ASH FURE - Animal

After the 2010s saw the most experimental strands of dance electronica gradually twist and crumple into that fascinating black hole known as post-club music or deconstructed club, now, with the mid-2020s well behind us, it may finally be time to rebuild. But beware of surprises: starting this reconstruction might not mean stooping to pick up abstract digital shards and trying to piece them back together, but rather using the concrete vibrations of our own, deeply human body as raw material. This, at least, is what seems to be suggested by the first album-length recording by Ash (born Ashley) Fure, the American avant-garde composer and sound artist who has been active for more than a decade.

The six parts of "Animal" are, in effect, the crystallization on record of an intensely physical performance devised by Fure and performed live on multiple occasions. Wielding a large polycarbonate plate, the musician positions herself at the center of a luminous enclosure that also houses two upward-facing speaker cones. The speakers spew out a formless audio track prepared in advance, which is shaped "like clay," in Fure's own words, by the movements she imparts to the plate, causing the sound waves to be deflected, filtered, polarized. What's more, the plate is pressed, slammed, and rubbed against the cones; the performer's body, as well as the architecture of the space housing the setup, interact with the vibrations, altering them; the interplay between Fure, the sound devices and the surrounding environment thus takes on the shape of something halfway between an embrace and a struggle, which, once concluded, regularly leaves the artist drenched in sweat.

One question naturally arises: does it make sense to listen to a studio version of a composition conceived in this way? If one is willing to accept that experiencing it with or without witnessing the live performance amounts simply to engaging with two different works of art, the answer is a resounding yes. And what does the product of such effort sound like? Like an impressive crossbreed of massive, perpetually mutating drones, subsonic industrial techno, tellurian rhythms generated from the very fiber of being, and the creaks of isolationist ambient. But also like a counterpart to the glitch cathedrals erected in Ryoji Ikeda's installations, where the conceptual flow — but also the compositional one — is reversed: rather than cascades of data rendered as sound, what we witness here is pure, rumbling analog sound trying to force its way into cyberspace. It is, deliberately, a response to Artificial Intelligence frenzy, to which Ash Fure replies with Natural Physicality: giving up the race against machines on the terrain of computational power — a race already lost from the start — and returning instead to our animal root of flesh and blood as the impregnable fortress of human exceptionality.

Ash Fure's insight captures the zeitgeist while also reconnecting with a decades-old tradition, well established long before the digital revolution: the acousmatic amplifier orchestras of Pierre Henry, the experiments of Alvin Lucier, who extracted symphonic poems from the resonances of voices in a room, from brainwaves, or from oscillating metal wires. Proof that certain languages still speak to the present, and that experimentation can step out of the ivory tower and become pulsing life.

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04/01/2026