BWV 905 – Fantasy and Fugue in D minor (not that one)

Plus: George Stauffer on Bach's Organ Works, fromis_9 go "Supersonic," and more!

Unbound—the debut release from Wisconsin-based Ojibwe band Bizhiki—is a paradox: an ambient-adjacent album that’ll make you sit up straight. Yes, the album has a lot of Bon Iver in it, both literally (Bizhiki’s producers and other collaborators have all worked on Bon Iver projects) and sonically. So there are oft-focus guitars and synth pads; signal-processed everything; as much reverb as you can stomach. But don’t hold it against them. The music is anything but run-of-the-mill, as you find out about a minute into opener “Franklin Warrior,” when singer Joe Rainey’s voice cuts through the musical haze with powwow-style vocalizations; doubly so when he jumps up the octave about a minute later. That kind of juxtaposition, of ultra-calm instrumentals with the intensity of powwow singing and drumming styles, is the album’s bread and butter. Sometimes the juxtaposition is within tracks (“Gigawaabamin (Come Through)”); sometimes it’s between them, as with how absolute banger “SGC” clears away the cobwebs from the dreamy title track “Unbound.” Sequences like that also illustrate how Bizhiki let rhythms and timbres from powwow drumming (“SGC”) influence their programmed drum beats in the other tracks (“Unbound”). Don’t ignore the lyrics either: on a track like “Trying to Live,” they’ll break your heart.

BWV 905 – Fantasy and Fugue in D minor (not that one)

Given the somewhat more relaxed pace of this Bach series, and its complete lack of constraints on what goes where,¹ it might’ve been tempting to frontload things. Kick things off with the hits to draw people in (?); go with the pieces I already know best; start out with the good stuff.

Please don’t think I’m overcompensating by making the D-minor Fantasy and Fugue BWV 905 the second piece in the series. In case you didn’t read the title: no, this is not that D-minor Fantasy and Fugue (the “Chromatic” one BWV 903). That one is much longer, more ambitious, more influential (it was one of Bach’s most-copied pieces in the 18th century, both in the sense of literal manuscript copies and pieces imitating it), more complex, more famous today, and probably better. When I get around to the Chromatic Fantasy, I’ll have to measure my playing against Jaco Pastorius. By contrast, here you can forget about jazz bassists: harpsichordists don’t bother with BWV 905. The best you’re going to find is this version of the Fantasy (no Fugue!) by Robert Hill. The other “complete harpsichord works” sets don’t even bother with that much.

As usual, you can partially blame the Neue Bach-Ausgabe editors, who withheld BWV 905 from their edition until finally putting it in an appendix-like volume of “doubtful” keyboard works. And it’s only fair to say that they could easily be right. The one surviving copy of this piece from the eighteenth century (actually just a fragment of the Fantasy—thus Robert Hill) is from England, always a dubious proposition; aside from that, all other manuscripts have been lost to fires and Allied bombs. It’s uncomfortable at best to have to rely on the word of nineteenth-century publishers for attribution. What did they really know?

It’s also understandable that a certain kind of editor would want to exclude this piece from the canon. If you were following along during Bach at Bond, you’ll remember how commonplace this kind of argument is for the “doubtful” organ works:

Isn’t this too clunky, too amateurish, too wrong to be Bach? It doesn’t fit our image of the perfect composer—perfect, at least, once you get rid of all these other doubtful pieces too…

And you can see what they mean. Leading into measure 8 (about 0:21 in the recording), for instance, there’s a short bit that really does sound clumsy if you pay attention:

It’s a moment like this that’ll make you appreciate the classical ban on parallel octaves. That’s not something I normally care all that much about (I’ve found that music theory enthusiasts and instructors are much more into correcting parallels than actual card-carrying music theorists are). But here, the upper voices create the illusion of parallel octaves with the bass, and there’s nowhere to hide: all you hear are the octaves. Without warning, the texture goes from 3-D to completely flat. And it can’t be a slip of the pen; there’s no obvious way to fix it.

There are two other spots, both in the fugue, which have a similar problem: the music suddenly thins out to a bare octave. Those do have obvious fixes, and I’ve changed the offending pitches in both passages. Let’s play a game: if you care for such things, try to spot the changes. (Score available at IMSLP.) The first person to email me with the correct measure numbers (or images of the relevant bars) can pick one of the four pieces I’ll cover in the remaining posts for 2024, and/or get a shout-out in a future post. (No points for wisecracks about the mistakes in measure like 51 or 53.) Warning: they’re subtle changes, indeed making the relevant passages stand out less than they would have otherwise. 

Leaving aside those awkward bits, the fugue certainly doesn’t seem all that…Bach-y. It’s mostly episodes, and mostly in two voices. There’s not a ton of harmonic range: all but one of the entrances of the subject is in the tonic or dominant, and that’s frankly misleading—the fugue really does mainly stick to the home key. And man the keyboard writing can be weird: all these strings of parallel thirds and sixths? That’s the kind of thing you expect to see in keyboard music from 1600 or 1850, not Bach.

There’s just one problem with this logic: all of that actually does sound like Bach, albeit when he was young. The harmonic and textural stuff sounds a lot like the A-minor Prelude and Fugue (no, no that one, relax) BWV 551. And even the parallel thirds and sixths are familiar from the nightmares of anybody who’s learned the D-minor Vivaldi Concerto BWV 596. Such things were clearly within Bach’s grasp, and few others at the time could play or write them.

The Bach/Vivaldi comparison points up what, for me, is by far the most interesting thing about this piece: its Italianate character. To be clear, it’s not in Vivaldi style at all—which should be comforting for anybody who thinks it might be by the pre-Vivaldi Bach of BWV 551. But both the Fantasy and the Fugue sound an awful lot like somebody trying to imitate, say, Albinoni. By the way, Bach, in addition to arranging oodles of music by Albinoni, also taught basso continuo playing from Albinoni violin sonatas throughout his life.

The Fantasy in particular is really pretty close to an Italian trio sonata movement, with the two upper parts in the right hand and the continuo line in the left. All of the melodic and harmonic gestures are Italian instrumental clichés, which isn’t to say that they’re bad or even rote; the quick move to a Neapolitan harmony (the E-flat in m.1) is somewhat unusual and certainly helps spice things up. The Fantasy has nice pacing: I like how it introduces the new “sighing” idea in m.9 (about 0:28) and it has a real high point at m.15 (about 0:45). It’s not the most exciting piece in the world, but it’s nice enough and certainly worth more than the paltry attention it’s been paid.²

Even more so for the fugue, this fugue that Robert Hill didn’t even want to record. What a fun little piece! If it came down to us with Handel’s name attached, I don’t think anybody would bat an eye. (Although that’s also because Handel’s keyboard works have remained inexplicably neglected by comparison.) I make the comparison advisedly: Handel’s keyboard writing is way more Italian (especially in this pre-Vivaldi kind of way) than Bach’s, and his fugues also have a tendency to wander away from the subject or even the form. Just like Handel’s fugues, this one has long stretches of pure keyboard writing with no imitation or thematic material (consider mm.27–30 and 42–45). Just like Handel’s fugues, the countersubjects are treated pretty loosely. 

And just like Handel’s fugues, this one has a winsome subject that really helps keep things going. Sure, it’s not utterly original in construction, but it’s nicely balanced, with a memorable profile and lively rhythm. Rhythm is really a lot of what drives this fugue: much of it is in the chugging, continuous-sixteenths mode that Bach would adopt post-exposure to Vivaldi, but some passages (mm.34–5) have a nice stop-and-start energy, while others (mm.42–45) couple a jaunty rhythm with moments of genuine harmonic interest.

Just like with all the other “doubtful” pieces, there’s no real way to adjudicate whether this piece is “BACH or NOT.” (Please imagine flames coming out from the top of the “A” in BACH.) As I’ve hinted, I think the case against it is surprisingly weak (note that I only mentioned “awkward” passages—there aren’t any real “errors”), and the piece has a lot in common with certified Bach from his early days. Why not?

In any event, the important thing is ultimately what the piece is actually like, regardless of who wrote it. And here too, I think BWV 905 deserves better than it’s gotten. It may not blow the doors down like the Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue, but it’s a nice, refreshing piece with a few tricks up its sleeve. More harpsichordists should give it a go. Just don’t leave the fugue off this time.

J.S. Bach: The Organ Works 

It takes some parsing, but, believe it or not, George Stauffer and his editors are sending a message with the title of his new book. J.S Bach: The Organ Works is not the same as The Organ Music of J.S. Bach, and I don’t just mean that one is published by Oxford and the other by Cambridge. Stauffer’s book is not trying to emulate or replace Peter Williams’. Thank goodness.

Williams’ book, which I’ve mentioned a couple times here (and invariably consulted) is a compendium in the strict sense: an attempt to give, in concise form, the most relevant information about every Bach organ piece.³ That can make for pretty dusty copy, which isn’t helped by Williams’ love of dry musical analysis for its own sake. He does give evaluations of most pieces, but—what could you expect from an organist-musicologist?—the laurels inevitably go to the strictest and most complex pieces. It can make for, as Stauffer puts it, “maddening” reading.

If Williams’ book puts The Organ Music first, Stauffer’s puts J.S. Bach in prime position. The culmination of a career devoted to the composer (and a long-awaited one—I was expecting this book to be released near the beginning of the Bach at Bond series!), this book could almost be seen as an organ-centric Bach biography in the “life-and-works” vein. Over a third of the chapters are devoted to life history and any information we know about Bach that pertains to organ composition or performance. 

That’s a much wider ambit than Williams’. It means that, in addition to valuable discussions of what we know or can infer about Bach’s instruments, performance practice, teaching, and composition process, the range of “organ music” under consideration is much larger. Basso continuo performance on the organ is relevant. So are cantatas that include obbligato organ parts: they get a whole chapter.

One of Stauffer’s talents as a writer has always been to bring in-the-weeds (and even completely novel) scholarly research to bear on writing for a more or less general audience. His Mass in B Minor book is especially good in this regard, drawing novel connections with sacred music repertoires in Dresden while also giving extremely readable and not particularly technical analysis of the music. The Organ Works book seems pitched at a slightly more knowledgeable audience—I would say that it aims one notch higher than this blog does in terms of throwing around terminology. 

Still, this book largely does the same. For instance, you might come away from it thinking that everybody must know about the importance of theorist Johann Theile for Bach’s understanding of counterpoint. You would be wrong; the only way you’d know about him is from reading David Yearsley’s book on Bach and counterpoint. Similarly, as with the Mass in B Minor book, Stauffer has a delightful way of folding manuscript sigla into the flow of a text in ways that can seem almost conversational, and definitely not pedantic. Stauffer wears it lightly, but you’ll get to know a lot of less-than-known stuff through this book.

With all that information and the book’s broad scope, that gives Stauffer a great deal less space than Williams for the “and works” part of his book. (The two books are roughly the same size.) So, in almost exactly the same style as Christoph Wolff in his Bach’s Musical Universe, Stauffer opts for more synoptic overviews, focusing on collections and broader themes. (Like Wolff, some of the remarks on individual pieces can feel a little scattered or random; it’s tough to zoom in when you don’t have space to do so uniformly.) Some pieces inevitably get short shrift: Herr Gott, dich loben alle wir is still waiting for its place in the sun. The second trio sonata (!) barely gets mentioned. Except for Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, “dubious” pieces basically go unmentioned: I was disappointed to see the “Little” Preludes and Fugues left out, given that I’ve seen Stauffer advocate for their potential authenticity in public before. Maybe Oxford insisted that 600-odd pages was a hard cap.

As the choice of pieces to discuss indicates, Stauffer’s book, like Williams’ can be surprisingly conservative. In both cases (Stauffer even less than Williams), there is relatively little questioning of the orthodoxy on what constitutes an “organ work” (or at least questioning the coherence of that concept). The Art of Fugue isn’t considered, let alone any of the “clavier” pieces that Benjamin Alard or Robert Levin have tried on the organ. There is barely any mention of pedal harpsichords or clavichords (Joel Speerstra’s book isn’t in the bibliography), and every piece is approached entirely from the perspective of the organ. (Stauffer is quite a good organist, and his performing and teaching experience radiates from every page.) Of course, I live in a glass house: Bach at Bond, as stated explicitly, was conservative in exactly the same way. Still, I would have appreciated even that kind of explicit acknowledgement.

The book can also be a bit conservative in its approach to analysis, which isn’t to say that it’s necessarily wrong or bad. Stauffer especially likes labeling motives and sometimes associating them with rhetorical figures, and he has a longstanding fascination with finding ways in which Prelude-Fugue pairs are “unified” in some way. Whether or not those links were actually intended, his analyses at minimum do a nice job of explaining why these pieces make good sense together for us. At any rate, his analyses are infinitely more readable than Williams’.

Indeed, the whole book is quite readable, and speeds by pretty quickly despite its density of often novel information. Yes: novel even if you’ve been reading this blog religiously, and novel even if you’ve read Williams’ book and all of Wolff’s. Stauffer includes scads and scads of details that I left out, didn’t know, or got wrong (oops!). For a very long time, this book will be the last word on “J.S. Bach as organist.” If only they could have used that as the title: unfortunately, it was already taken, for a book edited by one George Stauffer.

What I’m Listening To

Julian Prégardien and Kristian Bezuidenhout – Schubert: Die Schöne Müllerin

Hey! Quit staring. His name is Dumbo. Yeah, yeah, I know, creative name. But we’ll get to know him later—I wanna talk about a few other things first.

I should start by saying that this is my favorite recording of this piece in years. At minimum since Matthias Goerne’s take on it for the same label, and that’s from 2009; and in many ways Prégardien and Bezuidenhout’s version is more interesting. The sound is fabulous and nuanced. These are two excellent musicians at the top of their respective games. 

If you know either Prégardien or Bezuidenhout, you may be able to guess that this will be a “historically informed” approach to Die Schöne Müllerin. Bezuidenhout is on fortepiano (a salon-scale one to boot) and Prégardien uses what we know of vocal technique from around 1800; his low-vibrato, lighter singing matches excellently with the sounds Bezuidenhout draws out of his instrument.

But the most blatant “historically informed” signal is their widespread use of ornamentation. Lots of little changes, appoggiaturas, turns, shifts up and down the octave; it’s all very much in line with (but not a rote rendition of) the kinds of changes that Schubert’s favorite singer Johann Michael Vogl liked to make, as purportedly preserved in Diabelli’s 1830 edition of the piece. (It’s on IMSLP. Note that Bezuidenhout and Prégardien, unlike “Vogl,” do not opt for any changes to the lyrics or the keys of the songs.) 

These changes are very fun, if a bit distracting the first time; at its worst, the listening experience can feel a bit like it’s devolving into a game of Spot The Difference. And, while some of the changes are nicely musical and/or motivated by the text (we go down the octave when the word “tief” appears), a lot of them just feel like changes for the sake of changes. That’s not really a bad thing; boredom and whimsy were surely as real for musicians in 1823 as they are now, and nobody’s really hurt by any of the changes. (I hope we’re beyond Werktreue pearl-clutching about the sacred notes of the score.) Still, if there’s not much gain, it can sometimes feel like a bit of a wasted effort—couldn’t they spend that thought and energy on the core of the interpretation?

Look, I know he’s big. Yes, I can see him waving his trunk at us. But just hang with me for another few paragraphs.

You’re probably wondering when the other shoe is going to drop. At least, that’s what I was trying to set up with my opening: “favorite in years” is a compliment, but a backhanded one. What’s keeping it out of the top spot in general? (For the record, I personally think that Schöne Müllerin recordings have to live up to Aksel Schiøtz.)

It’s not the ornaments; like I said, they aren’t hurting anyone. But I do think that the things that bother me most about this recording are tied up with the desire to be “historical.” In particular, Prégardien uses an incessant messa di voce, that little swelling on each note—an excellent effect and one that people definitely used more then than they do now. But, man. When it’s used on every. note. of. a. phrase. (including. the. short. ones.), it can just sound mannered and disjointed, which isn’t even to mention the ruinous effect on legato (or at least our perception of the musical line). 

Elsewhere, Prégardien’s search for a “lighter” vocal tone can also come off a bit like a mannerism. I love pulling back from musical climaxes as much as anyone—it’s practically necessary in Chopin!—but I’m really not sure that “Ungeduld” is the place. In general, both performers do a good job of exploring a greater variety of timbres and range of dynamics, but it’s often confined to the quieter end of the spectrum. (Some of the hushed effects are ravishing.) That said, they’re certainly capable of bigger gestures; the more extraverted songs (“Mein,” “Eifersucht und Stolz,” the second half of “Trockne Blumen”) bring out sides of them that I really wish showed up elsewhere. 

Okay. I think it’s time. Everybody say hello to the elephant in the room!!

Julian is probably not the first Prégardien you think of. Not even as a singer, and not even for Schubert; my playlist of “Prégardien Schubert” has about 7 hours of music and nothing by Julian. Inevitably, this recording will get compared to the two his father Christoph made, and especially the earlier one with Andreas Staier. (It’s tough to make a direct comparison: the earlier recording is the one with fortepiano, but the later one is bolder in using vocal ornaments. Julian’s recording, of course, combines those two aspects of historical performance.)

To my ear, it’s a somewhat cruel comparison. (For both members of the duo: Bezuidenhout is wonderful, but Staier is possibly the very best to ever record on fortepiano.) I actually think I prefer Julian’s voice, and he’s younger than Christoph was when he made his first recording. But I infinitely prefer Christoph’s style of singing for this. It’s just much more straightforward, making for much better direct communication both in terms of the music and the meanings behind it.

If you want two comparisons, try “Ungeduld” and “Die liebe Farbe.” In both cases, the simpler approach of Christoph (and Staier) draws much less attention to itself; and in both cases, the music sings forth a whole lot more clearly. Christoph’s recording doesn’t quite have the highs of Julian’s (if you want a comparison that makes Dad look worse, try “Eifersucht und Stolz”), and Julian has still produced a lovely and fascinating recording. But it’s not tempting me to expand the “Prégardien Schubert” playlist. And Aksel Schiøtz’s position seems quite safe. Hope you liked meeting the elephant. 

Louis Cole with Jules Buckley and Metropole Orkest – nothing

Look, I have no clue what’s happening here either. And for the record, you’re probably less confused than me: I saw this album recommended as a jazz record. I guess?

Sure, there are big-band elements here, and Cole’s drumming (wow!) definitely reflects jazz training and chops. But suffice it to say that that is not everything that’s happening here. Forget about the skeleton costumes for a moment. This is a bewilderingly omnivorous pop album; a track like “Life” can convince you that you’re listening to orchestral film music, drum ‘n’ bass, techno, jazz, or even a dash of hyperpop, all in rapid succession. Naturally, the title track of the same album is a pretty good pastiche of the “Adagietto” from Mahler 5. Naturally.

There’s a certain novelty value to any new song using big band sounds; I’m convinced this is a large part of why Family Guy was successful. Still, the “pure” big band tracks on this album (“Cruisin’ for P”) lose that novelty pretty fast. It takes a track like “Things Will Fall Apart,” with its wild collisions of styles, to keep the fun alive. But to be fair to Cole, “Life” and “Things Will Fall Apart” aren’t just wacky novelty tracks; they’re also actually just pretty good songs, albeit ones that have been juiced up beyond all imagining by their arrangements.

Cole is smart: this album is crazy front-loaded, and those two tracks are by far the best stuff on it. There’s more boring single-genre stuff later on (“Who Cares 2” has such an apt name!), and even later highlights (“Wizard Funk”) don’t have the same oomph as the big earlier tracks. 

You may think this whole project is silly and in poor taste. You would be right: in case it wasn’t obvious from opener “Ludovicus Cole Est Frigus” (seriously??), there’s a laughable grandiosity to the whole project. Luckily, the music knows how to laugh at itself too. At the very least give the first three tracks a try. They’re better than any of the actual new jazz albums I heard these past couple months.⁴

Cathy Fink and Marcy Marxer with Chao Tian – FROM CHINA TO APPALACHIA

It’s one of my favorite genres, and it makes a whole lot of sense when you think about it. Buzzy plucked strings and hammered dulcimers; slide-filled fiddles; pentatonic scales. Appalachian music and Chinese traditional musics are a seamless fit.

I’m not joking when I call it a “genre”; this album far from the first to bring the two together. Really, almost every Chinese traditional musician with an American profile seems to give it a go. My personal favorites are also just some of my favorite musicians. Wu Man. Wu Fei. If you saw Wu Fei here at UChicago this past spring, I apologize if my program notes were a bit purple; I really dig her music, and the record with Abigail Washburn is one of her best.

The Wu Fei/Abigail Washburn album is also a bit more syncretic than Fink+Marxer/Tian. Most of its tracks are mashups or medleys, whereas Fink/Marxer+Tian can sometimes feel like they’re “taking turns” with each others’ music. (It surely helps that Washburn lived in China.) Still, the  FROM CHINA TO APPALACHIA approach has its own benefits: since each song is more or less “what it is,” it gives much more extended excursions into “Appalachian yangqin” and “Chinese banjo” territory. In some ways, by not making the music “fusion,” the instruments themselves are brought further out of their comfort zones.

Of course, it’s not entirely an accident that modern performers of Chinese traditional musics fit so well with American folk music; just as with every other folk music performance tradition, the modern performance of this music has been heavily shaped by scholars and conservatories with nationalist agendas. A solo yangqin album by Anna Guo, consisting entirely “traditional” music, can still sound weirdly “folk” (as in, American folk musics), precisely because the arrangements and performance practice have been shaped by Europeanizing tendencies. It doesn’t hurt that a lot of “traditional” music (everywhere, not just China or Appalachia) is quite new. (“Galloping Over the Vast Grasslands” is a lot of fun but incredibly different from any older yangqin repertoire.)

So yangqin performance is already a little bit “fusion,” a little bit “world music.” Then again, you could say the same for Appalachian music. Combining banjos, dulcimers, and fiddles is already bringing together instrumental traditions spanning three continents. Swapping out one dulcimer for another just continues the process. Looking forward to how they do Appalachian guqin next.

fromis_9 – Supersonic

KISS OF LIFE – “Sticky”

(G)I-DLE – “Klaxon”

Don’t get the wrong idea: I never said I was going to talk about “the best albums” in any category in any given post. Taemin’s latest is an absolute gem, and better than any of these songs (yes, I really am saying that about a fromis_9 release). But hey: as I write this, it’s still August for another hour or two (although it’s looking like it’ll go up in the first hours of September). Let’s keep the vibes summery as long as we can.

More than any other music industry I’m aware of, Korea’s is obsessed with the idea of seasonality. Sure, American artists put out Christmas songs and vie for “Song of the Summer”; but there’s no equivalent to the pressure for every release to conform to the season. (Wilhelm Müller wrote that Die Schöne Müllerin is “to be read in Winter,” but harmonia mundi doesn’t seem to have been fussed about releasing it in the summer.) There’s no American song that will reliably climb the charts every February like BTS’s “Spring Day” or Busker Busker’s “Cherry Blossom Ending.” I’m sure there are examples, but I can’t even really think of an explicitly Spring-themed American pop song off the top of my head. (“April Come She Will”?)

All of that can make “What does Summer sound like?” into something of an existential question for K-pop groups. These are probably the three most prominent examples this year. Not that I’m planning to be comprehensive. There have been other big songs—“Supernova” continues its reign—and other Summer-themed songs I don’t care to discuss. I won’t talk about the lyrics (“Heat and sweat…”). But you get the idea.

“Klaxon” is the most old-fashioned, which (coupled with aespa’s current stranglehold on the charts) has made I Sway the first (G)I-DLE album in a while not to have a song reach perfect all-kill chart status. Some of that old-fashioned sound is deliberate—all those retro horns and strings. But the very idea of a bold, brightly-colored Summer Song seems like something from ten years ago. (Even if Idle’s own “Queencard” succeeded on more or less those terms last year.)

“Sticky” and “Supersonic” are both much more up to speed with the current Sound of the Summer. Ironically, part of that is something that should be quite familiar to Idle: the kind of meandering chord progression that I associate with J-pop (most famously in the Royal road progression) and which has taken over K-pop ever since the success of TWS’s “Plot Twist” and Idle’s own “Fate” earlier this year. You’d think they would’ve built on what had worked most recently; in some ways, “Klaxon”’s shift to a dated sound was a pretty bold risk.

In any case, “Sticky” and “Supersonic” have more in common than a general harmonic vocabulary. They both use the same kind of washed-out, soft-synths, Antonoffized or PinkPantheress’d sound over an “exotic” beat; in KISS OF LIFE’s case, it’s derived from Afrobeats, while fromis got theirs from Miami Bass. Both songs rely on repeated single-word hooks, with the same initial “S” sound.⁵ Both run the risk of being boring.

I think “Supersonic” does a better job of avoiding that risk. It’s got a much more powerful chorus in general, coupling a more rhythmically interesting hook (“super super, supersonic, supersonic” vs. “sticky…sticky”) with high notes more exciting than anything in Kiof’s song. The instrumental is way more active, almost hyperactive—a hallmark of fromis songs since “Love Bomb” (listen to it!) and “Fun” (do not!).

Kiof do have fromis mostly beat in the verses. That’s partly a casualty of the difference in talent levels between the groups. All four members of Kiof can shine in the spotlight, whereas Saerom and Jiheon (my fromis favorites) can’t sing or rap to save their lives, often leading songwriters to just give up on their parts. The beginning of the second verse of “Supersonic” is pretty atrocious.

But luckily—and how often do you say this about the second verse?—what comes next is absolutely the highlight of the song (1:22). Those active instrumentals undergo a brilliantly-timed changeup, switching to a bouncing bass with much more pitch definition under much harder-hitting percussive beats. All of that’s designed to accompany one of the biggest Jiwon moments in fromis’s discography: she really goes for it on “Don’t be worried….” It’s a very extroverted moment in a song that, for all its activity and intensity, still does its best to fit into the “muted” trends of this summer.

I’ve seen people call Miami Bass the “genre” of “Supersonic.” That’s a bit hilarious to me (what would 2 Live Crew say?), but it made a lot more sense when I saw that Sabrina Carpenter songs with similar beats are also getting called that. In its own way, this song sounds to me like the fromis_9 version of Sabrina Carpenter; slightly frenetic and K-popified, but also laid back in its own way. Summery.

But this is fromis_9, so the album tracks are inevitably where the action is. I assume that “Beat the Heat” was also commissioned as a single and was ultimately relegated to album track status for not fitting the trend. (The same must have happened to Everglow’s “Colourz,” to far worse results.) Like “Klaxon,” and in the same spirit as older Summer Songs like ONF’s “Beautiful Beautiful” (what a difference 3 years makes!), “Beat the Heat” is brash and full of textural contrast. Only the prechorus sounds like Summer 2024; the chorus itself is way too catchy and fun. The verses are way too tuneful. “Supersonic” was definitely the better bet, even if this is the better song.

I’m not sure if “Take a Chance” is also better—it’s much simpler in almost every way—but it’s also exactly the kind of song I tend to like. The chorus has a great tune and an excellent undercurrent of burbling synths; the verses, for a change, are also really pretty. “Take a Chance” takes fewer risks but also has no sections that I wish had been nixed from the final song. 

It also sounds nothing like Summer to me. Pledis, in a somewhat perplexing business decision, decided to release this fromis_9 summer album on 12 August; imagine releasing a song about Pumpkin Spice the week of Thanksgiving. But if you make the B-side a song about snowmen, maybe you’ll hedge your bets. And maybe fromis will take a chance on “Take a Chance.”

Also liked…

Gillian Welch and David Rawlings – Woodland

illuminati hotties – POWER

Rebeca Ormodia – African Pianism, Vol. 2

SOFT PLAY – HEAVY JELLY

Bedouin Burger – Ma Li Beit

Navy Blue – Memoirs in Armour

The Po’ Ramblin’ Boys – Wanderers Like Me

What I’m Reading

Enough book talk above, but a few others:

• Our Cow Angus (no, seriously)

• Harper’s – My Auschwitz Vacation

• The New Yorker – Infiltrating the Far Right

• Food is Stupid – What happens if you put mayo in an ice cream maker?

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1. Or when: look, I said “approximately” once a month, and as I’m writing this particular section, it’s still August….

2. Relatedly, I have zero clue, I mean zero, why this is titled “Fantasia”—and this is one of the few Bach-adjacent subjects I’ve actually done real research on.

3. Its rough equivalent for the keyboard works, which I’m sure will eventually get a mention here, is by David Schulenberg.

4. For the record, I’m not counting the newly released Wayne Shorter live album. But I do owe esperanza spalding an apology.

5. Lots of people have commented on the “Super” trend from “Super Shy” through “Super Lady” to “Supernova” and “Supersonic”; but I think it’s just a general reflection of songwriters’ remit to use “strong consonants.” (All of those songs except “Super Lady” are by foreigners.)