What Brisbane-based composer and musician Madeleine Cocolas forged by combining a set of sounds she grabbed by her phone from the surroundings of her dwelling is simply amazing and considerably touching if you can reasonably say you preserved your soul in these hard times. It’s set into stones, to say so, on her recent album “Spectral” (out of music label Room40). I recommend diving into its sound, but let’s start diving into it with the words of Madeleine.
Chain D.L.K.: Hi Madeleine! How are you doing?
Madeleine Cocolas: Very well, thank you!
Chain D.L.K.: Before focusing on your last enchanting record, can you go back in time and tell our readers how you got attracted by music-making?
Madeleine Cocolas: It’s something I always remember doing, even as a little kid. When I was supposed to be practicing piano, I was always more interested in improvising my own stuff and putting my ear against the piano to hear the insides and explore different sounds the piano could make.
Chain D.L.K.: I can imagine it’s hard, but if you can choose three performers or musicians or just people in your family who were like spiritual guides or important milestones in your artistic growth, which ones you’ll mention and why?
Madeleine Cocolas: Ooooh that is a tricky one! I had a piano teacher growing up, Paul Turner, and he was a huge influence on me. He’s no longer with us, but I do think of him often, and I wish I could share some of my music with him. My partner Gregory Long would be another influence, as he has consistently encouraged me to pursue music even before I thought of it as something I could really pursue seriously. And lastly, I would have to say Lawrence English, whom I had been a big fan of and then had the good fortune and privilege of working with to release my last two albums. Room40 is such an incredible label and I feel unbelievably lucky to be able to release through them, and they are also based in beautiful Brisbane!
Chain D.L.K.: I have to admit that Ithaca was the reason why I remember your name before the reprise of listening to this conversation. Would you say your approach was different for any of your past albums?
Madeleine Cocolas: Approaching “Spectral” was different from my previous albums. With my previous three albums, I had a clear purpose of what I wanted to achieve and a clear vision before I started writing. “Spectral” began as a collection of field recordings I took on my phone as an exercise in mindfulness, without any preconceived ideas on what I might do with them. So in that sense, “Spectral” came about in a much less structured and more organic way.
Chain D.L.K.: I also remember Metropolitan. A very interesting album that got closer to modular electronics and computational approaches (and even some blinks to the improvisational scene) to composition, which, if I remember well, was strongly influenced by the Met in New York. Can you tell us more about that release?
Madeleine Cocolas: Metropolitan was directly inspired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which I fell in love with when I was living in New York City. I wanted to write an album connected with my time in NYC, and I decided to write what is essentially a love letter to the MET.
I selected 9 artworks from the MET that resonated with me, and wrote a piece of music about each of those individual artworks, with the title of the music also being the title and artist of the artwork I selected. My partner, Gregory, created custom software to analyze each of the 9 artworks in different ways, and the software he wrote generated either sounds or MIDI which I then used as the basis for my compositions. Each piece is my emotional response to the selected artworks based on a computational analysis of the artwork.
Chain D.L.K.: I noticed that the opening track of “Ithaca” and “Spectral” are both based on catchy tracks driven by widely resonant vocals. Before focusing on Spectral in detail, is that a reason behind this repeated choice? Are there any similarities in the equipment you used for both tracks as well?
Madeleine Cocolas: I actually hadn’t noticed that, but I can see what you mean! Although they both feature my vocals very heavily, the process behind writing those tracks was quite different. The opening track to “Spectral” (“A Memory, Blown Out”), was actually recorded when I was living in Seattle about 10 years ago, and it is only vocals. It was a piece that had always stuck with me and never really found its place in the world, but as I was writing “Spectral” and thinking a lot about memories, I re-visited the track and quite heavily manipulated it. “Across The Ocean” on “Ithaca” feels more like a piano piece to me (even though it also features vocals) and was much more of an emotional response to what I was experiencing at the time I wrote it.
Chain D.L.K.: Spectral seems to have a strong connection to memories and present times, as far as I understood. How did you manage to balance these two temporal layers while forging them?
Madeleine Cocolas: When I was writing “Spectral”, I was using field recordings that I had made up to a year beforehand, and then processing and articulating my emotions in the context of the time I was writing the album, so absolutely you are correct in that “Spectral” has a strong connection to memories as well as to present times. For me, writing “Spectral” was like bringing up old memories and emotions which of course shift over time, and then trying to place them in the context of the time I was writing them in. This gave me time to be able to process those memories and to be able to more clearly articulate the emotions they brought up.
Chain D.L.K.: I read that “Spectral” is based on sounds collected in your surroundings in these last years. Are there any of them that are somehow unique and intimately connected to the moment and the place where they were grabbed? If so, any example?
Madeleine Cocolas: Yes, absolutely! Whilst listeners might not be able to hear all the field recordings clearly because I have manipulated some of them so heavily, I could probably tell you exactly where I was for all of them. For example, the deep thud sounds at the beginning of “Presence” are loud crickets that my daughters and I were trying to find one night across the road from our house, and the cacophony in the background of “Rip” is a huge storm I recorded from my deck, “And Then I Watch It Fell Apart” features playground equipment from a children’s park we were visiting, and “Resonance” was recorded on the beach, and you can hear my children in the background. The act of recording the sounds on my phone felt like a kind of mindfulness to me where I was trying to focus on my surroundings and listen carefully to the surrounding sounds, and because of this very intentional act, I do remember where I was and how I felt at those times.
Chain D.L.K.: Would you say that this same uniqueness features the melodies you forged?
Madeleine Cocolas: The melodies and the piano for me are more of an emotional expression and have an element of improvisation to them. I’ll generally have an idea of what I want to play, and then I will improvise as I record various takes. Playing piano has always been deeply cathartic to me and a form of emotional release.
Chain D.L.K.: It’s funny to read that even the introductory words attached to the release refer to “deep stillness”, the album gets’ also described as “a dynamic set of transient states”. I don’t remember the famous movie-maker who said that if you stop, the world will move in front of your eyes as a movie… would you say that yours is the same idea of stillness in “Spectral”?
Madeleine Cocolas: Yes, that quote perfectly captures what I mean! With “Spectral” I feel like there are things happening throughout the album with varying levels of intensity, but to me, listening to the album feels a bit like standing in the middle of a storm and just observing what is going around you without necessarily getting caught up in the storm itself. It’s the idea of mindfulness and observation so whilst the music and sound itself aren’t particularly “still”, writing the album and listening back to it are about my own personal deep stillness, observation, and perception.
Chain D.L.K.: The dimension where it was born was familiar, I read… but the contribution of family members is not only limited to that, as I read the name of Anthony Cocolas for the lovely guitar of the final track “Rip” (less dark than the title could let imagine)! Any word about the role of the family for Spectral?
Madeleine Cocolas: Whilst I have an incredibly supportive family, and I was able to collaborate with Anthony (we used to play in bands together over the years), for me “Spectral” is a very solitary album, so there wasn’t really any direct input into the album from my family apart from Anthony who played guitar on “Rip”.
Chain D.L.K.: “Spectral” got released just some days ago… any interesting feedback by listeners (not professional reviewers)?
Madeleine Cocolas: I love that some people have found “Spectral” to be very calming and peaceful, while others have found it to sound like the end of days. I love this because it just shows how people can listen to the same thing which can elicit a completely different emotional response and reaction. Any connection my music makes with listeners is an incredible thrill for me.
Chain D.L.K.: Any work in progress?
Madeleine Cocolas: I’ve got some live shows coming up that I’m looking forward to, so I have been working on how to translate Spectral into a live setting.
Visit Madeleine Cocolas on the web:
www.madeleinecocolas.com/
https://madeleinecocolas.bandcamp.com/album/spectral