Does the bell speak?

Notes on five tracks about language and the sacred

Feb 07, 2026

Introduction: notes on tracks that are themselves footnotes

For a while now, I’ve been trying to find a way to write about older (meaning anything not released in the current year) music in addition to my new music round-ups. There is a lot of electronic music from the last thirty-five years that I love and have things to say about, but the problem I kept running into was finding the right format for it. I wanted something that would allow me to write more casually about music I love without having to turn it into a big a comprehensive historical study, while also not just being a random “here is a bunch of old stuff I like” list.

I think I have now found an approach that makes for a nice middle ground between the two. The idea came to me while going through a bunch of notes I had written about various tracks and it occurred to me that a few of them were actually very thematically related. Once put side-by-side, I knew that this was the approach I had been looking for: connecting tracks not via similarities in style or period, but by the concepts that they are about.

This necessarily involves a certain degree of interpretation, since most dance music does not have an explicit text or narrative that can be easily read … but isn’t that also part of the fun? I like the idea of reading these historically and stylistically disparate tracks by drawing out connective themes and concepts that may not be immediately apparent. This is also why I have formatted the track titles in the style of academic footnotes. I initially just thought it would make for a fun departure from the formatting of my new music roundups, but reflecting on it now, I think it also points to one of the things that has always fascinated me the most about dance music — that this music that often comes with very little explicit written discourse is nonetheless extremely referential, full of implicit citations, footnotes and marginalia.

I already have a bunch of ideas for further pieces in the same format (“notes on tracks about X”), but to begin I have assembled notes on five tracks that relate to the concepts of language and the sacred in some way. I think the latter in particular is interesting, because dance music often appears as highly secular music. Sure, there are obvious exceptions like gospel house and certain strands of trance, but what is supposed to be sacred in a dry utilitarian minimal house track? … and yet, here is what Samuel André Madsen — arguably the best minimal house producer of the 2010s — had to say in a 2018 interview:

I was working in a church as a drummer, church keeper, and incense deacon for an ecumenical Eucharistic service. I studied Theology at the University of Copenhagen at the time. All the metaphysical topics interested me a lot — the topics dealing with the rather mystical aspects of theology, so for example how to address the concept of eternity using language or religious art. This topic of explaining the inexplicable or bridging the gap between the transcendent and the immanent was so interesting to me, and at some point, I realized that music has that power. The bridge usually happens in the form of an experience or epiphany that’s impossible to put into words by the person experiencing it, and a very similar thing happens with musical experiences.1

I only found this quote after I had already put together the rest of these notes, so it’s interesting that it also immediately draws a connection between language and the musical sacred, which is “impossible to put into words”. But is it really? I’ve always felt that the liminal of this music is not inexpressible, but barely expressible; sitting at the indeterminate border between what can be said and what cannot be said. And when you take a closer look at the tracks below, what I think emerges is that they are themselves problematizing this tension, are about this tension. They are open-ended questions to be interpreted.

Cassy. “My Auntie”, in: My Auntie EP (12”). Perlon, 2005.

This is weird, even for something released on Perlon, dance music’s longest-running weirdo hangout. I mean, the drums are normal2 enough, but those slow dissonant FM bells … what are those doing here? Such an odd thing to put over a dry Chicago jack beat. And then there’s the vocals, which are sung by the artist herself, but resemble nothing you’d expect to find on a “vocal house” record: cold and mechanical, endlessly repeating the exact same words with only slight variances in articulation, not all that different from a repeating modulated synth sequence. Cassy Britton knows that the words of a club record vocal don’t really mean anything; her own voice is just yet another bell to occupy the brain while the kick thumps, texture without a text and without a speaker.

But she also knows that the brain is an obsessive interpretative machine that, when hearing the same words repeated over and over, inevitably starts to wonder if the same is still the same, starts to wonder if it has been mishearing — if what it has really been hearing all along wasn’t in a quality but actually inequality, or vice versa. And then, just as quickly, another question arises: does it really make no difference whether the words in this club track are about qualities or inequalities, wouldn’t the answer change its meaning? And then what does that say about the sounds that aren’t words … those bells, are they saying something, saying something about qualities and inequalities? Beautiful questions that are fundamentally unanswerable, because the text of the texture is itself an apparition; fragile and spectral and impossible to pin down and decipher because every new repetition of the bell is saying something slightly different, raises more questions than it answers … as the track’s flipside “Night To Remember” goes: “you don’t wanna know / you don’t wanna know / you don’t wanna know / … why?”

Suddenly Sacred, or: tracks in 113 words

Samuel André Madsen. “Untitled A”, in: DELAPHINE004 (12”). Delaphine, 2015.

whispering skip back whining reflective quiet ahead chamber wood suddenly sacred

whispering / skip / back / whining / reflective / quiet / ahead / chamber / wooden / suddenly / sacred

whispering

skip back

whining

reflective quiet

ahead

chamber wooden

suddenly sacred

Wolfgang Voigt. “Gas 2”, in: GAS (album). Mille Plateaux, 1996.

haze slowed down still drawn bow sung green glide verdant bliss

haze / slowed / down / still / drawn / bow / sung / green / glide / verdant / bliss

haze slowed

down still

drawn bow sung

green glide verdant

bliss

Angels

Vainqueur. “Ranges Theme”, in: Ranges (12”). Scion Versions, 2010.

Speaking generally, it is not all that difficult to get a synthesizer to speak: by emphasizing certain frequency areas with a series of parallel bandpass filters, a resonant structure will emerge that mimics the formants of the human vocal tract well enough to sound like intelligible vowels. Techniques of this sort were used in many vintage string synthesizers to create choir sounds that “oooo” and “aaaa”.

But what about the more ambiguous aspects of the human voice, the breathy and whispery; utterances that are themselves retreating from the realm of intelligibility? Rene Löwe’s production process, rather than emphasizing resonant frequencies, involves repeated subtraction through notch-filtering and phasing, leaving behind a frequency spectrum that is marked by its audible4 gaps and absences more than its presence. What little remains is then dispersed, diffused, delayed and reverberated, resulting in noisy, gaseous clouds whose breathy vocal qualities are closer to an ambiguous consonant hiss than a clearly articulated vowel. More whisper than word, you couldn’t quite call it language, but there is something being quietly sung here, at the threshold of language, although perhaps what is singing is not quite human … listening to those glistening upper harmonics all I hear and see are blinding lights, light embodied as a texture enunciating itself, speaking in a divine language intelligible only to animals, objects and the sky … the language of angels?

Citations

Blanka. “Klock”, in: Breaking Rules (12”). SK_eleven, 2024.

I’ve always been fascinated by how referential a dry DJ tool track can be, the way these mostly utilitarian tracks communicate with each other through an endless series of subtle footnotes. A scholastic discourse that’s easy to miss because it does not address the general listening public but other tools and their toolmakers. I think this track in particular is interesting in that respect, because its title itself serves as a one-word citation, helpfully pointing us to its point of reference — Berghain resident Ben Klock, one of the main architects of the sound of modern techno — without actually verbally spelling out what it is citing from that source. It simply assumes that others in the profession of constructing and playing records for dance floors will pick up on the ineffable nuances cited; not any sound in particular, but the visceral, kinetic feeling of playing a track to a dance floor.

To put these nuances into words, I think it helps to look at a specific point of comparison, namely Klock’s 2008 track “Pulse”. Listen to the rhythm — there’s a certain forward momentum on the offbeat (the traditional rhythmic home of techno) with those noisy hats, but there is also a strong anchoring on the house-y two and four via the pulsed rhythm on the booming tail of the reverberant kick and the percussive lead that is performing the function of a 2-4 clap without being a clap. If you now listen back to Blanka’s track, I think it becomes obvious that the techniques are essentially the same. In both, the result is a groove that does lean forwards, but then also slightly curves back, creating a heavy, swinging, circular kind of bodily motion. Having spent a lot of time on the platform next to the back left Funktion One stack at Berghain — from which you can directly oversee the “bear corner” under the stairs up to Panorama Bar close to the darkrooms — I’ve always felt that Klock must have modelled this type of groove on what he was seeing in that corner … a slower, weighty, stomping kind of dance, far from nimble, but just as expressive and sensual in its muscle and sense of heft. And while, when spelled out explicitly, this may all sound needlessly detailed and pedantic, make no mistake: the tékhnē of the dancefloor is always this hyperspecific. Generalize, and you have already missed everything.

Infinite Speeds

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