Crys Cole - Other Meetings (2021)

Composer of lowercase concrète music, crys cole lends the Documenting Sound series one of its quietest, most nuanced instalments; an imaginary dérive thru her memory banks.

Forced to engage with a “surreal mix of calm and domestic routine” that paused her usually chaotic schedule in its tracks when the pandemic hit last year, crys found herself with a compacted setup that made her explore new ways and meanings through her creative practice, turning her kitchen table into a makeshift studio which served as portal to other lands, locations, recorded on her travels. Chiang Mai, Melbourne, Winnipeg became equidistant to her coffee pot, and all became part of the beguilingly intimate yet diaphanous fabric to ‘Other Meetings.’

Bringing outer space into her small surroundings in a manner recalling Ballard’s The Enormous Space’ short, crys innovated with what was to hand, poetically eliding the everyday domesticity of wilting flowers and a rocking coffee pot with a brukup old Korg DS8 and sources far more fantastic; from a meditation ceremony and deep-throated singing birds in Chiang Mai, Thailand, to fireworks in her native Winnipeg, CA. What came out is like a plasmic, rematerialised recollection of feelings, sights and smells, with eight individual pieces gauzily chained into side-long movements at a glacial pace.

As crys is, by her own admissions, “a slow worker” the results of ‘Other Meetings’ took a while to materialise, but their longer gestation lends itself to close inspection, where her filigree ephemera come to life with a time-slipping quality that’s deeply intoxicating, like a shaft of strong sunlight unexpectedly hovering over your eyes, forcing you to escape into your inner being for a minute... that can sometimes feel like an eternity.