There is no warning and no chance to prepare. The instant you press play on Ash Fure’s Animal, a mass of thundering sub-bass hits you like a predator pouncing on its prey. With consciousness too slow to react, some ancient, primal region of the brain lights up. Suddenly, you find yourself in fight or flight mode, pumped with adrenaline, heart racing and palms sweating.
The US experimental musician and composer has dedicated a significant part of her career to exploring the physicality of music and our instinctual feedback to sound, with The Force Of Things: An Opera For Air (2014–2022) and Hive Rise (2020) tackling the human body’s relationship with fear and the palpable effect that sonic waves have on the psyche. However, none of her previous works are quite as immediate and visceral as Animal.
Using an oversized polycarbonate sheet and her own presence as a speaker cabinet, Fure sculpts, refracts, and directs the acoustic pressure of upturned 12” subwoofer cones. The results are mesmerising. Globs of billowing, pulsating low frequencies saturate the soundscape, then, through painstaking manipulation, subside into clouds of abstract, staticky techno ambient à la Actress.
The bodily and the animalistic are not constrained to the experiential side of the music – they provide a crucial element of its creation. The intensity and purposefulness of Fure’s movements when she performs Animal are transfixing. On video, we see her in the middle of a trance-like workout session, pushing her body to a simultaneously painful and liberating peak. Drenched in neon, she battles the plastic plate into submission through significant physical effort – shaking, waving, and bending – while perhaps having a bit of a laugh at the expense of the trope of the tortured artist.
During the album’s most distinctly shaped moments, Fure appears to energetically reject the deconstruction of club music. Instead, she assembles explicit dancefloor patterns from basic elements as an antipode. While it’s often all about the bass, the textural qualities and atmospheric flair of her aesthetic are just as compositionally important, both in emphasising the pieces’ relentless side and keeping them in a state of constant flux, from sparse to voluminous and from overwhelming to delicate. Here, clusters of ASMR-like trills, scraped metal, and knotty faux claps undulate at the limit of perception, then surge into another head-popping attack.
Ultimately, Animal remains geared towards live experiences, with its most empathic sections riddled with the sort of bass that cannot hit as hard as required when reproduced on a home stereo or headphones. Much like the music of Sunn O))) or Kevin Richard Martin’s The Bug, it yearns for the organ-shaking power of club PAs. It aims to be felt – vibrating your guts and scrambling your brain – while still providing plenty of pleasure for the id even when experienced outside of an ideal listening environment.
