When you’re ensconced in a circle of 29 piccolos, no one can hear you scream. New York-based flutist and TAK Ensemble cofounder Laura Cocks re-creates this otherworldly sonic scenario in David Bird’s “Atolls,” the first piece off their new debut solo album, Field Anatomies (Carrier). Bird says his piece derived the auxiliary performers’ pitches by employing “combined spectral analysis” of a cymbal crashing and Janet Leigh’s iconic shriek in Psycho. To get the desired eerie effect, Cocks recorded themself playing each of the parts while Bird, who produced the track, used binary panning to build a surround-sound sensation. The subsequent works on Field Anatomies create similarly monstrous spectacles out of recontextualized ingredients. The album’s most riveting works are metacommentaries on the flute itself, and both were written by composers with deep Chicago bona fides; Cocks also has local roots, having grown up in the tiny northern suburb of Green Oaks, and they cite Nicole Mitchell’s performances in the city as a major influence. The album’s tour de force is a 2014 piece by Catalan composer Joan Arnau Pàmies, “Produktionsmittel I” (German for “Means of Production I”), where Cocks eventually trades their flute for an aluminum foil sheet and glass bottle. Bethany Younge wrote “Oxygen and Reality” for Cocks in 2017, the same year Younge left Chicago for New York. Like Pàmies’s piece here, “Oxygen and Reality” employs unusual materials—in this case balloons—to dramatic effect. Also as with “Produktionsmittel I,” Cocks’s album performance, while electrifying, doesn’t give a complete picture of the work, since both scores specify lighting and stage directions for performers. Only in performance can you see a balloon quivering like a lung at the end of Cocks’s piccolo, while they grasp their instrument with the desperation of someone sucking from an inhaler. The instrument becomes a giver of breath rather than an insatiable taker. In the ongoing shocks of the pandemic era, Cocks’s asphyxiation feels all too visceral, all too soon. But where there is discomfort, I find there’s also some truth—and Field Anatomies will make you squirm.
Laura Cock’s Field Anatomies drops 2/22 and is available for pre-order on Bandcamp.