Tone (DC)

Arts & Entertainment : Music Review
Priorities
Tone
(The Kora)
Yeah, it's the whole post-rock thing. But Tone was doing it first.
By Ryan Little • November 4, 2011

Instrumental Clinic: Tone’s latest is a post-rock master class.
Slow, deliberate build-ups, heavy on repetition, reaching greater and greater heights until a climax in a maelstrom of instrumental high emotion—you know, the whole post-rock thing. But long before Godspeed You! Black Emperor was earning indie accolades and Explosions in the Sky was inspiring Slate writers to invoke Ralph Waldo Emerson, D.C.’s Tone was making sometimes brooding, sometimes ebullient, and always artful instrumental rock.

It’s strange this stuff is still called indie, given that term’s connotations of understatement and remove. Tone’s sixth full-length, Priorities, is a veteran distillation of post-rock’s grandiose possibilities. It pans across big, triumphant battlefields, cycling through massive highs and crushing lows, aching with conflict and longing for some ineffable catharsis. There’s no ironic detachment, only Kodachrome color, visceral evocations of drama, and deeply committed execution.

Each of the five songs stretches past five minutes, and all of them center on shimmery guitars that slowly gain intensity. While none of the tracks has quite the emotional impact of, say, Mogwai’s 1997 post-rock bar-raiser Young Team, they also avoid that band’s missteps (there’s no filler). Priorities is nothing if not mindfully crafted, and the record subtly showcases a diversity of influences within its unbending framework. The well-named opener, “Chrome Heart Shining,” is immediately hopeful; “Prototype” is tense and downcast; “A Just Shoot ” makes much of its marching snare drums. If you know the scene, it’s not a revelation. But it is excellent incidental music. Each song identifies a set of fluid emotions and fully realizes them.

The longest track, “Crop Circles,” opens with several minutes of densely saturated guitars before drummer Gregg Hudson pounds a single beat. Richly textured layers of distortion swell from peak to mountainous peak—with extended, percussion-free valleys separating crash-heavy crescendos—until the song reaches its thudding finale, undulating with an ocean liner’s weight. The whole record trudges toward a majestic final resting place that’s less nimble than the works of Tone’s younger contemporaries, but never lacking well-earned dignity. After 20 years of making music, Tone may not take many left turns, but at least the band knows precisely where it’s going. - Washington City Paper

TONE
Album review: "Priorities"

Local guitar ensemble Tone may seem a bit out of place in a town known more for punk and go-go than for melodic post-rock. But Tone is more than a flash in the pan: The quintet has been performing its climactic instrumentals for two decades and adds five songs to its catalogue with its newest release, "Priorities."

The album showcases what Tone does best - shimmering, guitar-driven songs that swell and expand with each layered repetition. Album opener "Chrome Heart Shining" captivates with a trancelike spell as a lilting guitar melody floats over a sea of sustained chords. Those heavy drones add a mesmerizing effect to Tone's sound, but the group doesn't rely on them. The rippling guitars on "Wintermore" create a driving energy, while the entwined melodies of "A Just Shoot" form a complex tapestry that unwinds differently with each listen.

Tone is known for dense layers of guitars, but its rhythm section is equally responsible for the album's dramatic moments. As the epic 13-minute "Crop Circles" builds momentum, a rumbling bass melody emerges, adding a subtle groove before the guitars take back over. The song ends with more percussive chords anchored by crashing cymbals, capturing a dramatic - and memorable - finish.

--Catherine P. Lewis, Oct. 28, 2011 - Washington Post

As much as music is nowadays mostly centered on vocals, it's good to see so many instrumental bands. Not having a singer always drives bands to be creative. We've already verified that with acts such as Pelican, Tristeza, Dysrhythmia, Electrocution 250, etc...

Tone is pretty much unclassifiable, being an instrumental band with five guitarists, a bassist and a drummer. While that might translate to bloody chaos in some people's minds, that's completely wrong. The five guitars are arranged in the best way they could have been and make good use of polyphony. What's remarkable about Solidarity is that it's really accessible while being extreme in some ways.

Musically it has Tristeza-like moments, "cute" melodic guitar playing, and some more Pelican-like parts. Still, the approach is so different: Tone's completely another thing. It's not really metal, but it's not mathrock either, and it's not normal rock for sure.

The songs usually contain a wall of sound, but, oddly, a pleasing one (a little bit like Godspeed! You Black Emperor). A big part of Solidarity's compositional aspect is the build-up, almost all the songs have it and it's a definite plus, so it wouldn't be so crazy to call Tone a post-rock act. But no.

A good way to summarize Solidarity would be "ambient music." It's not really attention demanding, and you'll love it even doing other things while listening to it.

All in all, an interesting concept perfectly done. I honestly can't imagine all the effort that must have been put into Solidarity, but I do know that the result's near perfection. (9.9/10)

Tone capitalizes on the space provided by rhythm & percussion to open the band to careful passages - a formidable counterweight to the soaring of guitars.

The expanded boundaries of Tone, where as they once communicated a new idea, they now communicate a new thought…
- Maelstrom

It's not very often that a release like this (numerous guitars, no vocals, highly repetitive) keeps one's attention, but Ambient Metals stands out as an exception to that rule. It's deftly played, swelling at just the right moments, coming off like a soundtrack that keeps the listener focused. Its sound is similar to that of other D.C. bands, but is set free from the restraints of vocals, setting a mood that is full of expectation and intensity. There are no moments where the group is trying to "out-art" anyone or prove something, or be something they're not. A great guitar record without all the posturing. Essentially, it's bullsh*t-free. ~ Chris True, All Music Guide
C 2008 All Media Guide, LLC - All Music Guide

Beginning early this century, the second wave of post-rock became huge in the underground scene, as kids flocked to bands such as Explosions in the Sky, Mono and Russian Circles. Yet very few know that one of the seminal groups in the instrumental rock movement had its roots right here. And no, I'm not talking about Don Caballero.

Norman Veenstra was a DJ at Carnegie Mellon's WRCT-FM and organized concerts for two years as one of Pittsburgh's earliest indie-rock promoters. So when he left for Washington, D.C., in 1991 to manage the 9:30 Club (a job he kept for more than a decade) and discussed forming a band with venue employee Gregg Hudson, Veenstra was already under the sway of the music he had unearthed as a CMU student.

"Norm and I clicked when it came to music," Hudson recalls. "It could be Swans or Glenn Branca -- we just liked a big, loud sound. We weren't looking to do verse-chorus-verse-solo-bridge stuff [...] eventually others were brought in who shared a similar interest and didn't mind being in a band without vocals."

Tone burst on the scene in 1994 with the Build EP, released as a split between Dischord Records and the Independent Project label (owned by Bruce Licher of Los Angeles post-punkers Savage Republic). At one point, Tone boasted ex-members of D.C. punk legends Teen Idles and Government Issue. Some of them had become friends with Richmond's Kranky Records droners Labradford, and through that relationship discovered that the post-rock zeitgeist had also spread to places like Montreal.

"Labradford were the support for Godspeed [You Black Emperor] on their first tour, and we managed to get the support slot," Veenstra recalls. "Seeing Godspeed showed how far you can take [instrumental rock] in terms of incredible instrumentation and longer songs. To me, it was like a connection with brethren I had never met before. Also around that time, Mogwai was borrowing from Slint and math rock, and they talked about hating singers. I heard it, and I agreed with them."

Though Tone had always regarded itself as a Branca-styled "guitar ensemble," as opposed to a mere rock band, cultural affirmation came from a different discipline. While the band was recording Solidarity with J. Robbins of Jawbox (released in 2006 on Neurot Records), it was invited to provide the soundtrack for the D.C-based dance company of choreographer Lucy Bowen McCauley. "It came about when Norm and I were doing an interview for [public radio station] WETA, which was overheard by her husband," says Hudson. "In some instances, she would ask us to do some editing, so it literally became a 'dance remix' of our music."

The latest configuration of Tone contains four guitarists, a bassist and two drummers, returning them to a denser version of their initial concept. But how easy is it to keep a group together that boasts seven members, mostly engaged or married, with five kids between them? Not very, according to Hudson.

"I have a 2-year-old daughter myself, and these guys have careers that they take seriously. We're in a phase right now where it's hard to get everyone to show up to practice at the same time," Hudson says. "If you go to a Tone concert, you're damn lucky if you see the whole band." So be thankful that all the stars are aligned in Pittsburgh this Sun., March 2, when Tone plays CMU.
- Pittsburgh City Paper

There is something almost orchestral about Tone and the way they present their material on Solidarity. Entirely instrumental, the collective features five guitarists, one bassist and two drummers. They play an intellectual post-rock, heavy on ambience and emotion.

Not that ambient rock bands are hard to come by, just ones who sound this good.

Six albums in, the band's self-awareness is staggering.

Sublime in its artistry, but not at all inaccessible or unpleasant in surface aesthetics, Solidarity is a warm, engaging whirlwind that gets better with every listen; one of those rare albums which truly sounds as exciting the fifth time as it did the first. In a word: Prime Grade A+ - The Acquarian

Dischord's "quality over quantity" mindset has always served them well, and their more recent signings (Q and not U, El Guapo, Cry Baby Cry) have done nothing to harm their reputation as the most eclectically consistent label of all time. DC-based guitar-ensemble Tone is yet another powerful weapon in their eccentric arsenal -- a guitar-toting stealth septet that doesn't appear on radar until it's far too late.
Ambient Metals, the group's fourth effort, strikes like a squadron of doomsday angels -- a relentless torrent of white-hot six-stringed fury raining down upon you, bathing you in a torrid luminescence not heard since Mogwai were still considered the young and dynamic provocateurs of ambient guitarscapes. That Tone appear less malicious in their intent seems beside the point, such is their savagery -- seven ruthless puppets hung from twenty-eight strings, bolstered by a battery of sticks, toms, bass and timpani, hell-bent on kicking up a deafening scorched-earth ruckus.

Tone's compositional skills and dynamic intensity are so finely honed that their only obvious peers are Seattle guitarrorists Kinski, East Coast noiseniks Isis and interstellar Montreal collective Godspeed You! Black Emperor -- and even those epic comparisons don't entirely do the septet justice. They harness all the sonorous sonic fortitude of those groups, while forsaking the histrionics and pretentiousness so often associated with them. The ominous Gaimanian undercurrent and interweaving dive-bomb guitars of opener "Karma" set the stage for the post-apocalyptic bombast that follows; swelling post-modern compositions conjure images of a dozen orchestras flailing wildly amid the clatter and clutter of an abandoned steel mill, with each separate combatant crusading for an unchallenged spot in the finite airspace. Solemn sonatas "Steppe" and "Alhambra" rise and fall on endless layers of clashing guitar lines and multi-octave fret runs, their rhythmic abstractions and subtle variations of tone-color painting images a thousand times more graphic than words.

Tone pre-date, or have outlasted, the majority of bands hailed as "epic", "grandiose" and "groundbreaking"; they're the band you won't see until they've torn you apart with a serrated E-String and a shit-eating grin. The new (old) poster children of the doom-rock alliance have arrived, manifesto (Ambient Metals) in tow.


-- Jason Jackowiak
- Splendid

Although my tastes favor a ‘less is more’ minimal rock band (see Mission of Burma, Shellac, Modest Mouse, et al.), there’s something that satisfies my inner band geek about Tone, the ‘guitar ensemble’ based in D.C. The possibilities of a band with anywhere from five to seven guitarists is intriguing, and the output of the band has shown a variety of moods. Their last effort, Structure, opened their sonic palette with the use of horns and cello, as well as the wall-of-sound production of Robert Poss, head guitar God in Band of Susans, another multi-guitar outfit with whom Tone shares more than a passing resemblance.

With Ambient Metals, Tone adds a second drummer and the engineering talent of J. Robbins, late of Burning Airlines. Don’t expect any Promise Ring comparisons, though. The sound is thick and menacing, perhaps the perfect soundtrack for a battle scene in the next Lord of the Rings, and Robbins clean production perfectly captures a group that, in lesser hands, could prove a sonic disaster.

Album opener ‘Karma’ creeps in and the bombast begins, a call to battle replete with marching snares. Imagine Stravinsky covering Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Tusk.’ ‘Steppe’ is a waltz for Rush fans (in a good way), and ‘Sticks’ is a maniacal tear down and rebuild piece with a melody that somehow reminds me of Camper Van Beethoven.

The record is a pleasantly warm fuzzy until about four minutes into track four, ‘Alhambra.’ This is when the band hits its stride, and sustains it throughout the remainder of the CD: distortion pedals, rhythmic stops, and interesting interplay between all parties involved.

The bassline of ‘Timebox,’ more than just a nod to Golden Earring’s ‘Twilight Zone,’ gives individual parts a chance to really shine. Call and response riffing, harmonic noodling, and delay effects are all put in the spectrum, overlapping in a continuous stream of all-out sonic mayhem. Tone works best when it rocks most, presenting the assets of its parts in an accurate and interesting tandem.

Closer ‘Southpaw’ ebbs and flows in the tradition of the guitar orchestrations of Glenn Branca, recalling some of the more freeform recorded moments of Sonic Youth and Can. A galloping, Edge-ish ebowing bonus track is buried deep at the end of the disc.

Though at times one wants to hear less stream-lined restraint and more of the shards of the sonic possibilities of this band, there’s a spirit in the work of Tone that transcends genre, working on both rock and classical levels. Nowhere near the wank that one would expect from such a massive rock line-up, their body of work will be appreciated far past the lifespan of its (somewhat) constant evolution of members. No small feat indeed.

Pros: More rock, no talk
Cons: More rock
Useful for: Beating down Uruk-hai and Orcs - Stellargirl

Tone has long been one of Washington's best (and most challenging) rock bands, a wall of guitars creating a sonic assault as beautiful as it is overwhelming. Over four albums, Tone's music has managed to say fresh and engaging - despite the lack of a vocalist.
- January 9, 2004

February 2003:
The evening opened with Tone, a local instrumental-rock septet inspired by Glenn Branca's massed-guitar music. Its current sound includes slow-building progressions, but also some intricate, more romantic passages-minimalism with a twist of Mussorgsky.
-Mark Jenkins

...But individuals aren't the point of Tone-the almighty sound of the guitar is. Tone works less as a traditional rock band than a carefully conducted ensemble...each guitar part is meticulously played with as little flash as possible. The effect is less sterile than it might seem, as when the guitarists' precision and the propulsive percussion combine...
Tone know that to do so successfully, you need to be riding in a well-tuned machine.
-Andrew Beaujon

- Washington Pos

There are usually five or six guitarists, a bassist and two drummers on any given Tone song. For this feat alone, Tone wins the fabled Disconnect Epic Guitarchestra Achievement Award™. But the best part is you wouldn’t realize it unless someone told you.

Solidarity was my first (and so far, only, not counting random stuff on Pandora) exposure to Tone’s work. And I was impressed right away. The sixth Tone album to date, Solidarity is 54 minutes of transcendent worship of the almighty riff at the altar of instrumental balls-out rock.

If you’ve ever been to a jam, you’ve likely experienced the frustration of establishing a musical direction among the participants. You might begin to develop an idea only to have it quashed by another instrumentalist. Although traveling against that current is at the heart of true improvisation, whenever you establish that link with another player, something feels right – pieces settle into place and music becomes beautiful. Tone finds that euphoric feeling and sets it on a pedestal throughout Solidarity. Through repetition and evolution, each riff becomes a complex organism, fully fleshed out and realized with artistic flair. Somehow, that unearthly link is ever present in Tone; the musical thread holding the members together appears to be unbreakable. Track 1, “Confidence and Progress,” latches on with a subtly layered hook, explodes at the one-minute mark and pounds the melodies home shortly thereafter with a rushing-through-the-jungle percussion section underneath a network of distorted guitar and plucked bass.

The root of “Towers” is a two-chord vamp, arpeggiated on a single-coil guitar and adorned with almost-sad surf guitar techniques; slow tremolo and lazy pitch shifts further emphasize a feeling of longing or loss. But it’s not a downtempo ballad; there’s enough rocky solo action to keep heads bobbing.

It continues to boggle my mind: How could this many artists create this music while leaving just enough space for everyone to breathe AND contributing to the evolution of the song without overplaying? The answer lies in practice, dedication and discipline … traits I greatly admire in every genre of music. - [dis]connect

...The most ear-catching was "Telemetry," an ensemble work with one long solo set to a wall of earsplitting electronic music by the musical group Tone. The dancers' attire evokes whips and chains and sadomasochism. Both the dancers onstage and the musicians in the pit thump, twang and stomp with disciplined ferocity. The music is intentionally repetitious melodically and is layered with lots of electric guitars and heavy percussion. The amplification was so loud that the music was painful. Yet even with one's head feeling thick from the pounding, the dancing was electrifying. Bowen McCauley let her hair down, dipped into her unconscious and pulled out surprise after surprise. This stylish, in-your-face work is like looking into Cinderella's dark side or Peter Rabbit's sex life...

—Pamela Squires, The Washington Post
- Washington Post

If you’ve ever attempted to bust a move to Mogwai or the Kronos Quartet, you might be aware that a pop-and-lock routine just won’t do. Modern-dance troupes, however, have found the cinematic end of the underground-rock scene useful.

In 2004, Portland, Ore., art-pop trio Menomena composed music for local troupe Monster Squad, resulting in Under An Hour, a three-part performance inspired by the U.S. government’s reaction to terrorist attacks (“under an hour” is the military’s response time for a counterattack).

Washington, D.C.’s Tone, a 15-year-old instrumental ensemble whose members’ lineage stretches back to punk bands the Teen Idles and Government Issue, also began working with modern dance in 2004. In January of this year, Tone collaborated with the Bowen McCauley Dance Company by providing the music for Amygdala, a performance at the Kennedy Center in D.C.

MAGNET spoke to Tone percussionist Gregg Hudson and guitarist Norm Veenstra about modern dance and the recent release of the group’s sixth album, Solidarity (Neurot).

How did Tone first become involved with the Bowen McCauley Dance Company? What attracted the group to working with dance?
Norm Veenstra: We have been on a quest for a number of years to pursue any opportunities to expand our music and performances outside of the standard “rock” environment—be it film scoring, festivals, alternative spaces and certainly dance. We’ve always felt that Tone music was more than just rock, and want chances to present this music in as many contexts as possible, and thus to potentially numerous different yet receptive audiences. Whenever possible, we put this attitude out there, and fortunately for us, Lucy Bowen McCauley heard us.

Gregg Hudson: My wife is a dancer and has been pushing me for years to explore the possibilities of what can happen when girls in tights meet boys with instruments. I was skeptical at first, but found myself making a deeper connection to the world of dance each time I saw a company performing to intense modern music. As an ensemble, we realized that we were comfortable sharing our music with other artists and other mediums but frightened by the idea of losing some creative control. Our challenge was to find someone who would actually collaborate with us as we ventured into new territory. Norm and I did an interview on WETA (D.C.’s public radio station) in the fall of 2003 to promote some upcoming performances and we mentioned our ongoing desire to expand our performance mediums, including working with a dance company. After her husband John McCauley heard this particular interview, Lucy Bowen McCauley came to a show of ours, and was impressed enough to start working on some choreography to several of our songs.

What’s the process of composing pieces for the dance company? I assume there is a great deal of work with Lucy in order to match dance movements to musical ones.
Veenstra: It’s been a combination of brainstorming collectively about themes and numerous rounds of back and forth with musical ideas, both initial impulses and fully formed works. Tone presented a quantity of songs, parts and pieces nearly a year ago to Lucy to generate kinetic energy for the new work. Lucy reacted and selected material befitting her direction. She worked with the chosen pieces as we completed them, yet also concurrently began some movement work based on her conceptual ideas before hearing completed versions of our material. As we had previously with Telemetry—the work performed with Bowen-McCauley Dance in 2004—we endeavored to maintain an ability to be flexible within our arrangements; as Lucy needed changes to works, we created modified versions. 2005 was a year of intense work on a very specific set of music, to say the least.

The Washington Post review of Amygdala basically said the performance was, at times, too loud. Do you think the writer was missing the point?
Hudson: I think the Post’s reviewer brought intellectual knife to an emotional gunfight and missed the point of what modern music and modern dance continually strive to accomplish. Our third invitation to perform at the Kennedy Center was certainly not going to be another predictable evening of traditional dance accompanied by a pre-recorded string section. The Amygdala collaboration is meant to envelop the audience in layers of sonic dynamics and emotional symbolism that build over the course of three movements. The fluctuations in volume are controlled and intentional. They purposefully contribute to the rise and fall of the intensity you see on stage. Lucy has choreographed her dancers to symbolize what happens when emotions succumb to primal fear and desperate aggression. We’re attempting to guide the journey with an appropriate piece of music. You can’t do that with a piano and a glass of champagne.

Music is presented in so many different contexts: Sometimes it’s just musicians on stage; sometimes there are video screens; sometimes music is scoring a movie or being piped in over the drugstore PA. What do you like (or dislike) about how music is presented in conjunction with dance? What is special about how the two art forms interact?
Veenstra: One of the primary reasons Tone is instrumental is not to avoid any direct meaning within a song, but rather to have the music stand on its own. Modern dance, while adding a visual component to our music, is still extremely subtle, not overt, and thus enables a patron to formulate his/her own reactions from the two forms intertwined. Meaning is added, but still without direct meaning. From an internal point of view, I think the ensemble (Tone) helps the company (BMDC) and vice versa in that there is an intense energy from a live performance of either discipline. This is mutually felt and generates better performances out of each collective. BMDC members have told us on countless occasions that the energy of our live sound always makes for more intense movement for them.

Hudson: For me, what’s special about each art form is watching it in the live context. Listening to a loud recording is great, but I’m waiting for the artists to actually perform the work right in front of me. I want to watch how the musicians communicate with each other, see how they physically approach their instruments and, of course, witness the music take on a life of its own. It can be the same with dance. Listening to a dancer’s feet hit the stage and watching their bodies flow and contort as the sweat flies accross the spotlight enables me to appreciate the difficulty and beauty of their craft. Experiencing the two art forms combined is almost an overload on the senses. But sometimes that’s what’s necessary in helping me to remember that people are capable of amazing and profound things.

Many of Tone’s album titles (Solidarity, Structure, Sustain) convey the music’s continuity and rigidness. What attracts you and the other group members to this sense of order?
Veenstra: All in the ensemble have been playing music for a great deal of time, going back to Geordie Grindle’s contributions to punk and hardcore in the Teen Idles many years ago. We take our music seriously, and are not comfortable with any “novelty” or “party” connotations some rock music enjoys. Rather, the music and the arrangements within should come across in virtually every piece. Many of us have an interest in classical/orchestral music, thus some aspects of our writing and aesthetic are influenced by that.

What’s coming up next for you?
Veenstra: 2006 is our 15th year of doing this ensemble, and performing at the Kennedy Center for the first weekend of the year was a great start. Later this spring there will be a Tone performance that will be remixed live by 302 ACID in an exciting performance space. We are working on having collaborative recordings and releases with our friends in Tulsa Drone, Maserati and any of our other friends who would be interested. And most of all, we hope to be on a supporting tour this fall with any of our stellar instrumental peers such as Mono, Pelican, Cult Of Luna, Dirty Three, Explosions In The Sky or Rachel’s. - Magnet