80 THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER13, 2021
MUSICAL EVENTS
GRINDING BASS
Ash Fure’s “Hive Rise” is a visceral encounter with sound.
BY ALEXROSS
ILLUSTRATION BY TOMA VAGNER
I
n the nineteen-nineties, when I fit
the profile of a young person, I some-
times ventured into tumultuous New
York dance clubs like Twilo and the
Tunnel, vaguely in the hope of making
some transient romantic connection but
mainly to experience the kind of over-
powering sonic sensuality in which these
clubs specialized. Inept at dancing, I
mimicked people around me, bopping
up and down as inconspicuously as pos-
sible. If I got close enough to the speak-
ers, I could feel bass beats passing
through my body—an elemental inter-
section of flesh and sound. The unre-
lenting noise was both gorgeous and
hellish. Afterward, I’d wander home on
empty streets, savoring the distant rum-
ble of the city as a new kind of silence.
Ash Fure and Lilleth Glimcher’s
performance installation “Hive Rise,”
which the Industry and MOCA recently
presented in Los Angeles, brought me
back to those long-ago nights on the
town. The venue was a warehouse-like
gallery at the Geffen Contemporary.
Fure, a composer and sonic artist whose
works often involve the live modifica-
tion of prerecorded electroacoustic
tracks, unleashed an hour-long storm
of sound, incorporating extremely low
bass frequencies that began below the
range of human hearing and slid up-
ward to a barely perceptible 30 Hz. For
a few minutes, I stood in front of a tower
of speakers, having taken the precau-
tion of inserting earplugs, and had a
purely visceral encounter with sound—
one that gave me the unsettling and
liberating sensation of being no longer
material in my own body.
In fact, the first iteration of “Hive
Rise,” from early 2020, took place in a
dance club—Berghain, the storied
techno palace in Berlin. But a dance
party this is not. There are no steady
beats, though various kinds of period-
icity come into play, including a rat-a-
tat flapping noise that Fure elicits by
holding a piece of paper over an up-
turned subwoofer. The music is amor-
phous, engulfing, gelatinous, ferocious.
Some passages evoke a subterranean
machine revving up, grinding as it as-
cends toward the surface; others sug-
gest tiny creatures excavating a cavern-
ous space. Climaxes have a rancid beauty,
the beauty of catastrophe and collapse.
Overlaid on the sonic foundation is
a theatrical ritual conceived by Glim-
cher, an interdisciplinary artist and di-
rector who has worked in New York,
Berlin, and elsewhere. At the Geffen
Contemporary, Fure was stationed at
one end of the gallery, amid an array
of subwoofers. A squad of fourteen
black-clad performers circulated
through the crowd, vocalizing into be-
spoke megaphones that had been gen-
erated on a 3-D printer. When mem-
bers of the group were close by, even
their slightest whispers had a tactile
immediacy, as if they were coming from
inside your head. Full-throated cries
bounced around the space with thun-
derous force.
The performers followed an unpre-
dictable, jagged choreography. Some-
times they stood in place, in statuesque
clusters; for a while, they were posi-
tioned around Fure, on risers. At other
times, they whipped their bodies back
and forth or moved swiftly from one
place to another. The spectators milled
about in pursuit of the squad, maneu-
vering around neoprene sculptural forms
that were devised by Xavi Aguirre and
stock-a-studio. We had our own cho-
reography—that pandemic-era dance
of avoidance we have perfected in
crowded supermarket aisles. The mood
was one of bliss and angst intermingled.
A squad of fourteen black-clad performers vocalized into bespoke megaphones. What cataclysm does “Hive Rise”
