Cole Blu - Torso (2023)

Patterns made by light falling through deciduous canopies on a June morning; Borgesian poetry in the mind of an anxious barista; awaking to dawn’s first light and looking, with waning hope, at one’s sleeping lover - memories flow through the songs of Cole Blu like water over a riverbed, or sense-impressions passing a meditator. This constellation of memories - lyrical and musical - forms a torso, in the sculptural sense: a body, shaped by human hands, but surviving only in part, leaving the full form and its interconnections to the imagination of the viewer.

Written, performed, and produced over the course of almost 5 years, the writing of Torso began with the sudden arrivals, during Blu’s penultimate year at the New England Conservatory, of Quiet Nighttime Pine-Flanked Hillside Street After First Storm December 2012, in December 2017, and, one month later, Sudden Red Gentle Green. This, alongside a breakup, a renewed engagement with art cinema and modernist literature, a decreased interest in jazz performance, and the discovery of Boston’s DIY scene, sparked a desire - to create a work both home-recorded and enormous in scope, like a polaroid of a landscape. And yet the record could not be fully written until it had been fully lived.

The record begins with the influence of songwriters of individual experience as Joanna Newsom, Kate Bush, Frank Ocean, Phil Elverum, and Joni Mitchell, but charts a course outward, crossing territories of krautrock, glitched-out electronic music, drone minimalism, noise, and ambient music. The record’s formal sensibility - as much derived from the art cinema of Clair Denis, Bi Gan, and David Lynch as from song - helps the total experience of the work rise above eclecticism, towards some arguably mystical all-encompassing unity. This formal unity encompasses difference and stratification with care and patience: the kinetic urge to fragment or explode is increasingly encumbered, as if tied down with a heavy weight, such that the music generally slows as it continues. From the hyper-compressed time-scales of ‘Boston Story’ and ‘The End Of Summer’, the music flows outward, to the expanses of ‘Patmos’, ‘Quiet Nighttime’, and ‘Thundering, Blissful’.

This slowing-down opens up zones for reflection, and also carefully turns attention away from the narrative’s humanistic starting points, towards the world. These (relatively) static moments aren’t far from what Paul Schrader calls ‘the transcendental moment’: after experiencing a flow of action, memory, mundanity, and conflict, a simple image, devoid of drama, acquires newfound meaning. And, as the record continues, these reflective zones grow until they overtake the more conventionally narrative material; what seemed to be a collection of songs reveals itself to be perched at the threshold of becoming something else.

As the record’s pace slows, the subject matter expands in kind. This expansion is a movement, simultaneously, away from the present, and towards the personal, universal, and referential - Patmos’ braiding of the narrator with Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus in both the present and in childhood as a means of examining the lingering effects of Christianity in one who no longer believes. But never with a unipolar conclusion: for all heady talk of “strandentwining sacraments”, the lyrics conclude - “I held your hand in summer.” Whether this is ultimately an affirmation of a relationship, or of a belief, or, contrarily, an acknowledgement of being a fairweather friend, lover, believer, is left open.

At once reflective and rhythmic, emotional and cerebral, urban and rural, Torso stares down existence from the smallest to the largest scales, finding moments of meaning as revelatory in their mundanity as their cosmicity.