field anatomies
Laura Cocks
Carrier Records CARRIER062 (carrierrecords.com)
Brilliant and fearless, American experimental flutist Laura Cocks’ solo album field anatomies is a collection of works featuring various varieties of flute, one each by US-based composers David Bird, Bethany Younge, Jessie Cox, DM R and Joan Arnau Pàimes – all exciting new discoveries for me.
Today the executive director and “flutist-in-chief” of the TAK Ensemble, the title field anatomies was inspired by Cocks’ experiences in the prairie fields of her childhood, memories she carries in her body still and transfers to her flute playing. And the results are striking.
Just one example is Bird’s substantial 18’38” Atolls (2017) for solo piccolo plus 29 spatialized piccolos. This studio recording employs panning techniques to emulate the surround sound of the 29 auxiliary flutists in the stereo field, here all played by Cocks. Beginning with a virtuoso catalogue of solo breath and metal piccolo clicking sounds punctuated by Cocks’ own vocalise, around the six-minute mark Atolls morphs into elegantly sculpted sound clouds. These are craftily constructed of single sustained tones expanding to masses of many-part chords ever shifting around the listener’s ears on headphones – or around the room you’re sitting in, if on speakers.
I was fascinated to read the composer’s note that the work’s “pitch material is derived from the combined spectral analysis of a crash cymbal and Janet Leigh’s infamous scream from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.” That may sound like a chilling listening experience, daunting even. Far from it, I find Atolls in turns highly intimate and elegantly sculpted – and at times a reassuringly gentle sonic experience.
