Flightless Birds Take Wing: Taking Flight

- I wonder how they came up with the name for this project. It’s difficult to think of two musicians who less fit the description of ‘flightless birds’ than Madeleine Cocolas and Marike van Dijk. The pair of world-tripping composer, sound-artist, music-supervisor, band leader, muso types are significantly more often in the air travelling between the US, Europe and Australia than most of the arty folks I know. I think we’re actually lucky they even stopped long enough in one place -van Dijk is already slated for July gigs in Rotterdam- to make the whole Flightless Birds Take Wing thing happen. Happen it has, however, in a highly unusual aural document of their time together in Meanjin / Brisbane and a flurry of industrial noise, energetically DIY beats, ethereal ambience and sax; and, who’s to say, there may be feathers swirling around in there somewhere.

My initial thinking was Taking Flight sounded a little bit more like what I know of Madeleine Cocolas’ playbook, so far. She’s very shortly about to release a whole other record, Spectral, on local ambient institution Room40 and she describes her process for that as “...built on a foundation of sounds I collected from my immediate surroundings in recent times.  It’s a familiar story, casting your ears close to home. I captured these sounds as a type of aural diary to mark days and weeks as they passed.  As our physical worlds seemed to become smaller, my senses of observation and perception of my immediate surroundings sharpened. Inside these small spaces I found a wellspring of materials that seemed to offer themselves up.” That checks out: the first couple of slices of the four track EP are even called Latrobe and Given Terrace -which should be a familiar part of the small world of any Meanjinite- and are filled with streetscapey snippets of found sound. You know I actually lived on Given Terrace and in my mind it was always the quieter half of Paddington’s main drag. Here, however, Latrobe is the airy and meandering soundscape, full of an ethereal wonder, while Given Terrace is clearly in full traffic jam, blaring from the beginning with what can only be a bus horn; guess it must be game night.

I know that Marike van Dijk has been working on more experimental stuff, as part of her PhD studies, which is what brought her down under, but in the couple of records she’s put out, you’ll hear her mainlining an often pretty oldschool style of jazz. It’s small ensemble rather than the 'bigbands' she often plays in, but her Stereography project sounds like a more modern echo of the lush vocal jazz of the mid-Twentieth Century. Perhaps, since Cocolas has recently been indulging slower and more spaced out compositions, the frisky beats of the track Main Arm are van Dijk's? They sound like a rhythm section centred on a child’s toy robot (one of those ones that walks and has a chest which flips open to reveal an arsenal of cannons, replete with strobing lights). There’s no doubting whose sax that is on the rather obviously titled final number, Sax Conversation. It’s a duet, though, so, overdubs? Oh and the electro-industrial noise is back and it’s insane! But playful.

I think it really only matters to me who contributed what, here, because I was so busy trying to size up Flightless Birds Take Wing and work out what was going on. If you're not actively trying to drain the fun out of it like that, then it’s a kaleidoscope of sounds, a swirl of ambient awe, thunderous noise and, by turns lyrically and energetically, many things in between. No doubt it’s a most unusual bird, but joyously it is most certainly Taking Flight.

- Chris Cobcroft.