ANIMAL | Album

HPM: The sounds of ANIMAL are intensely physical—stomping, vibrating, and rumbling forces surging through the body once the headphones are in place. Some textures scrape across the skin, while others reverberate deep in the chest, balancing crushing weight with trembling instability. How did you shape these sonic movements to create such a visceral, tactile presence?

Ash Fure: ANIMAL is a studio recording of a live performance on a custom instrument, and that rig has touch, tactility, and intense physicality built right into it. So you hear that in the recording, I think—the literal friction, the actual rub, the full-bodied muscular effort it takes. The setup looks like this: Two 12" speaker cones lying face up in an 8-foot square of tube lights. I stand inside that shifting frame of light, holding a large sheet of polycarbonate plastic that I use to warp a fixed media composition coming out of the cones in real-time. It's pool ball physics, collision orchestration: the cones shoot soundwaves straight up to the ceiling. I intersect that jet stream of energy inches from its point of release, using the angled plane of plastic to beam sound into the room like a laser. Pressing the polycarb straight onto the cones adds friction-filled distortion as it grinds against the drivers. Shifting its height depresses or accentuates different parts of the spectrum. So there's bump and grind friction and laser spatialization and physical filtering of sound and light, all fluidly unfolding and reflecting off the architecture as I whip and whirl the polycarb through the air. The process is intensely physical, both in terms of what it asks of my body (I am drenched in sweat by the end of a performance) and the blunt collision aesthetics of the energy chain.

HPM: Translating a sculptural and performative sound work into an album must have presented challenges—losing the physicality of the space, adapting sonic textures for stereo playback, and rethinking how listeners engage without the visual or interactive elements of the live setting.

What aspects of that physical interaction did you carry over, and what adjustments did you have to make to translate ANIMAL into an album that feels like it exists as an entity in its own right, distinct from the live performance format?

AF: One of the most exciting things about getting to experience ANIMAL live is hearing it interact with the architecture in which each performance takes place. A lot of the rhythmic material I use is made from impulse responses—those full spectrum clicks that acousticians use to capture the reflective identity of a space. At EastWest Studios, we put microphones all over the recording room, at the back walls, way up on the ceiling, and in the corners, trying to capture the dynamic reflection dance that happens live.

Once I had the physical performance recorded, I think it was actually relieving to enter a studio composition mode with the material. When I was developing the piece originally, I always had to be performing and composing at the same time,for two reasons: 1) not all sounds are receptive to this kind of live manipulation with polycarb, so it was very hands-on empirical research, and 2) the fixed media composition is just the clay I shape live with the poly, so it's designed to be spectrally dense and kind of flat as an audio file, because what we hear live is not the audio file going into the cones, but that file shaped and warped by my physical movements with the poly.

So, entering a studio process with the live imprint of the already well-captured physical performance allowed me to focus on the depth, layering, and spectral nuance that the tools of a well-stocked studio can bring. I've always made reallyspatial, spherical soundwork and so never been much interested in the stereo album format. This was really my first deep dive into making an album this way. And I learned so much from Lewis Pesacov, who guided the process as we moved through it.

HPM: You've created custom-made sound machines for ANIMAL that go beyond the limitations of traditional instruments. Why did you feel it was necessary to move away from conventional instruments and notation?

Is it an attempt to bypass the brain somehow and go straight to the nervous system?

AF: I spent a lot of years trying to denature Western classical instruments to find a kind of wildness and fragility in them. That was partly an aesthetic interest, just the type of sonic material I was after, compositionally, and partly a political position: the West's power structures, ethics, and worldviews are built into classical instruments and score-based notation at a DNA level. And I wanted to break through those, challenge them, and shake some other kind of energy and togetherness free. Eventually, I found I could get to the timbres, rhythms, and relational structures I was after more effectively by building my own setups. It's been a long and progressive process, and it builds on everything I learned about sound, form, and notation in those many years of working through the strictures and structures of concert music. But it's much more unbound now, my practice. Much closer to exactly what I want to offer the world at this exact moment.

HPM: If you could guide a first-time listener through ANIMAL, what would you tell them to focus on—or rather let go of?

AF: For me, in performance, ANIMAL is really a body ride. It's much closer to surfing than playing scales. I have to catch the waves of friction and propulsion. I have to hear the room, in a hyperpresent and spherical sense, to really play the specificities of each architecture. So, I guess I'd invite that of listeners too—to let the waves of sound carry you, to let it build and crest, and then break your focus open into these deep, dark waters.

Someone once described hearing ANIMAL like walking through a forest at night. At first, it feels like you can't see anything in the darkness like none of the known forms are there (melody, lyrics, hooks, drum loops), but once your senses adapt you start to notice this teeming nighttime ecosystem, all intricate and alive and dense with energy, just dancing with itself in the moonlight. I think that's the real invitation of this album: To let go of your rationalist, pattern-seeking brain and let your body be drawn forth by the visceral thrill of listening. And to trust that your animal capacity to sense will guide you where to go.