Album Review: Laura Cocks, field anatomies

On field anatomies, Laura Cocks’ flute often sounds like anything but a flute. They breathe into their instrument, creating puffy wasps of air and biting, gritty punches that zig zag from one speaker to another. Sometimes, pitched tones appear, but even those sound a little alien. The album presents a wide array of possibilities of the flute’s sound, aiming to expand the instrument’s possibilities and ultimately presenting music that defies conventions.

Cocks has had a long history of pushing boundaries on the flute and in contemporary classical music. The New York-based flutist is the Executive Director and flutist of TAK Ensemble, a fearless group of musicians who present cutting edge new works. They developed field anatomies in close collaboration with the five composers featured on the album, centering spatialization and resonance on each piece to give the music a three-dimensional feeling. Cocks began working on the album as a way to explore the flute’s physicality, and throughout the record, the flute’s body is more of a character than its bright tones. 

At many points of field anatomies, Cocks’ voice and breath feel one with the flute’s frenzied motion. David Bird’s “Atolls” opens the album with breathiness and flutters, eventually expanding to include chaotic bursts of notes and manipulated electronic dissonances, and then receding into spiraling echoes and metallic drones. Cocks’ urgent breath runs underneath every musical moment, ultimately creating a fast-paced whirlwind of energy. Bethany Younge’s “Oxygen and Reality” feels similar, building up from barely there blips of air that come and go in spurts and travel in frenetic buzzes. Cocks’ voice and breath eventually enter, becoming one with the flute until they’re all that’s left. 

While most of the album embodies this hectic space, one piece stands out for its more meditative approach: Jessie Cox’s “Spiritus.” It features a drone that’s mixed with a hint of voice, gently wavering between pleasant consonance and moments of tension, until the flute bursts into a fast melody that moves like it’s weighed down in quicksand, stuck in time yet striving to push forward. Every moment stretches out, reaching past the instrument.

Throughout field anatomies, Cocks finds the balance between light and dark, pummeling and airy. Much of the album breaks open our imagined conception of what a flute might be. But perhaps what’s most compelling about this music is its suggestion that flute has places yet to go. In the album’s final moments, Cocks takes a breath in as if they’ll play another note, but they don’t. Instead, we’re left to wonder what might come next.