Ash Fure

The 2010s saw the most experimental strands of dance-oriented electronic music gradually twist and collapse into that fascinating black hole known as post-club or deconstructed club. Now - well past the midpoint of the 2020s - it may be time to rebuild. But beware of surprises: opening up this construction site may not mean bending down to pick up abstract digital shards and attempting to reassemble them ; rather, it may imply using the tangible vibrations of our own, deeply human bodies as building material. This is what the first album-length recording by Ash (born Ashley) Fure seems to suggest. An American avant-garde composer and sound artist active for over a decade, Fure here makes her debut in long-form recorded format.

The six parts of Animal are, in effect, the crystallization on record of an extremely intense performance devised by Fure and repeated live on several occasions. Wielding a large polycarbonate sheet, the musician positions herself at the center of a luminous enclosure which, besides her, contains two loudspeaker cones facing upward. The speakers spew out an amorphous audio track prepared in advance, which is then shaped “like clay,” in Fure’s own words, by the movements she imparts to the plate, causing the sound waves to be deflected, filtered, and polarized. Moreover, the plate is pressed, slammed, and rubbed against the cones; the performer’s body itself, as well as the architecture of the space in which the setup is installed, interact with the vibrations, altering them. The dialogue between Fure, the sonic devices, and the surrounding environment thus takes on the form of something halfway between an embrace and a struggle—one that, once concluded, regularly leaves the artist drenched in sweat.

A question naturally arises: does it make sense to listen to a studio version of a composition so conceived? Let us accept that experiencing it with or without the live performance simply amounts to engaging with two different works of art: then, the answer is decidedly yes. And what does the result of all this effort sound like? Like an astonishing fusion of powerful, perpetually mutating drones, subsonic industrial techno, telluric rhythms generated by the very fiber of being, and creaks of isolationist ambient. But it also sounds like a counterpart to the glitch cathedrals erected in the installations of Ryoji Ikeda, although here, the conceptual - and compositional - flow is reversed: instead of cascades of data rendered as sound, we witness here pure, rumbling analog sound attempting to break into cyberspace. This is, intentionally, a response to the frenzy surrounding Artificial Intelligence, to which Ash Fure replies with Natural Physicality: abandoning a race against machines that is lost from the outset on the level of computational power, and instead returning to our roots of flesh and blood as an impregnable fortress of human exceptionalism.

Ash Fure’s intuition captures the Zeitgeist while simultaneously reconnecting with a tradition that spans several decades and was already well established long before the digital revolution: Pierre Henry’s acousmatic orchestras of amplifiers; Alvin Lucier’s experiments extracting symphonic poems from the resonances of voices in a room, from brain waves, or from oscillating metal wires. Proof that certain languages speak the language of today - and that experimentation can step out of the ivory tower and become pulsating life.

04/01/2026