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Dusted Reviews
Artist: Coppice Album: Holes/Tract Label: Consumer Waste Review date: Jun. 15, 2012 |
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The word "coppice" describes an area of newly formed growth that has emerged from the stumps left behind in deforestation. In keeping with this theme of life budding from death and the new spawning from the old, the Consumer Waste label, which released the debut full-length from Coppice’s Noé Cuéllar & Joseph Kramer, use only (you guessed it) post-consumer waste in the packaging of their releases. Regardless of one’s opinion on the sounds, it’d be hard not to at least appreciate this lucid connection between label and artist.
Since 2009, Coppice has worked with reed instruments and custom electronics to form a truly unclassifiable style of music, full of shruti box wheezing, subtle feedback, and all the pops, buzzes, scrapes and thuds that idiosyncratic analog sound treatment can deliver. On Holes / Tract, the duo bring tape loops and a modified boombox into the mix, lending the sonic swill and ever-present shruti a distinctly salvaged quality. The result of Coppice’s intentionally imperfect process translates as a stitching together of sound scraps, as if culled from bits and pieces of a library of recorded live performances, or sonic fragments patched together from various turntable experiments.
It may seem negative to say that something sounds salvaged, but it’s a testament to how easily Coppice’s music allows the imagination to probe for the secrets behind it. In reality, this isn’t some one-in-a-million “found sound” record, but one derived from two hard working musicians who perform their art live, as cumbersome as it might be to do so, and as challenging as it might be for their audience to interpret.
By Adrian Dziewanski
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View all articles by Adrian Dziewanski