Sophie Cooper - Lean In / Intact (2023)

Todmorden’s avant bard Sophie Cooper takes an oblique route under the skin with her slow-burning rumination on broken family structures and unspoken taboos surrounding estrangement.

Using guitars, tape loops and electronics, the vital member of Yorkshire’s experimental music rhizome dwells on matters of family and interpersonal relationships lesser covered in contemporary music. Her ideas on fractured nuclear family structures are made explicit via frayed loops of her speaking on the nature of familial relationships during lockdown, and hopes of reconciliation with an unidentified person.

On the first instance of ‘Lean In’, her stop/start loops are embedded in instrumentals that cloud her thoughts with a textural uncertainty that leaves much ambiguous space to the listener’s imagination and sense of anticipation. On the other hand ‘Intact’ sheds the fug for a play of phased tape loops of vocals on longing for a connection, and the expectations of family, coaxed into curious cadence with results that relate to Richard Youngs’ experiments as much as Lolina or Jacqueline Humbert’s Lovely Music, Inc. recordings, but keening into more maddening blur of trombone and white-out electronic noise like an Alvin Lucier work.

Everyone is going to have a different perspective on Sophie’s subject here, to hugely varying degrees. Depending one’s background it’s possibly either discomfiting or insightful in effect, and in that sense recalls Terre Thaemlitz’s uniquely challenging ‘Deproduction’ opus in its broaching of societal taboos on family.