{"title":"Crys Cole","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"making-conversation","title":"Making Conversation","description":"\u003cp\u003eCrys Cole returns to Black Truffle with \u003ci\u003eMaking Conversation\u003c\/i\u003e, her third solo release for the label. After the intimate song-like constructions of \u003ci\u003eOther Meetings\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eMaking Conversation\u003c\/i\u003e documents a different facet of cole’s work, presenting three rigorously conceptualised commissioned pieces, each of which extend her signature approach to highly amplified small sounds into new directions.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe 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’.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e‘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. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOn ‘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.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Black Truffle","offers":[{"title":"Black LP","offer_id":50427067793739,"sku":"2217530","price":29.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/BLACKTRUFFLE123_a5e93888_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1726821219"},{"product_id":"other-meetings","title":"Other Meetings","description":"\u003cp\u003eFollowing on from last year’s acclaimed Sylva Sylvarum, the epic double LP from Ora Clementi (her collaborative project with James Rushford), crys cole returns to Black Truffle with \u003ci\u003eOther Meetings\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003cbr\u003eOriginally commissioned and released on cassette by Boomkat Editions in 2021, \u003ci\u003eOther Meetings\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Black Truffle","offers":[{"title":"Black | LP","offer_id":50476704465227,"sku":"1163909","price":29.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/a2c3ccf9-adbc-4c13-a365-d5510efd2cdd_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1727462733"},{"product_id":"testing-the-waters","title":"Testing the Waters","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eTesting the Waters\u003c\/em\u003e is a long-form electroacoustic work that moves through a series of episodic sections, tracing a drifting sonic journey. Field recordings sit alongside instrumental and electronic passages, all shaped in the studio into a landscape that is always in motion.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOriginally composed in Berlin in spring 2023 as a commission for WDR 3 Radio in Cologne, the piece is threaded through with the sound and idea of water: trickling, flowing, resonating and changing form.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAs both material and metaphor, water gives \u003cem\u003eTesting the Waters\u003c\/em\u003e its title and its quiet pull, shaping the music’s sense of movement, permeability and drift.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Persistence of Sound","offers":[{"title":"CD","offer_id":58241628799307,"sku":"R8902-2569","price":16.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/a2490911584_10.jpg?v=1787609482"}],"url":"https:\/\/shop.roughtrade.com\/collections\/crys-cole.oembed","provider":"Rough Trade","version":"1.0","type":"link"}