Tone Dialing, Radiant Veil, The Cabaret
Hello again. Thanks for reading these recommendations: a follow-up on the encoded aesthetics of the telephone, a consideration of musical radiance, and a Japanese lounge artist.
Recommendation: The Nerves - “Hanging on the Telephone”
Ornette Coleman in a 1995 interview on the occasion of his album Tone Dialing with the Prime Time ensemble:
Information comes to people in the form of tone dialing. When you speak of something you speak in the tone of what it means to you. Sending a fax is tone dialing. When someone reads something you wrote, that’s tone dialing... These songs were written so that the musicians would be able to express their views about the information they were using.
A tweet from a decade ago:
A boy at avicii telt me his dad died cos of MDMA and when the beat dropped he was proper crying his eyes out shoutin ‘ma dad died for this’
We are attuned in each of these passages to transmission as an act and a process. In the first, tone dialing. In the second, the drop. Coleman’s tone dialing is more open-ended and less deterministic in nature, while the drop has more rigid formal affordances. The latter is also associated with synthetic chemicals and a particular structure of feeling produced by those chemicals in concert with the EDM experience as social ritual.
Thinking back to last week, we can continue considering the signal as a mediator and a catalyst between assemblages and actors. Entraining the practice of communication at the same time that it facilitates its functioning. We were thinking about telephones, so we can return to the telephone now, following the Nerves:
I’m in the phone booth, it’s the one across the hall
If you don’t answer, I’ll just ring it off the wall
I know she’s there, but I just had to call
Don’t leave me hanging on the telephone
—Alexander Iadarola
Recommendation: Hafeez - “Amateur” / Dave - “Raindance (featuring Tems)”
“The veil is thin right now.” Or, at least, that’s what I keep saying during incidental conversations and small talk watercooler moments this week. Shit’s pretty fucked up right now, and this seems like a way to acknowledge that fact in a relatively brief but serious way. I’ve been trying to listen to music that makes me feel good as a result, and that’s opened some thinking on the utility of music and a larger psychological examination—what does “feeling good” mean to me? It seems redundant to list out all of the varied ways music has in fact made me feel wholly, genuinely good. I don’t want to go there. I think I know how to feel good and understand how music can make me feel that way. But, reserving some reflection for that this week seems like the move.
I’ve been listening to Hafeez’s album “Amateur” this past week. It’s radiant music that fits into a framework of “pocket music” I’ve been scatteredly outlining over the past few months: Mikey Enwright, ear, further reflection on the history of PC Music. The most immediate reference points in Hafeez’s production vocabulary are the Swedish artist Toxe (who released the incredible Toxe2 a few years back), Lorenzo Senni, and plenty of others who foreground the flow of MIDI into arpeggiated buoyancy. Each pluck is twisted and automated to attune its impact, its release. Alec and I recorded some thinking about this on our Flavortone podcast by outlining a “Theory of the Byoing Sound”—loosely conceptualizing electronic music’s infatuation with the “Byoing” through primordial phonetic language formation, to physics and sound spatialization, and the elasticity of sound as a challenge to “consistency.” A sonic pull, tautness, tension, and release are dynamic features that ground Hafeez’s music with its own grace and space. It’s accentuated with blithe and emotional radio drops, things like “Don’t give up” and “Heyy Hafeez,” and “Hi, I love you.” This week, such things help me to feel fantastic.
The music goes beyond just being “sweet” music. A lot of recent electronic music exaggerates a sense of child-like innocence and wonder in its general stylization. With Hafeez, kalimba, handpan, or toy keyboard tones create a space of good intentions—cut by laser sounds and wisps of trance pads that push into introspection. I hear a general gesture of affirmation—a single MIDI note literally affirming itself through its repetition and progression, elastically morphing through a cadence, a melody, a rhythm, and an affirmational lyric all at once. The stunning track “Riding Thru” coalesces into a showstopper Rich Gang Atlanta-rap-type groove. Or, “Shine” features a beautifully melting arpeggio before some wild, almost Dan Deacon-esque vocals erupt in-step with a simple snare ride. There are plenty of almost hand-cranked tiny musicbox loops and moments that are ascendent, uplifting. I recommend it.
On a different tip, Alec and I stopped into the local cig and vape shop earlier this week. It was dead quiet when we walked in but after chopping it up with the shop guys a bit, they dropped the recently chart-topping song “Raindance” by Dave & Tems—an emotional dancehall, afrobeat hit that could be basically overlaid entirely onto “One Dance.” Nonetheless, its sense of longingness, forlornness, even slight religiousness, alongside its pensive piano melody, trace a movement of redemption—an affirmative sensitivity, but also a radiance. Standing in the vape shop, hearing the lyric “You’ve got that white wine I never got to sip,” while getting my regular vape customer stamp card punched, the track made me feel pretty good.
Back to my earlier “the veil is thin” comment—I’ve been thinking a lot about good and evil in recent days. I’ve done plenty of writing and thinking about evil music—a past essay on Demonic Listening, which was a survey of the 2010s as “diabolical times.” Or other writings about the seven deadly sins, particularly the sin of Wrath, as a conceptualization of music. Throughout this thinking, I kept on writing about “the diabolic” as a principle that attempts to maintain or control the phenomenal world—to keep or preserve the flux of time. At the time, I loved how this flipped the traditional narratives of evil as the annihilating force. Instead, “The Good” could become a dissolving agent which would yield a cosmic catastrophe that would effectively release and end the phenomenal world. I still like this idea of the Good, but maybe I could do well to conceptualize The Good as something that doesn’t just mean the end of the world.
With Hafeez and even Dave & Tems, I hear that Good, with no cosmic evacuation necessary, chilling behind a radiant veil.
—Nick James Scavo
Recommendation: Momose - “The Cabaret”
In keeping with my stretch of digital crate-dig music, I want to recommend another favorite artist, and a point of longstanding personal curiosity: the Japanese lounge-jazz singer Momose.
Momose’s interpretations of jazz standards have a unique, big-swinging expressivity, colored by her free drifting execution of melody, and by her notable, strong Japanese accent in the delivery of the American song-book. Moving to New York City for a time, and releasing recordings in collaboration with GRAMMY-winning keyboardist James Alan Smith, Momose drifted back to Japan, where she still performs at local jazz festivals and clubs, with her signature mâitre-d style performative flourish.
I latched onto Momose’s 2007 album “The Cabaret” sometime around 2016. “The Cabaret” blasts off with a sort of humorous Las Vegas style simulation skit, drum roll, big band introduction and a grand announcement: “Good evening ladies and gentlemen, we’d like to welcome you here to the beautiful, wonderful surroundings that you’re witnessing tonight. And tonight we have a special guest. If you would please set your sushi down. Second thought, pass me a piece of that. Thank you so much. Don’t like the California roll… Now please welcome to the stage: Momose!” Momose’s high-production, synthetic jazz band recordings evoke a futuristic, global space of jazz: crisply digital in its aesthetic register, but so deeply individual as a voice, mediated within both technology and the range of stylistic affects present in the progressive possibilities of genre.
I used to work in a champagne bar when I was studying ethnomusicology. I used my tip money to fly myself to conferences as an unaffiliated scholar, and socialize under the wings of my musicology mentors. Attending (and a couple of times, presenting), my most enriching intellectual role was, frankly, as a bar-mate to any subject-matter-expert looking for a fellow freak to go deep-in-cups with and discuss the serious questions and nuanced appreciations of music.
There was something in the air for me then (at the Tex-Mex restaurant in the Old Albuquerque Hotel), that’s still active in my imagination, and which Momose reminds me of: the cosmopolitan experience of high-brow thinking and high class art forms in low-brow settings. At conferences, I met and spoke with musicians and scholars in the intoxicated drift of discussions and sounds addressed to geo-politics, institutional drama, theory, memories of music past and embraces of music present. I absorbed so much theoretical runoff from those grounded in and committed to the participatory lifestyle of music (eating, drinking, talking, dancing, playing), in the settings in which music had so often been celebrated and cultivated (bars, clubs, and so on). And in this, I gained a vocabulary for my fascination with the way that popular-genre-signifying music registers in the opaque, global story of cultural circulation and the media by which we gain access to our imperfect cross-cultural interpretations.
So, when I encountered Momose during this time - this simulation on “The Cabaret” of high production value, the global exchange of jazz style infused with Japanese language and sensibility, signifying the archetypal almost comic New York club - it became a core document of this phenomenon for me.
This week, I simply recommend listening to her incredible, idiosyncratic jazz, and perusing her YouTube channel and website. I’d start with this captivating performance of the ABC song.
—Alec Sturgis