Laura Cocks, flutist and Executive Director of TAK Ensemble, chamber and solo performer, and advocate for contemporary music, is no stranger to the ambitious. Heralded for their “visceral physicality” (Foxy Digitalis), Cocks’ new solo album field anatomies (Carrier Records) is a true must-listen. Described as a “blisteringly physical” collection, this album undoubtedly challenges any preconceived notions of flute-playing, probing the flute-body relationship and hyperextending its possibilities with vibrance and intention.
Without hyperbole, this five-track spread is a marathon of physical and artistic endurance, each piece starkly demanding and sonically rich in its own right. Breath, phrasing, dynamics, projection — the elements of performance flutists are trained to hone — are expertly exploited, not only through unquestionable technical prowess, but through physical vigor. Extended techniques are taken to extremes, with impressive control over the entire range of dynamics. Long phrases, tongue rams, singing and playing, all techniques requiring olympic breath control, are just some of the elements that make this a behemoth of a line-up.
Laura Cocks performs Bethany Younge’s Oxygen and Reality
Atolls by David Bird scatters 29 spatialized piccolos across a sonic underwater landscape. At one moment, clicks of the piccolo keys bubble and pop. At another, a cadenza-like interjection flashes by like a frenzied fish. Bethany Younge’s Oxygen and Reality for piccolo, electronics, balloons, and hardware sculpts with breath — the lungs and body acting as the force and air acting as the form. The balloon, piccolo, and body are unseen, but they are strangely felt via huge bursts of air billowing from Cocks; what could be a balloon becomes a roaring fire, a piccolo transforms into a metal barrel drum. If an opportunity to see Cocks perform this work live presents itself — go!
Parsing the relationship between body and flute, Cocks leads us through other sound worlds rife with their own collection of extended techniques. Cast with multiphonics, vocalizations, and slow evolving swells, the meditative repose of Jessie Cox’s Spiritus for solo flute reveals a vast inner world of vibration, air, and voice. In You’ll see me return to the city of fury for glissando flute and electronics by DM R, explosions of flutters, crescendos, and growls ricochet and reverberate.
In what may be the most impressive performance on the album, Cocks absolutely shreds in the ferocious Produktionsmittel I for amplified flute, aluminum foil, glass bottle, and fixed media by Joan Arnau Pàmies, a gnarly near-25-minute undertaking. In the opening phrases, Cocks’ flute-body is an amalgamated creature, gnashing and spitting in long utterances. Fleeting moments of quasi-arpeggiated phrases escape, only to fall back into quiet vocalized murmurs. Cocks challenges the idea that body and flute are separate entities of flesh and metal; those limitations don’t exist in this space as body and instrument meld.
Laura Cocks–Photo by Julia Den Boer
Throughout the entirety of field anatomies, Cocks wields complete command of not only the flute, but the flute-body. And it’s important to note that this album is not merely virtuosic for virtuosity sake. Cocks is adventurous, but more importantly, thoughtful. These five pieces, created through collaboration and experimentation with the composers, tesalate beautifully together, venturing through the wild and meditative, electronic and acoustic.
In the liner notes, Cocks describes the significance of the prairies of their childhood from which the album garnered its name, a detail that provides a nuanced layer to the curation of the album as a whole. The album itself comes in an ephemeral “eco-wallet” (without plastic shrink wrap) with detailing of hand-collaged dried flowers and beeswax. Each eco-wallet also includes a pack of seeds native to the recipient’s area, with instructions to scatter them. In this way, Cocks invites listeners to join in the powerful physical communion of field anatomies, a tender gesture that matches the fervent musical potency of this body of work.
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