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Search Result for Artist crys cole
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BT 123LP
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crys cole returns to Black Truffle with Making Conversation, her third solo release for the label. After the intimate song-like constructions of Other Meetings (BT 096LP), Making Conversation documents a different facet of cole's work, presenting three rigorously conceptualized commissioned pieces, each of which extend her signature approach to highly amplified small sounds into new directions. The side-long title piece is a stereo version of an eight-channel sound installation exhibited in 2023 at the Tabakalera Art Center in Donostia/San Sebastian, Spain. The piece uses a multitude of instrumental, vocal, concrete and electronic sounds to evoke the soundscapes cole encountered during nocturnal listening session in Bali, Indonesia in 2018 and 2019. In this world of night sounds, she explains, she "observed the complex interplay between amphibian, lizard, bird and insect communication, domestic animals (roosters, dogs), man-made sounds (airplanes, vehicles, conversations and evening activities) and sounds that were difficult to place." Drawing on field recordings as memory aids (but including none in the finished piece), cole's piece uncannily reproduces the spatiality and pacing of environmental sound without attempting strictly to replicate it. While at times it can be difficult to imagine the source of these sounds, at other points they are clearly instrumental or electronic in origin; in its placement and layering, though, the whole assemblage suggests the glorious, unthinking richness of a non-musical sound environment. Suggesting at once the electronic gardens of Rolf Julius and the little instrument expanses of classic AACM, the piece is a brilliant enactment of the Cage-ian drive to "imitate nature in her manner of operation." "Valid ForeverrRrrRRrrr? (pt. 1)" began as cole's contribution to an Issue Project Room commission to realize a score from Alison Knowles and Annea Lockwood's Women's Work, a 1975 collection of text and conceptual scores by women artists and composers. cole's piece begins from Beth Anderson's "Valid for Life," a complex arrangement of the letter R in various typefaces. Accompanied with extensive liner notes, photographic documentation and a download code, Making Conversation is an exciting next step in cole's work, extending her signature concerns in new sonic and conceptual directions.
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BT 096LP
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Following on from 2021's acclaimed Sylva Sylvarum (BT 077LP), the epic double LP from Ora Clementi (her collaborative project with James Rushford), crys cole returns to Black Truffle with Other Meetings. Originally commissioned and released on cassette by Boomkat Editions in 2021, Other Meetings is a major addition to the body of carefully hewn solo work cole has released over the last decade, offering up two side-long suites of her radically intimate approach to sound. After many years dominated by touring and travel, cole found herself in lockdown in her Berlin apartment, working in a limited space with minimal equipment. Digging through archives of recordings taken overseas and exploring the sonic potential hidden in the objects surrounding her (including a coffee pot and a vase of dying flowers), she crafted what she calls "an internal dérive, a journey that drifted through many places without a defining compass." Totaling over 50 minutes, the two pieces unfold at an unhurried pace, each containing four individually titled subsections. Beginning with a sequence of the highly amplified small sounds characteristic of much of cole's work, the opening moments of "The time between two durations of sleep" are underpinned by a gentle rocking motion, weaving together contact mic crunch, metallic resonance, glimpses of bird song, and isolated drum machine hits, the sonic space expanding and contracting as focus moves between elements. Briefly side-lined by a tactile but unplaceable sizzling, this complex weave of voices then returns in a kind of dubbed-out "version", the percussive accents echoing around the stereo space. In one of the record's most beautiful and unexpected moments, these sounds are joined by a sparse melodic line performed on a broken 1980s digital synth, the vaguely new age timbres being taken on a long, tonally ambiguous wander. Cole's immersion in memories of travel comes to the fore in the final section of the first side, titled "Wat Paknam" after a royal temple in Bangkok, where snatches of voices, ringing bells and distant waves of chanting blur together with synth tones into an increasingly abstracted wave of sound. The second side, "Slices of cake", opens in a similarly hallucinatory outdoor space of echoing bird song and liquified traffic before abruptly zooming in on a microscopic world of subtly processed and highly amplified objects, explored with a starkness and quiet insistence that calls to mind the fringe not-quite-concrète of outsiders like Paul A.R. Timmermans or Knud Viktor, whose obsessive interrogation of dripping water might also serve as a point of reference for the following sub-section, the aptly titled "magischer Abfluss" (magic drain). Radically reductive yet deeply musical, Other Meetings is a major work from an artist driven by an uncompromising and idiosyncratic vision. Presented with an inner sleeve with photos and liner notes from the composer and remastered audio.
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SE 010LP
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Sound can be a labyrinth, a twilight drift. Sound can truly unfold when it escapes logic or categorization. For it is never really one thing or another, especially abstract, collaged or found sound, as it is always connected to a time and a place, or sometimes to an intention, or a notion, or -- even more vague -- to something as dubious as a feeling. So, all this is inevitably inherent in a sound too. Sound is a fact but also an in between.
In A Piece Of Work, concrete composer crys cole takes you on a journey through those in between places. Fragments collected over time in Oslo, Berlin, Vienna, Winnipeg, Melbourne, and Lisbon were later arranged and assembled into an invented space, a story arc, a freeform poem. cole's work is one of dynamics and proximity, of complexity and sensitivity. One that embraces both montage and movement. Originally commissioned by Radiophrenia (Glasgow, Scotland), where it premiered in 2019, A Piece Of Work has been developed through live performances and studio sessions, naturally progressing over time and eventually leading to this final version presented here on vinyl. Composed, performed and recorded by crys cole, 2019-21. With additional percussion by Oren Ambarchi and electronics by Seiji Morimoto. Mixed with Joe Talia at Good Mixture in Berlin, 2021. Mastered and cut by Anne Taegert at Dubplates & Mastering in Berlin, 2021. A Piece Of Work was commissioned by Radiophrenia in Glasgow, Scotland, and originally premiered in 2019.
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SOD 123LP
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"Beside Myself is the second full-length release from Canadian sound artist crys cole. Known to many through her extensive collaborative practice with artists such as Oren Ambarchi, Leif Elggren, and James Rushford, in her solo work cole uses contact microphones, voice, simple electronics, and field recordings to create sonic environments that linger uneasily at the threshold of perception. Demonstrating how cole's work has developed and deepened since the relative austerity of her first solo LP Sand/Layna (BT 017LP, 2015), Beside Myself offers two lushly immersive side-long pieces that explore ideas of compositional drift. 'The Nonsuch' is inspired by the aural hallucinations experienced in the hypnagogic state during the onset of sleep. Opening with scratching contact mic textures and unintelligible vocal murmurs, the piece threads together live and studio performances with field recordings of urban environments to create a texture that is at once seemingly consistent and marked by constant transitions. Individual elements rise up from the background thrum only to disappear just as we become conscious of them; heterogenous sounds and spaces succeed one another with the unassailable logic of dreams. 'In Praise of Blandness (Chapter IX)' also focuses on drift and transition, but in a much more single-minded way. Over a rich, slowly-evolving organ drone, cole reads a passage from the French sinologist François Julien's book In Praise of Blandness (1991) exploring the concept of 'blandness' in the Taoist aesthetics of sound. Beginning crisp and clear, cole's voice becomes gradually less distinct over the course of the piece, the spoken words blurred by resonant frequencies à la Lucier's I Am Sitting in a Room until we are left with only the rhythm of incomprehensible speech. The text that cole reads acts a perfect description of her aesthetic project: 'We hear it still, but just barely, and as it diminishes it makes all the more audible that soundless beyond into which it is about to extinguish itself. We are listening then, to its extinction, to its return to that great undifferentiated matrix'." --Francis Plagne (November, 2019) Includes download code; edition of 300.
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BT 035LP
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Two Words is the debut release from the duo of Canadian sound artist crys cole and Australian songwriter Francis Plagne. Building on a series of experimental live performances in which the pair toyed with possible common languages for their seemingly unrelated approaches to music, the LP's two sides present a single piece that brings together abstract texture and slow-motion song in a sonic space where genre cedes to the logic of dreams. The piece begins with a long, nearly static sequence built primarily from rubbed surfaces, using movement in the stereo field and changing mic placements to create a unified but unstable sonic environment that mimics wind, water, and breath, opening an impossible space between nature and artifice. This artificial outdoors ultimately makes room for Plagne's electric organ, which sounds a series of melancholic chords to accompany a wandering Wyatt-esque keyboard line as cole's intimate contact mic textures sizzle and pop in the foreground. From here the piece makes a surprise detour into song, as the majority of the second side finds Plagne intoning a series of obtuse two-word phrases (from a text by Berlin-based poet Marty Hiatt) to an austere organ accompaniment. Working closely with engineer and producer Joe Talia, cole and Plagne extend the studio-as-an-instrument tradition of Teo Macero and This Heat, introducing subtle yet unexpected production shifts that lead the listener from the initial austerity of the organ and voice to an oneiric space of asynchronized vocal doubles, creaking textures, and distant whistling, ultimately arriving at something like an imagined meeting of Organum and Arthur Russell. Packaged in a suitably mysterious sleeve featuring a lush work by Australian painter Anne Wallace on the front and text by Hiatt on the back, Two Words is both comforting and strange, a disorienting blend of seemingly discrepant elements. Sleeve design by Stephen O'Malley. Mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin.
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2LP
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BT 029LP
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2024 repress. Hotel Record is the second release from the duo/couple of crys cole and Oren Ambarchi, following on from Sonja Henies vei 31 (PLANAM 031LP, 2014). Where their debut recording presented a disquieting portrait of the erotic dimension of romantic intimacy, the follow-up continues to explore the pair's simultaneously musical and romantic relationship in a more subtle fashion, presenting four long-form pieces that touch on the variety of forms the life of this couple takes: as a musical duo, as a pair of travelers to exotic locations, as opponents in a game of cards... Each of the double LP's four sides presents a distinct sound-world, yet each manages to attain the same suspended, half-sleeping feeling, outlining a space where improbable combinations of the electronic and the acoustic, of extreme closeness and amorphous distance, occurring with the gentle insistence of a dream. The opening "Call Myself" calmly unfolds a fabric of long tones from electronic organ and guitar, combining the sliding, aleatoric effects of classic David Behrman with a more hands-on feel. Over the top of this slowly shifting tonal bed, cole's voice mutters unintelligibly into a Buchla synth, teasing the listener by suggesting a meaning that remains always out of the ear's reach. "Francis Debacle (Uno)" builds on the foundations of a heavily amplified session of the titular card game, overlaying vocal murmurs and exhalations and mysterious room-sounds to create an impossible aural environment. On "Burrata", a palette of vintage 1980s digital synthesizer sounds combined with guitars create an irregular texture of lush chords and bubbling melodic details, into which cole's voice processed by a vocoder, is interwoven, reading fragments of romantic correspondence. Finally, on "Pad Phet Gob", field recordings made in Thailand become an ambiguously acoustic/electronic rainforest, eventually giving way to a mysterious, wavering electronic tone-field punctuated by sibilant, popping mouth-sounds. Carving out an intimate and human sonic space across a diverse array of compositional approaches, sound sources, fidelities, and textures, Hotel Record is the latest dispatch from the continuing explorations of a unique duo. Ambarchi and cole reimagine electro-acoustic music, not simply as "abstract" sound, but as a diary, a love poem, a dream. Comes in deluxe gatefold sleeve with photography by crys cole and LP design via Stephen O'Malley; Mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering.
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BT 017LP
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"Sand/Layna is the first full-length solo release by Canadian sound artist crys cole. While cole is known to many through her collaborative work with a host of Canadian artists and internationals such as Oren Ambarchi, Keith Rowe, and James Rushford, this LP presents the first opportunity for an extended appreciation of her singular approach to amplified sound. Using contact and other microphones to amplify her interactions with small objects and the surfaces on which they rest, cole's work exists in a lineage of heavily amplified 'small sound' that stretches back to Cage's Cartridge Music. cole's approach to these materials and techniques is distinguished by its single-mindedness: rather than simply searching for interesting or attractive sounds, her performances attempt to illuminate the sonic properties of the specific objects and amplification devices she uses. Devoid of looping and complex processing, the sonic outcome of her work always retains an audible link to the handling of microphones and what they amplify. The awkward and sometimes even 'ugly' sounds of manipulated microphones and recording equipment thus sit comfortably alongside the mysterious crackle of amplified salt and the deep, musical resonance of a rubbed tabletop. This LP presents two pieces, recorded almost ten years apart. Sand, recorded in 2004, crafts a sustained texture from rubbed surfaces that transcends academic sound art tropes to recall the haunted environments of Massimo Toniutti and Small Cruel Party. The seemingly static structure of the piece allows the multitude of dynamic and timbral variations caused by the basic instability of cole's sound sources to come to the fore. In contrast, Layna, constructed between 2012 and 2013, lets loose a volatile stream of microscopic activity. Adding extremely amplified voice and domestic field recordings to the mix, the piece inhabits a space of bodily, almost sensual intimacy, moving beyond the Cageian tradition of small sounds to somewhere uncomfortably human" --Francis Plagne, Melbourne, January 2015. Artwork design by Lasse Marhaug. Vinyl cut made by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin. LP-only release; edition of 300. ][Please note: there was an error with the labels which state 33rpm, it was actually cut at 45rpm]
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PLANAM 031LP
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"Recorded during a week-long sojourn in Norway, Sonja Henies vei 31 is a profoundly moving document of the personal and artistic union between Crys Cole and Oren Ambarchi. Abandoning their usual instrumental artillery, both performers make themselves vulnerable to the listener, undertaking a committed exploration of pure physical gesture. Surrounding an explicitly intimate duo performance is a hazy collage of field recordings, tape hiss, metallic clinks and wandering voices. This forces the listener to hover in a disorienting psychological space between a confronting real world, and a swirling dream-world. While the latter's abstraction cannot penetrate the former's emotional directness, both environments function to obscure one another's meaning. What is most affecting for the listener is how he/she inadvertently becomes part of the record's scenery: a dreamer, narrator and voyeur in equal parts. Sonja Henies vei 31 is a brave personal statement, a celebration of the idyllic, and a tragic theater of emotional longing." --James Rushford, Melbourne, 2014; Due to the very intimate nature of these recordings, the first pressing has been limited to 150 copies only.
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