Laura Cocks - FATHM (2025)

FATHM isn’t so much an album as it is a question—a pause in the middle of a conversation no one’s having, but everyone’s pretending to understand. It asks nothing of you, but demands your presence, your ear, your breath. The flute, a tender and fragile instrument, becomes almost otherworldly—like a butterfly in another dimension with teeth, or a marsh wren that screams only in windings. It speaks in fragmented thoughts, tracing edges of longing, absence, and memory. Each note emerges from a distant place and dissolves just as quickly. It’s both the sound and the space between it, the breath before it, and the quiet that follows.

Before each note, there’s a silence—a gap, a waiting room—like the universe is about to explain itself, but it’s just been put on hold. You can feel it, that space holding the possibility of everything and nothing, a breath that hasn’t yet exhaled. It lingers, like something on the tip of your tongue, familiar but unnamed. The flute doesn’t rush; it moves through the silence with patience, lingering in the void with an endurance that says, we can hold this forever if you want.

And then, the sound. But not in the way you might expect. These notes don’t land where you think they should. They drift, suspended in air like thoughts that float just out of reach. The space between the notes gives them meaning—what they leave behind, what they never quite say. You might listen for something known, but instead, you’re met with something softer, something almost too delicate to hold onto. In "To outstretch," you listen, but the listening itself feels like the point. The flute isn’t trying to be heard so much as trying to make you feel how you listen. It speaks in pieces of melodies, like memories slipping away—only you’re not sure you were supposed to remember anyway.

This isn’t music about loss. It’s music about absence, about the heavy gap where something used to be. Not everything can be filled, and some things shouldn’t be. The silence isn’t empty—it’s a presence, holding what the sound can’t. In “FAVN,” the flute breathes into this space, honoring what’s not there with a gentleness that feels almost like the rage in an apology that bites back. The silence is never an absence of sound, but a sound of its own, heavy and quiet, pressing itself into your ribs, into your heart.