 Captivating. Evocative. Nuanced. Expressive. Violent. These were the words that came to mind when I first sat down to write this review. In all honesty, it’s been difficult finding the words to describe my reaction to this album, and I mean that as high praise. I found Laura Cocks’ Field Anatomies to be an incredibly engaging and impressive album, one that’s so original in concept and execution that I don’t think any kind of analysis in this particular format could do the pieces and performances justice, but I’ll do my best to capture my takeaway.
Laura Cock’s solo flute album Field Anatomies (Carrier Records) is a colossal album in both content and scope, with only 5 pieces clocking in at just under an hour and fifteen minutes. It is a collection of physically demanding pieces, most of which focus on unpitched, percussive, and timbral aspects of the flute as the crux, the central germ of the composition, rather than as supplemental techniques to expand otherwise more traditional playing. The composers approach the instrument as a multi-faceted sound generating device, exploring not only the timbral capabilities but the actual physicality of producing these sounds, and Cocks displays adept mastery as a performer in 5 blisteringly captivating recordings. Ultimately, this is an album that highlights a collection of artists who are deeply invested in engaging with new, exciting and lesser explored sound worlds, executed at the highest level. As pointed out above, many of the works call on Cocks to utilize variations of breathing and tongue pizzicato, singing while playing, key clicks, multiphonics, speaking/singing through flute, reading multiple staves simultaneously - notation that gives instructions for physical movement or technique rather than resultant pitch and rhythm. Three pieces use electronics and additional materials to augment the flute, while David Bird’s Atolls calls on an additional 29 spatialized piccolos. The combination of these techniques filtered through each composers’ unique voice is a mélange that is rife with creative exploration of new ideas while grounded in rigorous compositional craft. The time and dedication these pieces demand comes through in every moment of Cocks; ferocious performances, making highly intricate playing seem effortless. David Bird’s Atolls is the first piece on the album, scored for solo piccolo and an ensemble of 29 spatialized piccolos that surround the audience in a live performance. The formal structure of the work consists of alternating sections of solo piccolo and piccolo with the ensemble. The solo material presents sequences of gestural motives using percussive, pitched and unpitched elements. Over time these go through variations, fragmentation and reordering resulting in a uniform mood/character that is always in flux. During the sections with the ensemble the piccolos often play dense cluster chords - derived from spectral analysis of a crash cymbal and Janet Leigh’s scream in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho - reminiscent of the early sound mass works of Penderecki and Ligeti. The ensemble also replicates activity from the soloist in a sort of object/shadow dichotomy. Over time the lines blur, the shadow is perceived as the object and vice versa. Bethany Younge’s Oxygen and Reality is an imaginative work that explores breathing, air, perception, and limitations, using an array of playing techniques and creative sound design. Scored for piccolo, electronics, balloons and hardware there’s no shortage of interesting sound design and creativity at play. At the onset Cocks is asked to cover all openings of the piccolo (including the end hole with the pinky finger and mouthpiece) and while breathing into the sealed tube release and depress a single key at a time resulting in short rhythmic bursts of slightly pitched air, separated by long stretches of silence. In later sections a balloon is used to cover the end hole of the foot joint while variations of the same playing techniques are utilized, becoming more varied and frenetic over time. These sections of modified piccolo playing are contrasted against sections where Cocks improvises with balloons filled with metal washers, augmented by electronic sounds and processing. While I strongly encourage you to listen to the recording on this album, I think it’s essential that this piece be watched and not just listened to. Please FOLLOW THIS LINK to watch a video of Laura Cocks performing Bethany Younge’s Oxygen and Reality with a score follower roll. Jessie Cox’s Spiritus is equally demanding from a purely technical and physical standpoint, in that the performer is asked to sing and play simultaneously throughout most of the piece. Like the Bird and Younge pieces that precede it, Spiritus focuses on how sounds are produced and manipulations of the end result, accomplished primarily by notating what to do rather than strictly resultant pitches/rhythms. The majority of the music in this piece is in the form of sustained complex long tones formed through simultaneously playing pitches and singing through the flute, sometimes through us of multiphonics. These introspective sections are broken by contrasting moments of brief angular flurries of microtonally altered pitches. One interesting aspect in Spiritus is that Cox specifies that the resultant timbres are more important than intonation of the sung pitches, placing the focus on subtleties of color rather than singing perfectly in tune. Cox not only accepts inharmonic interferences, but welcomes it. Along with singing while playing, Cocks implements additional manipulation of timbre through gradual embouchure changes, glissandi and microtonal inflection. Listening to Cocks’ performance of Spiritus, it’s almost effortless to get lost in the meditative sound world of evolving colors. DM R’s (Diana M. Rodriguez) You’ll See Me Return To The City Of Fury is scored for glissando flute, tape and live electronics. It utilizes Ableton Live for both sound file playback (the tape) and for processing the live input from the flute, including freezing select pitches and creating delayed copies of the flute with added manipulation (filtering, spectral processing). You’ll See Me Return To The City Of Fury offers a nice contrast to the rest of the album in part because the electronics are really a prominent element, always working to elaborate on or enhance the flute while also maintaining its own identity. Physicality of playing is found in this piece through the use of the glissando flute, which uses a head joint that can smoothly glide left to right to extend or shorten the flute’s length, allowing the flutist to create smooth glissandi up or down. There are moments where a single sustained pitch is transformed through movement of the glissando joint, minor alterations in embouchure, use of quarter tones and live electronic processing work in tandem to create a tapestry of gorgeous and eerie colors. Similar to Spiritus, You’ll See Me Return To The City Of Fury is slower and more nebulous than other pieces on Field Anatomies, and even though it has fewer impulses per second there’s no shortage of detail and nuance packed into every moment. Joan Arnau Pàmies’ Produktionsmittel I, clocking in at just under 25 minutes, is a massive and impressive tour du force on all counts, and I would say embodies the core concept of physicality of performance perfectly. This piece uses a type of graphic prescriptive decoupled notation - a similar approach and visual aesthetic of Aaron Cassidy’s more recent tablature scores. The flutist simultaneously reads staves for embouchure position, sung pitches, phonemes, lip/jaw pressure, and fingerlings, each staff under constant development, and none of which use extensively standard notation. The result is not a single unified sound in any traditional sense of “flute” timbre, but rather an amalgam of multiple strata of activity. The notation functions as a sort of deconstruction of both the physical apparatus of the flute (keys, head joint position, etc.) and the physical elements involved in sound production; the essential building blocks of playing. Pàmies takes the separated component parts and puts these pieces back together in a way that feels familiar - the timbre and experience of a person playing a flute - but seen in an entirely different perspective, like a puzzle assembled incorrectly that still retains a semblance of its identity. There is plenty more to say, but at 25 minutes in length I wouldn’t be able to even scratch the surface. And I won’t sugarcoat it, this piece is not for the faint of heart if you haven’t already spent some time with this particular aesthetic, but I do encourage taking the time to sit with this piece and engage with it on its own terms. Pàmies’ compositional skill and creativity paired with Cock’s staggering and incendiary performance make this, in my opinion, a perfect closer to a stellar album In short, Field Anatomies is a marvelously remarkable album, and one I’m glad I had the opportunity to review. It’s not an album that you can consume and absorb in a single listen, but if you’re anything like me it’s an album you won’t mind listening to multiple times. To Purchase Field Anatomies For more information on Laura Cocks For more information on David Bird For more information on Bethany Younge For more information on Jessie Cox For more information on DM R For more information on Joan Arnau Pàmies
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