Beside Myself, by crys cole

Beside Myself

by crys cole

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A limited quantity of sealed copies of this 2020 solo LP are now available directly from the artist. **DUE TO COVID shipping to some countries is slower than usual.

Includes unlimited streaming of Beside Myself via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

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	1.	the Nonsuch 21:53		buy track
	2.	In Praise of Blandness (Chapter IX) 20:03		buy track

about

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 focusses 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 Julien’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)

credits

released February 21, 2020

Composed, performed and recorded by crys cole.

Side B is a reading of 'The Blandness of Sound', from François Jullien, In Praise of Blandness, translated by Paula Varsano (Zone Books, 2004).

Additional voice and bloops on the Nonsuch by James Rushford.
Audio sweetening on In Praise of Blandness by Joerg Hiller.

Mixed by Joe Talia & crys cole at Chinatown, Melbourne and Good Mixture, Tokyo 2017-2019.

Mastered & cut by Kassian Troyer at D&M, Berlin, October 2019

Cover painting by Melanie Rocan. Lace, 2018, oil on canvas, 14 x 18 inches.

Released on LP by Students of Decay (US), edition of 300.

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about

crys cole Berlin, Germany

crys cole 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 textural works that continuously retune the ear.

alongside her solo work, she has ongoing collaborations w/ Oren Ambarchi, Francis Plagne, Ora Clementi (w/ James Rushford) & more. ... more

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