Crys Cole's third solo release for the Black Truffle label, Making Conversation documents a different facet of her work, presenting three rigorously conceptualised 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 8-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. We hear insect-like twittering and birdsong fragments, resonant thuds and distant roars, furtive crunches and taps, muffled breath and metallic scrapes. 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 Cagean 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 realise 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. Where the composer suggests a realisation on a trio of acoustic instruments (playing rolls with velvet beaters), cole translates the piece into her characteristic sound and object language as a trio of rolling sounds on 'two large similar paper things and one 5-pin bowling ball'. Rolling from one side of the stereo field to the other, the bowling ball's uneven movement is the heart of this immersive textural array, created with the simplest materials, which generates phantom sensations of pitch and phasing effects solely through amplified friction.
On 'Valid ForeverrRrrRRrrr… (pt. 2)', cole makes a first foray in translating her signature approach into conventional instrumental sounds, here in the form of a transcription for MIDI percussion ensemble. The result is refreshingly puzzling, comparable perhaps only to the sparsest moments of Keiji Haino's classic "C'est parfait…" 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.
Crys Cole (born 1976) is a Canadian sound
artist working in composition, performance
and sound installation. Generating subtle and imperfect sounds through
haptic gestures and seemingly mundane materials, she creates texturally
nuanced works that continuously retune the ear. Cole has performed in
Canada, Japan, Australia, Thailand, Singapore, the USA, UK and throughout
Europe. She has ongoing collaborations with
Oren Ambarchi and with
James Rushford (under the name Ora Clementi). She has also worked with Francis
Plagne,
Leif Elggren, Tetuzi Akiyama,
Seiji Morimoto, Jessika Kenney,
David Rosenboom,
Annea Lockwood, Keith
Rowe, Lance Austin Olsen, Jamie Drouin, Mathieu Ruhlmann, David Behrman,
Tim Olive and many more. Cole's work has been published on labels
Black Truffle, Penultimate Press, Ultra Eczema, caduc, Bocian, Another Timbre
and Infrequency editions. With guest appearances published on Touch and
MeGO. She has exhibited her work in Canada, Russia, Czech Republic,
Germany, Denmark, Sweden, the UK and Thailand.
