Readers, we hope you enjoy these recommendations: a shortform video and sound analysis, a post-structuralist bagpipe review, and a sound-sculpture deep-dive.
Recommendation: LONOWN & Asenssia – addiction (Slowed)
Some songs provide effective soundtracks for shortform video, and some don’t. The form makes specific demands of its soundtrack, and the soundtrack shapes the form in turn. This is a standard pattern.
We know shortform video well: it engenders high-stim distraction, sedentary immersion, particular modes of fantasy. How might we pin down the styles of music that work well in this context? Some songs, like Joy Division’s “Disorder,” were not created with social media virality in mind, and still soundtrack cooking videos or TV show edits. Many new artists hope to go viral in order to achieve professional success, so they integrate the demands of the form into their production process with varying levels of intention. They might specifically seek to write a viral song, or their songwriting might find itself non-trivially conditioned by regular exposure to the form.
We know that the “slowed,” “sped up,” and “slowed + reverb” edit styles have all flourished as go-to soundtracks at various points in the shortform era. These styles manipulate ambiance and the consistency of time, applying effects to a track’s entirety. Other viral songs grab attention by constructing dynamically conspicuous, time-bounded musical events in their compositional sequences: attention-grabbing drops, or other types of sudden shifts. Such songs lend themselves to dramatic transitions, formally melding with cinematic editing as a technical practice.
I have recently paid actual attention to the montage effects of the TikTok edit, taking a moment to register the visual effects: there are lots of heavy filters and intense, disorienting zooms. It’s not a comfortable thing to pay attention to. The beat synchronizes and one clip rapidly fades into another, or is shoved aside by its successor; there are a bunch of variants on this attentional quicksand effect. At times it feels as much like animation as editing, where the poster has simply taken clips from Batman Begins as raw material to animate beyond its original instantiation. Animation thus takes on a double meaning: energetic surplus is created with video editing software. Color, line, clip from Batman: this is the animator’s repertoire.
Along these lines, I increasingly hear lots of what one could categorize as “TikTok music” as a kind of animation soundtrack. Wikipedia informs me: “In 1928, Steamboat Willie, featuring Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse, popularised film-with-synchronised-sound.” I then learn about “Mickey Mousing” from Animation Obsessive – it appears to be a well-known term in its field:
We’ve all seen Mickey Mousing before. The term’s been in use for 85 years, and probably longer. It refers to the strict, literal sync between score and movement. A character walks, and the background music emphasizes each footfall. They startle, and the orchestra stabs. They fall, and the bass drum and cymbals explode.
I guess a lot of this shitty music that I listen to because I heard it on TikTok is basically “Mickey Mousing.” It’s doing “Mickey Mousing” to my nervous system, harvesting my energetic resources in order to actualize its full memetic potential, guiding me to write this post. Is this what I deserve?
— Alexander Iadarola
Recommendation: Bagpipes, Jean-Francois Lyotard’s Soundproof Room: Malraux’s Anti-Aesthetics
I’ve been walking in the park more frequently as the weather has begun to cool, engaging in various peepaw style behaviors (watching the parks crew trimming branches, and so on). This morning I hit the monkey bars, as is my custom, and strolled listening to electronic easy listening pastiche group The Gentle People (which I intend to write about). Over the dwindling output of my busted AirPods and phasered symphonic strings in my headphones, I could hear the drone of the industrial leaf blower on the basketball court. As I was leaving the park however, I perceived a more piercing, high and lonesome sound embedded in the droning texture. I moved toward the blower to investigate. The motor cut and I heard a bagpipe from somewhere out of sight.
I reentered the park and crossed the green turf of the soccer fields towards the barbed wire fence of the adjacent graveyard. I assumed a funeral was taking place. There wasn’t one, but behind the final wall of the handball courts was the piper. He was practicing, maybe for a funeral; he was so close to the gravestones that it seemed, if not intentional, then an unconscious alignment between the instrument and its often solemn connotations. But he was wearing shorts, there was an old man smoking a joint on the next cement slab over, a young man doing quadrupedal bear crawls nearby on the turf. I squatted near a pile of empty modelo bottles and listened for about 10-minutes.
I don’t know the repertoire well enough to identify the tunes he played. in this case the literature interests me less than the basic, stimulating atmospheric shift in the public space that is, otherwise, generally pipeless. What exactly is the affective quality of this shift?
In previous writing, I’ve mentioned Jean-Francois Lyotard’s writing on the aesthetic quality of “stridency,” where his use of the ear’s defenseless exposure to the audible world forms a metaphor for broader existential vulnerabilities. Stridency, as Lyotard outlines, is a sonic presence that pierces and saturates the sense of hearing to the point of deafening it; and, in doing so, overwhelms and occupies the ear’s lidless receptivity. His use of the concept as a sonic violation or disruption is laid out, actually, to describe an almost psychedelic revelation of silence as a hallucination, simultaneously forced and liberated within this unpleasant phenomenon.
“It flouts the decency of the sound waves dismissed into silence. The unheard-of is exhibited, in a flash, at the threshold of the audible. And, undecided between the life of sounds and the silence of death[.]”
The bagpipe is high on the list of instruments that could be considered “violating.” As the piper’s bag deflated and the reverberations of his overwhelming sound dropped from the air, I heard the sound of leaves in the trees, which before, were silent.
—Alec Sturgis
Recommendation: Aki Onda & Nao Nishihara - Kouya_e_to
In November 2016, almost ten years ago, I organized a show at ISSUE Project Room with sound artists Aki Onda and Nao Nishihara. The performance took place a few days after the results of the 2016 United States presidential election—the one where Trump won for the first time. An unforgettable mood of devastation took hold of the entire space, audience, and performance. The five tracks on Onda and Nishihara’s album Kouya_e_to, released on legendary Japanese onkyo, electroacoustic improvisation, and reductionist label Ftarri, were taken from recordings of this performance. This week, I’ve revisited the album after doing some thinking about sculpture and photography with an artist I deeply admire.
The performance felt like an expanded sculpture; and, it showcased the two artists installing and manipulating the fucked up mood of an entire body politic. This is something we’ve become used to since—even numb to—but it remains one of those shows that felt like a paradigm shift happening in real time. Handmade instruments, analog equipment, various found and everyday objects, and lighting were carefully organized into a preset arrangement as the audience entered. Strange apparatuses hung from a long thin wire running from wall-to-wall, while the space was scattered with Nishihara’s self-made wooden machines and Onda’s unique collage of cassettes, tapedecks, walkmans, bells, and glass pieces. The vast arrangement almost felt like a post-apocalyptic encampment—a space wherein the anxieties of the time could be hyperbolically suspended and survived within. I was struck by how a massive global political event provided great drama to the podunk movement of objects in a sound art context.
Aki Onda has a long history of performing within expanded sculptural settings, including his numerous performances with Akio Suzuki, Raha Raissnia, the late Ken Jacobs, Annea Lockwood, and others. This approach has roots in Fluxus art, specifically the work of Takehisa Kosugi as evidenced in Theatre Music, a piece that featured a cardboard rectangle imprinted with a spiral of smudge-marks from footsteps. In Kosugi’s piece, the installation of the object was paired with the simple instruction of a word-score: “keep walking intently.” This also recalls Alvin Lucier’s Chambers, itself a word-score piece that asks the performer to “collect or make large and small resonant environments” (sea shells, subway stations, canyons) with the simple directive to “find a way to make them sound” (blowing, cracking, exploding).
During the performance, Nishihara used kinetic sound machines that autonomously operated as individual “performers,” including pulley-machines that clicked and moved themselves across the room-length wire, as well as a small wheeled cart, itself an assemblage of various sound making objects held together with rope. These devices also reference early Fluxus history, including the work of artist Joe Jones, who often used invented machines in his performances. These machines included “The Longest Pull Toy in the World“ (a pedaled vehicle that pulled handmade instruments on wheels) or small drone machines such as those used in 1969 when he opened his own “Music-Store” in New York City (where anyone could press the numerous door buttons of the shop to play the machines).
The first recording on Kouya_e_to opens with the long bell-tones of another of Nishihara’s tools—a long fishing pole-like rod with a metal sphere on the end. Nishishara would lightly hit the metal end of the tool against the resonant surfaces and marble floors of the performance space, producing sweeping, bell-like tonalities that would reverberate wildly. The woodblock clicks and electronic noises heard on the album come directly from one of the “machine performers” dragging itself along a taut wire, while Onda presents broad, empyrean territories of bass and the unknown sounds from his cassette archive. These overlapping sounds build to dramatic heights as the “time-keeping” clicks of the music machines set a rhythmic stage for other sound sources to collide, ascend, and transform—building and releasing tension.
In 2026, it’s hard not ask—who the fuck cares about any of this? Ten years removed from this performance, we might shrug at the drama of objects scooting around and producing sound as feeling liberatory, intense, or dramatic within any political context. Looking back on the atmosphere that surrounded the performance, I feel a great distance between both the political mood of that show and my overall relationship to “sound art” proper. The past ten years have driven a serious wedge between art and music’s apparent political stakes and relationships. I’ll leave the reasoning for why that’s happened for another piece; but, overall, I think we can speculate that there’s some kind of collective trauma felt from art and music’s aspirations as political engines and entities. Instead, a sense of skepticism has developed from the incessant insistence of art and music’s liberatory potential, creating a common mistrust for their political intentions. Looking back on the show feels almost tragic in how two artists suddenly found their work politically charged without this mistrust. The audience gave the work their political fears and anger generously and without warning, as if out of necessity.
The memory of Onda & Nishihara’s performance brought me back to the covalent relationship between objects: the exchange between the minute actions of a given space, and the immense dramas of world activity—an astounding plea for the intimacy between materials and the collective at fundamental levels.
— Nick James Scavo