- Following the recent release of ‘tropical ambient bangers’ Taking Flight, a fun collaboration with Marike Van Dijk under the pseudonym Flightless Birds Take Wing, local Meanjin/Brisbane composer and musician Madeleine Cocolas returns with her most cohesive and best album yet, Spectral.
Where Taking Flight was spontaneous, irreverent and largely improvised, Spectral is contemplative, meditative and grounded almost entirely in manipulated field recordings. Cocolas herself describes the album as being about “deep stillness, observation and perception underpinned by emotional expression. It is a subtle shift in memory, a recolouring of the world we think we know and a willingness to lean into that possibility.” Unlike previous solo releases, Cocolas didn’t have a clear concept in mind for Spectral and the foundations for it were not fully realised until more than twelve months after moments in time were captured in the outside world during the first wave of the pandemic. These recordings are heavily worked, some sped up, some slowed down, others compressed or equalised yet the overall sound is largely organic. The reason for this is twofold: their natural sources including weather storms and birds and Cocolas’ propensity for creating a deeply interconnected and immersive experience.
The first track and first single released, A Memory Blown Out, is an anomaly in many respects. It does not feature field recordings and contains vocals which were originally recorded across two separate tracks when Cocolas was living in Seattle almost ten years ago; part of an ambitious creative endeavour to record a piece of music every week of the year. Here Cocolas has manipulated the vocals down an octave, distorted the pitch and fused the electronics to create a deep, ethereal space. Enfold is tender and elevates the listener’s mood which is disrupted with Presence, sinister ambience layered with warm -though at times foreboding- electronics and classical piano. The field recording for Northern Storm was captured around the lake at the University of Queensland. It’s fuzzy, heavily punctuated and dystopian in feel, the climax of, and the most intense track on the album. And The I Watch It Fall Apart is a reverie, a liminal state between two tracks of vastly different intensity. Resonance contains angelic vocals and electronic loops to create a hypnotic space which slowly begins to restore positive mood. In Waves slows the tempo again and Cocolas’ brother lends guitar on the final piece, Rip and the chords immediately reminded me of Lilac Wine by Jeff Buckley.
It’s hard to believe that with the exception of guitar on one track and vocals on a few, mobile phone, laptop computer and piano are the only apparatus used on this album. What this does highlight though is Cocolas’ mastery of these apparatus, spatial awareness and her developing curiosity and connection to her surroundings. On Spectral, the devil is in the detail, and what the listener is gifted with is a deeply transformative experience from one human being, their documentation and experience of the world at a moment in time, to another.
- Tristan Birrell.