Scariest album of flute music ever. Laura Cocks’ solo recital disc field anatomies is a gruelling, intimidating experience when heard in one sitting. Don’t let the pressed flowers on the cover fool you; get the message that these (genuine) preserved petals crushed flat between heavy black cards are sending. All five works, composed over the past ten years, are intensely physical and demanding pieces for performer and listener. I don’t mean in the Unity Capsule sense, either, although there is a similar complexity and difficulty which Cocks successfully wrestles with throughout. All five composers represented here push intricacy of pitch and rhythm into the background, pushing their emphasis partly on sonority, but particularly on emodying the flute as an extension of breath – or an obstacle to it.
Cocks presents a masterclass on the phsyicality of wind playing. We can acknowledge that past prejudices against the flute as a petty instrument are entirely unfounded, yet during the opening half of the the first work, David Bird’s Atolls for solo piccolo “and 29 spatialized piccolos” I kept steeling myself against the prospect of a barrage of relentlessly finicky virtuosity. This never happens, even as Cocks negotiates tortuous passages of overblown multiphonics with a smearin’ and sneerin’ attitude before the work suddenly explodes into dense, dark spectralism. Electronics and other devices are used in all the works here, except for Jessie Cox’s Spiritus, but even that relatively straightforward work requires Cocks to provide a low, vocalised drone to thicken out the sound of her instrument. The focus on the sound of breath and mouth in all the works becomes most extreme in Bethany Younge’s Oxygen and Reality, where musician and piccolo are hemmed in by electronic processing, affixed balloons to ration the use of air and, most ominously, “hardware”. The constricted, suffocating atmosphere is marred a little by being a little too demonstrative of its premise, as when Cocks is required to speak on the subject through the piccolo, but by this stage of the album her voice comes as a surprise as up until now she has sounded larger than life.
The most listerner-friendly piece here may be DM R’s You’ll see me return to the city of fury, but even this electroacoustic work is dark and menacing while also being the least convulsive in its progress from start to finish. The final piece, Joan Arnau Pàmies’s Produktionsmittel I is part of a 2-hour trilogy. For this segment, Cocks unloads a marathon barrage of groans, growls, grunts and howls that search out the medians and extremes between pitch and noise. I’d call it an indomitable display of power, yet the piece itself suggests human exhaustion as the flautist is buffeted by electronic bleeps until she is swept away by a tide of white noise. There are times when it starts to feel like the flute has become an adjunct to the music, a prop for a greater compositional conceit. Based on the performances given here, a composer could get some exciting results from writing piece for Cocks which required her to do without an instrument altogether.
