used to be called Mysticism.” Isn’t that something? Shachtman and his friends regularly called me “a mystic.” The fool hath uttered wiser than he knew.
It says, “there is mystery in the mystical, only however for the Understanding which is ruled by the principle of abstract identity; whereas the mystical, as synonymous with speculative, is the concrete unity of those propositions which understanding only accepts in their separation and opposition.”
We, the great revolutionaries, have been accused of “mysticism.” It is no accident. Hegel says that men of Understanding do not understand that when they take the determinations as they are, they renounce “thought”; the determinations become “fixed elements and swing around into its opposite […] Reasonableness, on the contrary, just consists in embracing within itself these opposites as unsubstantial elements.” Assume that they will pass away. You must. That is Reason. His combination of Reason as mysticism and then as “reasonableness” is calm and superbly ironic.
—C.L.R. James, Notes on Dialectics: Hegel, Marx, Lenin
[7]
Average: [5.71]
Recommendations Corner
For our Recommendations Corner, Tone Glow’s writers have the chance to write about anything they want that’s caught their interest.
2025’s Hottest Cycling Jerseys
A new year means another chance to hijack the Recommendations Corner to gawk at the latest pro cycling kits, a parade of Lycra body stockings plastered with brand logos, muddy gradients, and artless technicolor swoops. While none of this year’s offerings reach the heights of EF Education-EasyPost’s pink-and-yellow stunner from 2024, there are two favorites worth shouting out here while my outlook on the season is still unmarred by the creeping chill of Tadej Pogačar-induced cynicism.
Team Jayco-AlUla: The only Australian-owned WorldTour team, Jayco-AlUla have always had a direct line to my heart on the sole basis of national pride; my father goes for Sunday bike rides in a replica of one of their old jerseys from when they were called Orica-GreenEDGE. They’ve never been at the pointiest end of the competitive stick, but they’ve amassed a respectable spread of wins and high placements over the years thanks to a revolving roster of A-list talents: Caleb Ewan, Esteban Chaves, Michael Matthews, and the ever-present Yates twins, who finally fully divested from the team in 2025 with Simon Yates’s move to the juggernaut Visma-Lease a Bike squad. Jayco’s jersey this season is a standout, a dazzling ocean of amethyst tones rendered in thick striated lines that gradate from dark crushed velvet to royal purple. The kaleidoscopic effect is somewhat marred by the frumpy grey shorts the top pairs with, but the end result is still a beautiful and refreshing departure from the staid, blocky designs that have dominated the team’s past years of operation. Frankly, they need all the early sartorial wins they can get with a lineup that, even with the no-brainer addition of 2024’s breakout Aussie star Ben O’Connor, smacks strongly of “rebuilding year.”
Cofidis: One of the longest-running teams in the current WorldTour lineup at nearly 30 years old, Cofidis seems to have settled comfortably into the role of the squad whose glory days are palpably behind them. They racked up just two wins on the world stage in 2024, and while it’s always fun to see them succeed, they haven’t been able to field a truly deep roster or sign top-level competitive talent in a long time, a trend underscored by a slow, agonizing slide to the bottom tier of the UCI team rankings that puts them in imminent danger of relegation. Their 2025 jersey, at least, signals a willingness to explore new directions with a fantastically bold, color-blocked canvas of scarlet, burgundy and safety yellow that serves as a great soft pivot from their usual red-and-white attire; looks like old dogs can learn half of a new trick after all. —Maxie Younger
Standish Lawder’s Roadfilm (1970) & Raindance (1972)
Standish Lawder (1936-2014) was an obsessive tinkerer. He used coffee tins for his homemade contact printers, constructed an optical printer that would run overnight in his basement, and devoted countless hours to perfecting his films. During a 1975 screening at the Carnegie Museum of Art, someone in the audience noted that a particular work was an anomaly in his filmography. He explained that it was simply a product of his interests at the time—he’d moved on since then, and would eventually move on from 16mm film, too. Still, the American director’s small filmography ranks among the most playful in the avant-garde.
When Lawder travelled to show his works, he’d often present actuality films from the turn of the century, including the Biograph’s Deaf Mute Girl Reciting The “Star Spangled Banner” (1902) and the Edison Company’s Electrocuting an Elephant (1903). His fascination with these silent shorts can be understood through his found-footage films, which take a handful of frames and expand them into elaborate studies in color, perception, and materiality. (Lawder admitted that buying old films instead of new film stock was an economical decision, too.) There’s beauty to be found in the simplest of movements, his films imply, and he highlights this through looping transformations. His films also address the very nature of watching movies. Intolerance (Abridged) (1973) takes the D.W. Griffith classic of the same name, culls every fortieth frame, duplicates it, and leaves you with the aftermath. Before people could fast-forward VHS tapes, DVDs, and YouTube videos, this experiment offered a similar effect, revealing the importance of duration in narrative legibility.
Lawder’s films often operate in this way: take a simple idea, and stretch it out so it feels like both a joke and something serious. Roadfilm (1970) takes a clip from an old cartoon and runs it repeatedly, occasionally throwing in an array of colorful lights or a person’s face. We see a fox running away from a pack of dogs, and the color filters oscillate between red and turquoise, like a police siren is flashing onscreen. He conveys the thrill of breaking the law, echoed in the fox’s mischievous facial expression and the cheery human face that’s superimposed. The soundtrack is fitting: The Beatles’ “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?,” a McCartney song inspired by a trip to India where he saw monkeys copulating on the street. Consider Roadfilm an ode to exhibitionist pleasures—an unexpected, highly memorable spectacle.
Raindance (1972) is a much more elaborate film. Lawder takes a loop from John Halas’ 1956 cartoon The History of the Cinema and uses a film wipe that shows rain falling diagonally. He was interested in understanding his homemade contact printer as an instrument—much like any musical instrument—and seeing everything it could do. He’d bipack it with film strips that were taken from an earlier color-field project he abandoned. You can watch Color Film (1971) and see these strips, which contain alternating frames of red, green, blue, and yellow. These, along with red and green color filters, were used to create dizzying afterimages. It was this illusion that fascinated him, and he’d test out everything he could with the source material to achieve them, making two or three prints a week and scrawling thoughts in a massive notebook.
Despite its maximalist nature, Raindance is one of the most tender flicker films. This is largely a result of the soundtrack, made by his then-student Robert Withers, who would later be known for his collaborations with Meredith Monk. The two would meet monthly, with Lawder showing his footage and Withers showing his tapes. They eventually cut the film together, using the soundtrack as a structuring device (the initial, repetitive dings coincide with a preamble to the experiment). The squiggly synth work meanders gracefully before building into a moody drone. These moments are coupled with sequences that feature frames that are duplicated multiple times so that it feels like the image itself is breaking down, slowing and stuttering to the point of being terrifying (at one screening, the projector was dying and the passage felt especially haunted). Soon, the flitting synth arrives again amidst golden hues. He continues to play with speed and color, and then when Raindance suddenly ends, you’re left breathless. —Joshua Minsoo Kim
Standish Lawder’s Roadfilm (1970) and Raindance (1972) are available via The Movie Club, a monthly streaming series run through Ultra Dogme’s Patreon, where they show an exclusively curated program of experimental films. Past screenings have included films by Jennifer Reeves, Larry Gottheim, and Nazli Dincel. Sign up here.
ake 阿科 - ake 阿科 (Sub Jam, 2025)
I’m a sucker for anything from Beijing experimental circuit—many releases from which come out via Sub Jam, Ftarri, Zoomin'‘Night, Aloe Records, and a miscellany of other labels and solo Bandcamp pages. It’s a comfort zone for me. It’s not 100% predictable, but it’s a set of sounds and procedures that I never tire of as either objects of focus or sources of ambience: drones, field recordings, junkyard/DIY electronics, unconventional uses of found objects, the human voice, percussion, and reed instruments—all within an aleatory and/or hyper-minimalist framework. What I appreciate about the Beijing scene, as well as its relatives in Japan (onkyo + its legacy via the labels Improvised Music from Japan/Ftarri) and Korea (anchored by the label Balloon & Needle + the performance venue Dotolim) is a casual yet sincere commitment to both the aesthetic and democratic premises of “experimental” music. A given set-up may work or it may not, but once it’s put into motion, you might as well see it through; there’s little preciousness over a particular recording and performance, and if one doesn’t click for me, another that’s ostensibly the same in its essentials will totally captivate me. Furthermore, there’s an emphasis on the participation of untrained and non-musicians; this is especially true for the Beijing scene and Chinese experimental music at large, where some of the best stuff to come out of it can be found in open-invite “amateur” compilations like Yin Yue and there is no music from china.
All that being said, there is a perpetual threat of orthodoxy settling in—one that’s historically gone hand in hand with precarity and the staving off of disintegration, but which now comes with the novelty of attention received from international outlets and newfound collaborators, increasing stabilization of performance schedules and venues, etc. There’s always incentives to keep doing whatever it is you're doing. So even as I enjoy the consistency of output from the Beijing experimental scene, it’s nice when something that feels like a genuine mutation comes along.
This self-titled ake 阿科 record makes me feel this way. In one sense, it’s a hodge-podge of ideas and motifs from the work of others running in the same circles: vague, muffled knocking sounds on track 1; clipping mouth noises on track 5; slow-motion melodic deconstructions for voice and guitar (track 3) or toy piano (track 7)—all with varying degrees of field-recorded ambience audible in the mix. But there are subtle choices throughout that are remarkably compelling. The knocking on track 1, “how to destory the wall 如何毁掉墙,” sounds as if it’s coming from within a small closet or some other space with a high noise floor/low noise ceiling. But as the piece goes on, one can hear cars, voices, and other sounds in the distance, which, while faint, possess greater clarity. This takes the knocking sounds out of isolation and places them in ambiguous relation to a broader landscape; one gets an impression of intimacy separated from the outside world by barriers of both cognitive interiority and concrete exteriority. The most shocking and immediately enthralling piece here is “now, first 此刻，首先”—a ten-minute cut of ake (presumably) sobbing. There aren’t any other sounds to distract the listener, nor anything in the way she cries to suggest how it might be performative in some way or another. But without knowing the occasion or circumstance, there’s no other way to listen to the crying except as performance, to sit with it as sound and rhythm; it’s a beautiful experience.
The rest of the album is full of other highlights: “mismatch 不合” reminds me of a Taku Sugimoto/Minami Saeki duet, but less ethereal or plaintive and more listless or prosaic—sort of how the beauty of the rural mundane compares to its urban counterpart; the toy piano piece, “expatiate on something 对某物的详述,” is driven by a metronomic pulse that evokes an imaginary simple machine—the sort whose efficiency has undoubtedly been surpassed by some descendant technology, but whose operation brings one greater comfort and whose presence sits more organically within the domestic ecosystem. As a whole, and despite its high degree of abstraction, ake 阿科 feels like a personal record. The liner notes describe ake’s impetus toward music making as “a desire of being exist and a planty of still time, as the only valuable propoty of many people.” I think this hits on why this sort of music affects me as meaningfully as it does in its best moments and iterations. A lot of art (and a lot of product) promises stillness amidst the frantic whirl of the 21st century’s capitalist death drive. But it’s difficult to deliver on that promise, and no means of doing so can be repeated endlessly without reneging on its potential as a panacea. Even within a space that encourages mindfulness of time and the stillness of reflection, one must find ways of rethinking and reorienting one’s purview upon the steady flow and relational depth of things. —Jinhyung 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 profile on Suzanne Kite for I Care If You Listen.
H.D. Angel wrote about Bryson Tiller’s “Ciao!” for her blog, Things Are Getting Desperate
María Barrios published a list of the Best Latin Music of 2024 for Bandcamp Daily.
Billdifferen published two lists for their blog, including their Top 100 Songs of 2024 and Top 100 Jersey Club Tunes of 2024.
Matthew Blackwell highlighted the Best Field Recordings of 2024 at Bandcamp Daily. He also wrote about Amen Dunes’ Death Jokes II for Pitchfork.
Daniel Bromfield wrote about Fennesz’s Mosaic for Pitchfork.
Rae-Aila Crumble wrote about SahBabii’s Saaheem for Pitchfork.
Hannah Edgar wrote about the best in classical music, jazz, and more in 2024 for the Chicago Tribune.
Frank Falisi wrote about Robert Zemeckis’ Here for Bright Wall/Dark Room.
Alex Fields has published a list of their Top 75 Avant-Garde Films of the 21st Century at their blog, Not Recondiled.
Sam Goldner wrote about Jane Remover’s “JRJRJR” for Pitchfork.
Marshall Gu is listing his Top 100 Albums of the 1980s. Read about the first twenty choices at his blog, Free City Rhymes. He also wrote about The Last Poets & Tony Allen’s Africanism at Bandcamp Daily.
James Gui wrote the final edition of Ley Lines at Bandcamp Daily. He also wrote about Nizar Rohana’s Safa for the same site and jackzebra’s 王中王 for Pitchfork.
Raphael Helfand wrote about quinn’s stars fell on trench at Pitchfork.
Michael Hong published multiple year-end lists at his blog, Mando Gap, including The Top 100 Mandopop Singles of 2024, the Top Cantopop Singles of 2024, and the Top 40 Mandopop Albums of 2024. The blog’s latest entry is on Waa Wei’s Ordeal by Pearls.
Vincent Jenewein published two lists at his blog, Infinite Speeds. Both are about the Best Electronic Music of 2024, one on albums and the other on EPs and singles.
Colin Joyce wrote about LEYA’s I Forgot Everything EP for Pitchfork.
Joshua Minsoo Kim wrote about Chicago Filmmakers’ new Picture Restart film series for the Chicago Reader.
Michael McKinney wrote about the Best DJ Sets of 2024 for Passion of the Weiss. He also wrote about six emerging artists for DJ Mag.
Ryo Miyauchi published numerous lists for their blog, This Side of Japan, including 50 Favorite Anison of 2024, Top 50 Rap Songs of 2024, 60 Favorite Bandcamp Albums of 2024, Top 40 Idol Songs of 2024: The Boys, Top 100 Idol Songs of 2024, and Top 100 Songs of 2024.
Jude Noel wrote about Zach Phillips’ True Music for Pitchfork. He also wrote about footwork collective The Era for The Fader.
Shy Clara Thompson published her annual Buddy List, featuring reflections on the past year from herself, Joshua Minsoo Kim, and Jinhyung Kim. She also wrote about PAS TASTA’s GRAND POP for Pitchfork.
Evan Welsh, who is the manager of Bayonet Records, made an hour-long mix for The Lot Radio.
Thank you for reading the 170th issue of Tone Glow. New Year, Same Glow.
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