The Canadian artist's second album features two immersive pieces that
explore ideas of compositional drift: The Nonsuch is inspired by
nocturnal hallucinations while In Praise of Blandness builds on
sinologist François Jullien's concept of “blandness”.
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 (2015, Black Truffle), 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 Jullien's book In Praise of Blandness
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)
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.
