Sound Essay 11 — Esque
A Signal Study in City Pop, Jersey Club, and House
Every record in this set is a resemblance. None of it is the thing itself; all of it is in the manner of something else — Japanese guitarists playing American soft rock, an Italian playing Brazilian jazz, a track named for a European idea of Arab ornament, another making a genre name into a come-on. Esque: the suffix of likeness, the almost, the in-the-style-of. It defines the next 25 minutes. It also shapes the way this essay listens. Heard this way, genre stops being something a sound is and becomes something a sound does — a likeness it performs, an index of who learned what from whom, and across what distance. And because listening is never solitary, those distances are measured not only in the music but in the hearing we make together.
And we hear all of it on one floor. City pop from the seventies, a Jersey club edit from last year, German ambient techno, and Detroit house — different origins and decades pulled onto a single grid and made to pulse as one body, without any of them ceasing to be themselves. There is a picture this calls up, and it is one we have reached for before. A photograph once circulated as a sneer — strangers crammed into a subway car, nothing in common but the bench — captioned this is the future liberals want. The shift to the past tense is ours — the future that liberals got — and an earlier set in this series already carried it as a title. Here we are on the same ground.
How this works: This is a Sound Essay — a DJ set structured as an investigation. Press play, then read along. Each section includes timestamps so you can follow the thread as it moves through the music, though the tracks here layer as often as they follow one another, so a timestamp marks where a record enters, not where the last one leaves. Everything sits at one tempo; what binds them is the company the tracks keep.
I. In the Manner Of
[00:00] The set opens with Shigeru Suzuki — a Japanese guitarist first known through Happy End and later Tin Pan Alley.
[00:16] Sixteen seconds in, Bread & Butter, a Japanese duo in the same register, slide in over the top. From there the two play at once, two records laid over each other into a single warm wash. To a Western ear, it is indistinguishable from a certain kind of American session fusion: clean, warm, sun on water. That is the point. This is city pop, or its close cousin AOR — Japanese musicians in the seventies building, with great precision and great love, music in the manner of an American soft rock they mostly knew through imported records. The resemblance is the achievement. Here the resemblances are stacked: two likenesses of one distant sound layered until there is no telling where one ends and the other begins. A sound can be entirely about another sound, played on top of another, and lose nothing for it. Underneath, the grid does its quiet work, holding both to a single pulse.
II. The Word for the Whole Set
[05:19] Nicola Conte — an Italian producer who works in nu-jazz and bossa — arrives with a track called “Arabesque.” For a moment it plays alone, and the word does its work. Arabesque — from the Italian arabesco — is a European name for ornament made “in the Arab manner”: a style christened by the people who borrowed it, for the people they borrowed it from. A resemblance coined from the outside. It is the essay’s own title surfacing inside the music. It also carries the question the rest of the mix keeps asking under its breath: who gets to be -esque toward whom. Conte himself is the case in point — an Italian playing Brazilian and American forms from an ocean away, beautifully, and at a remove.
III. Only a Few of Many
[06:53] Then the first voice, which is a woman’s, arrives on top of him. Buscabulla — the Puerto Rican duo of Raquel Berrios and Luis Alfredo Del Valle — layer “Métele” over the Conte: a command lifted from reggaetón, a register usually pointed by men at women, turned around and handed back. The song’s video gave Puerto Rico’s trans women and drag performers the screen. A way of being a woman that takes a form built to contain her and wears it as a costume of her own choosing. And it arrives as a layer — Conte keeps playing underneath.
[08:39] Then a second woman pushes in. Azealia Banks — the Harlem rapper whose work draws on hip-house and ballroom sonics without being straightforwardly of the ballroom scene — brings “Inner Monologue,” a title that doubles as a method: the inside voice with the door left open, unbothered by whether we approve. Now three records sound at once — an Italian’s bossa, a Puerto Rican inversion, a New Yorker’s unedited interior — the deepest the layering goes. We hear them as a social texture made in the act of listening together: one vibration distributed across us, never settling into any single owner. The origins refuse to stay sealed, refuse to sit neatly side by side. Two of the myriad ways of being a woman, playing in the same air at the same moment.
[11:42] The wash thins to nothing, and for the first time a single track stands in the clear. Ziahfyah’s “NASTY GIRL” — a Jersey club track by a producer from New Jersey, working in a scene that lives on phones and runs on edits. But the voice is older than the edit. Where the hook comes from is hard to pin — original, or something obscure — yet it summons a whole lineage of nasty women the floor already carries: Vanity 6’s “Nasty Girl,” the 1982 single Prince wrote and produced for his protégée Vanity, too explicit for radio; Inaya Day, the Brooklyn house vocalist who covered it two decades on and ran it back through the clubs; Janet Jackson’s “Nasty” of 1986, where the word turned into a demand for respect. Esque toward all of them, lifted from none, and dropped onto a contemporary floor. After ten minutes of things layered and blurred, the clarity arrives all at once: when the layering drops away, what remains is a body, a beat, and a woman’s voice that has outlived its moment. The title carries a freight it cannot help carrying. Nasty woman was an insult thrown across a debate stage in 2016 and reclaimed within the hour. But the danceable version of the claim got there first, by thirty-four years; Vanity was already nasty on purpose, already unembarrassed, long before the word came back as a slur to be turned. A third way of being a woman — the oldest of them — and the first we get entirely on its own.
[13:05] “A.O.R.” Towa Tei — the Japanese producer who first surfaced in Deee-Lite — built a track whose joke folds the whole set into one song: it takes the name of a genre, Adult Oriented Rock, and turns it into an invitation, sung by Lina Ohta in English, Japanese, and Russian at once. Here, genre is something you can flirt with — a category sung as if it were a feeling, a label worn as a come-on. The fourth voice is the coolest of them, deadpan and entirely in on it. And like “NASTY GIRL,” it stands in the clear, with nothing layered over it. The label was always there to be put on.
By now the set has shown us four women — two sounding at once in the wash, two standing alone in the open: Berrios turning a man’s command into her own, Banks broadcasting the unedited interior, Vanity making “nasty” a pleasure decades before it was an insult to reclaim, Ohta wearing a genre like a feeling. Each a different way of being, and the set never pretends the list is finished. These are only a few of many.
IV. One Floor
[15:50] As we think of opening up, of letting go — the set lets go the way it began, layered. Gas — Wolfgang Voigt’s ambient techno project — opens a doorway of submerged loops and forest depth.
[16:50] Theo Parrish comes in beneath it, though in a blend this deep, under and over stop meaning much. The Detroit deep house producer makes tracks that run long and patient on purpose, and the two play out together to the end: a single long, slow, raw groove with the Gas dissolved into it. The bench empties of strangers. The resemblances merge into a single field — the destination they had been bound for each time two asked to become one. We began with resemblances laid over one another, each in the manner of somewhere else. We end inside one continuous thing, on one floor, listening it into common life, no longer able — and no longer needing — to tell the pieces apart.
Signal Study is a diagnostic practice — DJ sets structured as investigations, essays as frame. Sound and theory as a single method. Press play, read along. Bluesky · Mixcloud · signalstudy.co