Coppice – Draw Agreement

Few releases i’ve explored this year have pulled me into their orbit so completely, and so (in the best sense) puzzlingly, as Draw Agreement by the US experimental duo Coppice. i’ve been following the work of Noé Cuéllar and Joseph Kramer for around a decade, and have been consistently entranced by their unique approach to the production, and perception, of sound. For a pair of avant-garde experimentalists, Coppice’s output is extensive, and as the years have passed and i’ve acquired and got to know pretty much their entire catalogue, it’s become apparent that, far from thinking of them as mere ‘albums’, each one is just as much a research document, a testament to the latest stage in the duo’s evolving compositional methodology. My lengthy experience with and understanding of their work should make writing about Draw Agreement that much more straightforward, but it’s easy to feel a touch overwhelmed by both the scope, and the convolution of this particular project, being as it is a summation and synthesis of sorts of their entire body of work to date.

Any difficulties in getting to grips with Draw Agreement certainly aren’t due to reticence on the part of Coppice themselves. While the handsome 3CD set contains little more than some mysterious photographs, diagrams and basic information, the duo’s website has an extensive, in-depth accompanying essay exploring all of the specifics of the works found on the album. My relationship with programme notes is a strained one (composers are rarely the best people to write about their own music), yet in the case of this particular text, titled “Lightyears: Exploded/Collapsed Auditions for Test Audiences and Technics”, Cuéllar and Kramer provide genuinely illuminating insights into the multitude of thought and compositional processes at play. “Play” seems an important word here, because while Draw Agreement contains a great deal of serious, rigorous investigative work, there’s nonetheless a sense of spontaneity and caprice underpinning it, the quintessential inquisitiveness at the heart of all genuine creativity, simply asking, “What happens if we do this? What would that sound like?”

An integral part of that playfulness arises from the way Coppice have taken fragments from their earlier work (part of a process of “abridging”) and incorporated them – and in the process, re-examined and, to an extent, redefined them – in entirely new contexts. The first disc introduces this idea via four works, Circumpass, Compass, Hourglass and At the Poles. One of the key characteristics of Coppice’s work – one of its most continually beguiling features – is a fundamental dislocation of our ability to identify real and artificial elements. This is reinforced by the emphasis in their music on physical instruments and objects, leading to a preconception that everything is (or should be) real, yet the listening experience invariably indicates otherwise.

Circumpass and Compass, both short studies, conjure up similarly disorienting, sonically liminal environments. Circumpass blends tactile noises with soft electronic tones such that they become indivisible, colouring them with surges of burbling stuff, faint traces redolent of instruments, skittering sounds and low buzzes that keep the ear constantly on the move and refocusing at different levels. It’s a relatively gentle track, culminating in a static chord with insect-like noise around it. By contrast, Compass, while again mixing tangible and intangible sound objects, nonetheless speaks more directly, via the emergence halfway through of a slow semblance of bassline while a strange, wiry melody meanders above. In this context it’s unexpected and beautiful, but it dissolves away into a soft ticking pulse that itself eventually breaks down, all of which makes that brief lyrical interlude all the more tantalising in retrospect.

At the Poles takes more extensive pieces of extant material to create what amounts to a birfurcated (or, considering the title, polarised) soundworld. Beating pulses play out adjacent to noise elements that dance across the stereo field. In encourages an interesting juxtaposed listening, both in terms of jumping between the two layers as well as between regarding them as separate or possibly connected. A little after its midpoint, the piece transforms, the pulses replaced by a dirty drone. Considering that drones have a way of enabling almost anything above them to feel somehow ‘connected’, this works to bring the elements together, despite the fact that, by now, the other element having developed into intense noise shapes filled with energy, they could hardly be more contrasting or ostensibly unrelated.

In tandem with notions of real and artificial, separation and connection, Coppice also play with our perception of what constitutes active and passive. Not surprisingly this manifests most significantly in the two longest works, Hourglass and Clocks in Flux (Elastic Capture-Source Diffusion post-CLEAT), the latter of which, lasting just over an hour, occupies the entire third disc. It’s admittedly disappointing to report that, coming at the end of Draw Agreement, Clocks in Flux is the album’s weakest point. Once again incorporating and reworking earlier materials – Compass and Circumpass, themselves reworkings, such that the whole has something of a Russian doll effect by this stage – the work again seeks to disrupt aural ‘reality’, here melding them with a binaural recording that is then undermined by additional elements taken from a live multichannel performance. The simple problem here is that, whereas the majority of Coppice’s output is arresting, fundamentally questioning (and / or causing us to fundamentally question) the nature of what we’re hearing, Clocks in Flux, compared to the rest of Draw Agreement, is just not as interesting, coming across as a somewhat arbitrary and at times baffling sequence that feels distancing. Its soundworld is no less fascinating, and its most interesting feature is the way it blurs its nature, primarily through being very obviously “composed” (active) yet with its quasi-arbitrary quality indicating otherwise. (Yet to call this a “feature” is cheating, i know, as it’s no doubt not something the composers intended.)

Shorter and more musically successful is Hourglass, which to an extent also feels affected by the long durational issue (lasting 49 minutes), yet where the narrative and the relationship of active and passive is more effective and engaging. Which is not to say clear; indeed, if Hourglass is anything it’s volatile, physical sounds merging with abstract noises, impressions of air and impact integrating and contrasting with glitch and pitch and multifaceted sound agglomerations that are more defiant against attempts to resolve them. Though unpredictable, its level of immersion maintains the sense that there’s an active attitude of order presiding over its potentially random shifts and eruptions, and once again Coppice take evident delight in playfully throwing highly naturalistic sounds together with artificial and electronic sources, like scientists playing with sonic chemicals, revelling in the resulting reactions

Where Draw Agreement is at its best is in its central panel, comprising the two snappily-titled sibling works Rotations in Refractor (Simulated Diffusion in the Likeness of the Yerkes Observatory) and Turning in Reflectors (Simulated Diffusion in Objects against the Yerkes Observatory). These form a pair of lengthy studies that recontextualise Compass and Circumpass within forms of real and simulated spatialisation, in relation to the Yerkes Observatory building in Wisconsin. These are among the most engrossing works Coppice has ever produced. The first, Rotations in Refractor, harnesses the hugely powerful mechanical sounds of the Observatory in a diptych-like structure. Its opening half is a play on the whirring mechanisms (with periods of silence that paradoxically seem no less full of microscopic sound), answered by a milder sequence of bubbling noise amid whirling and pitches, in another demonstration of relative (compositional) passivity yielding to activity. Turning in Reflectors is more collage-like, juxtaposing and superimposing elements to form a continually changing palette of click and clunk. The return of the lyrical passage from Compass is a delicious moment that here serves to create a similarly hypnotic period of glossy focus before becoming lost in a blur of sculpted and real-world actions that seem a world away from melodies and basslines.

All of which barely scratches the surface of the hugely ambitious sonic art Coppice have presented here. Equal parts research, experiment and music, Draw Agreement‘s achievement isn’t just in the brilliant, mesmerising explorations i’ve outlined above, but also in the way it makes one reflect on (and literally hear) their earlier work in a new context, which in turn has left me itching to go back and revisit their extensive back catalogue all over again.

Released earlier this year by Ferns Recordings, Draw Agreement is available on CD and download from the label (best for those in Europe) or direct from Coppice (best for everyone else).

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