“do something”
The work of sound artist ake (阿科)
Back in summer 2024, I met the improviser and sound artist ake, visiting Europe from China. I didn’t see the outdoor performance she did for Yaqin Si’s Daybreak Concert Series, but during one of the Expanded Improvisation Workshops I’ve been co-running with the theorist-artist-improviser Mattin, we were introduced to the piece, or exercise, ake had performed there—of which more below—and which, on this occasion, saw us go into a soundproofed room, individually and then collectively, and scream.
This was by no means the first, nor will it be the last exercise or piece or framework or practice to deal with that kind of intensity. (Take Mattin’s own records with Junko.) But in the context of the workshop, it opened up a whole other dimension of cracks and fissures within the social, within individual experiences of alienation and their collectivisation we’d been thinking through, via Mattin’s concept of social dissonance, and via the collective practice we came across in the “small musical commons” of Eddie Prévost’s weekly, basement-based London Improvisation workshop.
In such moments, something’s released into the air: a sound, a possibility. There’s a risk you fall apart. Falling apart, holding thing stogether, being held or holding them in, these of restraint and constraint as both positive and negative factors in socially-atomised existences, all these are concerns ake’s work raises.
A few days later, in another basement, this one a rehearsal studio, ake joined a few of us and played a sustained violin drone that, once more, changed the whole atmosphere of the music we’d been playing up to that point: unwavering, even more than one might be able to face in its implacable intensity, and yet with a distance, an inner barrier, inside it—constricted, and yet full of variation and possibility. That kind of framework is at once interruption and continuation or expansion of pressures already present, but silenced, both within and outside the space of performance. A bowed drone drawn out on a violin might seem the antithesis of the exploration of the scream: restraint rather than catharsis, reductionism rather than performance art-adjacent excess. But within the world that ake’s practice exists in and creates, they share something fundamental in common.
ake’s biography describes her as “a surrogate weeper, currently working and living in Beijing, conducting site and context specific sound experiments, events, behaviors and installations, also writing poetry, being a musician, organizer and waiter”. Among other activities, ake “accidentally initiated the nomadic space A2 space”, and appears as part of collaborative projects on Zhu Wenbo’s Beijing-based cassette label Zoomin’ Night, as well as Yan Jun’s sub jam cassette box Silence is Shit, but ake (阿科), released in January 2025 as Sub jam 020, is her first solo album.
Working with the material to hand, ake’s work gives a new, subversive meaning to the well-worn term “site-specific”. The eight tracks fit together awkwardly, like a kind of broken jigsaw. They refuse to build up to a unity, but remain fragments, though, as fragments, they are in themselves whole: broken wholes, wholly broken. A majority of the tracks are field recordings, though this is no pastoral. If it has a ‘field’, it is the field of the (urban) social: social action and social inaction as experienced in the corners of everyday life, the boredoms and discontents and acts of quiet rebellion by which one might negotiate one’s way through the world and its systems, what is given to us, what is taken away from us. These are recordings of environments, or recordings that make environments, that intervene in them, that frame and re-frame them, that question or that spark questions. Workers destroying a wall in a Shenzen hotel are heard from a bed, the hammer blows a kind of impromptu drum set, accompanied by scattered fragments of conversation.
‘now first’, which follows, is labelled a ‘field recording’. It’s also ten minutes of the sound of a human being crying. How to listen to this? How do we listen to this album? A field recording is supposed to put emphasis on the environment, but these recordings often feel ‘inwards’ as much ‘outward’. It sometimes feels as if the listening is being done as much by the performer as the listener, eavesdropping, confused. Yet the performer themselves is hardly some sort of hidden mastermind, the composer at their desk, the sound artist shaping with expert directorial flourish. Is the person performing here performing? An actor, forcing themselves to weep? A kind of reversal of the singer who turns tears musical in Dowland or ‘Dido’s Lament’, turning music back into tears?
Flow, my tears, fall from your springs!
Exiled for ever, let me mourn;
Where night’s black bird her sad infamy sings,
There let me live forlorn.
I’ve quoted before somewhere Adorno’s comment in the Philosophy of New Music that the original of all music is in itself weeping.
As at its end, so the origin of music reaches beyond the sphere of intentions, that of meaning and subjectivity. It is a gestural art, closely akin to crying. It is the gesture of dissolving. […] The sentimentality of inferior music caricatures what superior music is truly capable of shaping at the boundary of frenzy: reconciliation. The man [sic] who surrenders to tears in music that no longer resembles him at the same time allows the stream of what he himself is not—what was dammed up back of the world of things—to flow back into him. In tears and in singing, the alienated world is entered. “Tears pour, the earth has taken me back”—this is the gesture of music. Thus, the earth reclaims Eurydice. The gesture of returning, not the feeling of waiting, describes the expression of all music, even in a world worthy of death.
But what kicks in ake’s ‘now first’—anxiety, empathy, the urge to stop the tears, the impossiblity, given the distance of recording, of doing so—goes beyond any
