INTERVIEWS / FEATURES

JANUARY 2023 • WDR3 Radio concert presentation and profile w/ Ilka Geyer 

AUGUST 2021 • Crucial Listening Podcast w/ Jack Chuter 

AUGUST 2021 • It’s Psychedlic Baby Magazine festure on Ora Clementi’s Sylva Sylvarum

APRIL 2020 • Distances for GRM 

MARCH 2020 • On Blandness and Being Beside Yourself: An Interview with Crys Cole by David Perron on FREE FORM FREAKOUT

MAY 2019 • SOUND AMERICAN contribution to ‘Two Questions for Sound Practitioners’ piece by Jennie Gottschalk

JULY 2018 • NATIONAL SAWDUST LOG Review and Interview for Two Words LP

MAY 2018 • AVANT-GUARDIAN interview w/ crys cole & Oren Ambarchi

FEBRUARY 2018 • FFFoxy Podcast #114: crys cole feature

AUGUST 2017 • on crys cole & oren Ambarchi’s hotel record… by Bradford Bailey, the Hum

JUNE 2017 • Discaholic’s Corner interview by Mats Gustafsson

FEBRUARY 2017 • syg.ma Interview for Geometry of Now event in Moscow, Russia.

DECEMBER 2016 • Field Recording feature in BOMB Magazine (NYC)

SUMMER 2016 • crys cole amplifies personal space Musicworks Magazine #125, feature by Kristel Jax

JANUARY 2016 • Personal Best fanzine #6 (Norway) interview by Francis Plagne

JULY 2015 • the WIRE magazine UK feature (Wire-Bite-2015)

NOVEMBER 2013 • BLOUIN ART interview by Mark Mann

JUNE 2013 • ARTslant interview by Courtney R Thompson

MAY 2013 • SPOR FESTIVAL Aarhus, Denmark, 3 questions

APRIL 2012 • INTERVIEW  by Joe Kalturnyk (for solo exhibition TRACINGS – Winnipeg)

AUGUST 2009 • Stylus magazine (Winnipeg) by Curran Faris

RECORDING PRESS/REVIEWS

Ora Clementi 

Sylva Sylvarum 

Black Truffle (AU / DE) 2021 

“As the first few seconds of Sylva Sylvarum unfold, listeners already familiar with Cover You Will Softer Me, the debut from crys cole and James Rushford under the Ora Clementi banner, may be confused. They may think that they’ve actually stumbled across a long-lost new age album. Yet as “Peach of Immortality” continues, several disorienting sounds announce that this is indeed the work of these two veteran sound artists: digitally altered birds, quiet yet ghostly shrieks, a soft croaking. By the time “Umbrella Spinner” arrives, and with it the pair’s hushed vocalizing, it’s clear that Rushford and cole have spent the last six years collecting their best ideas and have finally gathered them together here for us to consume heartily.

Sylva Sylvarum borrows its name from a vast tome attributed to Francis Bacon, considered to be one of the progenitors of modern scientific experimentation. Bacon’s “collection of collections” brings together a plethora of experiments, observations and theories that are foundational to our understanding of the natural world. Rushford and cole have mirrored Bacon’s curatorial ambition, having amassed fifteen compositions spread out across two slabs of vinyl. Many of the tracks allude to fantasy, mythology and utopia in their titles, some of which the artists derived from science fiction. This tie to sci-fi marries nicely with the many new age signifiers that cole and Rushford have included in their music, particularly the sounds sourced from synthesizers. Yet they have always embedded their soundscapes with subtle morsels of the uncanny, and they continue to do so here. In “Vulning” for example, a loud, guttural noise appears from out of nowhere. Is it the lowing of a cow in a pasture, or could it actually be the sorrowful moan of a humanoid beast living in an alien wilderness, like Jeff VanderMeer describes in his Southern Reach novels? This hybrid of musical and mysterious elements continues with “Lathe of Heaven,” as a lonely guitar is infected by a strange, snappy sizzle probably created by cole’s favorite instrument, the contact microphone. 

In amongst the Kafka-esque beauty — a quality which is depicted quite splendidly in the colorful cover art — are moments of bliss in its purest form. The relatively short “Milk Street” features a solemn trumpet line that drifts from guest Callum G’Froerer’s instrument. Rushford and cole harmonize across lush synth pads on “Magic Mountain.” The plucky yet melodic percussion from “Umbrella Spinner” reappears later as “Ferae.” The entire album unfolds with a dream-like sensibility, telling a story in fragments that aren’t necessarily in order but are pleasant to experience. To punctuate this, cole and Rushford close Sylva Sylvarum with “Forest of Materials,” in which they alternate relaying the syllables of a mysterious tale while a synth drone lazily tracks the journey. It’s a transfixing moment as well as the perfect summation of this duo’s surrealist vision. “

– Bryon Hayes – Dusted Magazine 

“Where do dreams come from? That’s something I think about more often than I actually remember my dreams these days. Ora Clementi, the duo of crys cole and James Rushford, are architects, in a way, constructing a sonic Neverland from a synthetic mosaic of lucid digital ephemera and vocal hypnosis. Details for days are spread across these 14 pieces, adding an enchanting aural realism that brings these blotter-soaked compositions to life. Sylva Sylvarum is an intoxicating soundworld; an exotic place to get lost exploring so we can find ourselves.

In the opening moments, as the chiming fractal curtains are pulled back on “Peach Immortality,” digitized waves rise from unseen sunken terraces, like ghost butlers trying to put everything into place before everything is open for business. Utopian patterns frolic into the frame as “Umbrella Spinner” takes both cole’s and Rushford’s breathy vocalizations on a flitting romp into underwater tunnels before evaporating into metallic dust, leaving us alone to dwell on the strange sonic murals hanging in the air.

Birds peck out wooden rhythms while fuzzy electronics sigh in the breeze on “Vulning,” the lines where one ends the other begins blurred beyond recognition. Snippets of cole’s voice, processed and sent back through time, attempt to pierce the veil of hiss. Alert tones fade in and out, an unsettling invitation to push further into Sylva Sylvarum where Callum G’Froerer’s solemn trumpet contemplation on “Milk Street” strips any notion of this universe being paradise. It’s dense. It’s real. It hurts.

Taking a straight line from the high-wire scaling, latent Broadcast skewed-pop vibes of “Magic Mountain,” rootless and drifting toward a green and pink glow at the horizon, Ora Clementi finally finds rest on the massive, brilliant “Forest of Materials.” The spatial motion of their respective voices, subtly moving across the audial field is hypnotizing with cole and Rushford alternating syllables and creating a warped sense of balance. G’Froerer’s trumpet and Joe O’Connor’s trombone sing forlorn drones, weeping beneath the shifting surface as this perfect world tenderly splits about at the seams. Sylva Sylvarum is a beguiling masterpiece. 

– Brad Rose, Foxy Digitalis 

“crys cole and James Rushford’s music was not made for kitchens or cars. Their work is so subtle that the smallest distraction—the noise from an AC unit, the rumble of a passing truck—threatens to drown out its nuances. The Canadian sound artist and Australian composer, who together record as Ora Clementi, specialize in small, quiet sounds evocative of rustling leaves, rubbed wineglass rims, and humming fluorescent bulbs. Silence the noise around you, and their work opens up a world of vivid and suggestive detail.

cole’s music, both solo and alongside collaborators like Oren Ambarchi, uses contact mics and controlled gestures to unlock a hidden world of vibration in everyday objects. Rushford’s pieces are fuller bodied, but not by much: Mixing electronics, tapes, and acoustic instruments, his compositions fixate upon the most ethereal textures and timbres. He described this year’s Lake From the Louvers, recorded during an artist residency on Lake Geneva, as an attempt to translate the play of light as it bounced off the surface of the water onto the windowpanes of his studio. Even when Rushford works in a more traditional mode, playing pianissimo is his forte: Last year, he released a recording of the modernist Catalan composer Frederic Mompou’s Musica Callada, a collection of diminutive piano sketches whose title translates as “Silent Music.”

The duo’s debut album as Ora Clementi, 2014’s Cover You Will Softer Me, was stitched together from whispering, crackling, and scraping sounds—manna for any ASMR lover. The music’s flow was so imperceptible that for long stretches, it was possible to wonder if the duo had simply set up microphones in some out-of-the-way space and walked away, allowing the tape to fill with the sounds of a building groaning under its own weight. Their captivating follow-up, Sylva Sylvarum, feels considerably more purposeful, as though its constituent parts were all meant to lead to a kind of epiphany.

The album begins with angelic voices, tinkling bells, and distant birdsong—a soft, glowing efflorescence as beatific as a moment of religious ecstasy. Across 15 tracks, the two musicians avail themselves of a wide array of sounds, atmospheres, and moods, yet all these pieces feel linked by some hidden design. They are held together not only by the musicians’ customary crepitations but also an eerie palette of synthesizers and guitar that are forever rising and falling, perpetually on the verge of slipping out of key—not dissonant exactly, but sour, wilted, enervated.

The shortest tracks are mere sketches. The minute-long “Sirin” runs pitch-bent flute synth through heavy reverb, reveling in the resulting vibrations; “Lathe of Heaven,” not much longer, pairs mournful guitar with choral pads and shrieking birds, almost gothic in its dour, languid movements. Often, a piece might abruptly change shape halfway through: “Umbrella Spinner” begins with bright mallet synths, reminiscent of Visible Cloaks, with a tentative, searching quality; the huffing of breath provides the pulse. But halfway through, the melody falls silent, giving way to more than a minute and a half of clicking sounds, like pebbles in the tide heard from underwater. In the first half, the artists are at their most lyrical; in the second, they cede the stage to purely environmental sound, as though erasing themselves from the frame.

A number of the most substantial tracks contain vocals. Practically as cryptic as their sound pieces, these are almost liturgical in tone, the lyrics neither sung nor spoken but softly chanted, like a church congregation reciting a prayer in unison. The artists have said that all the album’s lyrics are sourced from texts pertaining to utopias and the natural world, and the album’s title comes from a 17th century posthumously released book by Francis Bacon, a kind of miscellany of scientific facts and curiosities. In “Dialogue Between a Grandmaster of the Knights Hospitaller and a Genoese Sea-Captain,” they assemble a vast panoramic image out of stray shards and fragments—“precious and common stones… minerals and metals”; “wines, oils, and different liquids”; “all the different fish that are found in the rivers, lakes, and seas”; “dragons, worms, insects, flies, and beetles”—that dances in the mind like some ancient mosaic illuminated by flickering candlelight.

The words are difficult to make out; you don’t so much register their meanings as feel the weight of them sinking like stones into your subconscious. The same feeling is true of “Magic Mountain,” the album’s closest thing to an actual song, in which soft, optimistic synth pads serve as a bed for the pair’s sing-song recitation of places of natural wonder: “the Pacific Ocean seafloor… a prehistoric geological site in Colorado… a mountain on the border of North Cascades National Park.” It is unclear what these places may share in common, but the reverence of Ora Clementi’s tone is unmistakable. In moments like this, Sylva Sylvanum feels imbued with an almost spiritual resonance. Folding real-world sounds into a landscape of dreams, this album holds your attention even when it confuses.”

– Phillip Sherburne, Pitchfork 

Ora Clementi is a duo of Crys Cole and James Rushford, and Sylva Sylvarum is a cosmic suite of… I don’t know what to call it… narrative vaporwave? (See particularly ‘Magic Mountain’.) That sounds awful, but this is wonderful: cosmic undulations, thickets of low horns, a suite of electro-acoustic world-building. It draws from various literary descriptions of utopias – ‘Dialogue Between A Grandmaster Of The Knights Hospitaller And A Genoese Sea Captain’ reads from a 17th century utopian text (Campanella’s City Of The Sun) that describes an imaginary seven-walled city whose walls are decorated with animals, serpents, dragons, and worms. The landscape painted in sound feels indebted to gentle game music such as Monument Valley (‘Umbrella Spinner’ in particular), infused with small acousmatic moments of clicks and whirrs. ‘Vulning’ and ‘Peach Of Immortality’ are located in a pastel jungle replete with birds, beasts, insects, chiming bells and weather. In the vocal duets there are really pleasing lyrical junctions of words that just sound great together. Choose your own favourite, but mine is the softly enunciated ‘hy-dro-ther-mal vent field’. The strangeness of this synthesised place held my attention, but what I liked most of all is that it made me feel good. I felt briefly… hopeful.” 

– Jennifer Lucy Allan, July Rum Music, The Quietus 

crys cole 

Other Meetings 

Boomkat Editions (UK – 2021) 

– Julian Cowley – Modern Composition Column, WIRE July 2021 #449

crys cole

Valid ForeverrRrrRRrrr… (pt.1)

February 2021

Online audio-visual piece for Issue Project Room’s (NY) project With Women’s Work.

“With Womens Work” began on February 3 with a composition by Berlin-based sound artist crys cole responding to Beth Anderson’s Valid for Life, a graphic score featuring the letter R in varying typefaces and font sizes. Anderson’s instructions call for the gentle amplification of a “long, soft, full, round roll” performed on a trio of stringed instruments and drums. cole’s answer, Valid ForeverrRrrRRrrr. .  . (pt.1), abandons conventional musical means, creating a more quotidian soundtrack out of heavy balls, coins, and rolls of transparent paper flung across the artist’s studio floor. Set into motion by an unseen hand, these objects create muted but unmistakable tonal qualities, producing a haptic acknowledgement of the cascading trill evoked by Anderson’s score.

• Lauren Rosai, Art In America April 21, 2021.

crys cole 

Beside Myself 

Students of Decay (US – 2020) 

• Wire Issue 434, April 2020

• Musicworks Magazine (Canada) Issue 126, Spring 2020

“I have horrible associations and a violent dislike for most instances where texts are spoken over ambient sound. My worst experience of this was having to literally watch a large ice cube melt accompanied by an ‘art-text’ (cue, nonsensical ontology bollocks) read by Charlotte Rampling (for no apparent reason). Crys Cole’s ‘In Praise Of Blandness’ however, on this new album Beside Myself, is all that piece wishes it had been. She reads an extract of a book called In Praise of Blandness by Chinese scholar François Julien. Her sotto voce reading becomes increasingly distant and muffled, over a loud drone that has troubling frequencies in headphones – to me it almost ghosts a scream. It is not entirely relaxing, and I don’t think it’s supposed to be. I love it.

The other side, ‘The Nonsuch’ has moments that call to mind a scene from Michaelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger, Maria Schneider and Jack Nicholson stop at a roadside cafe, there is heat, dust, plastic tables and lukewarm drinks. The hum and shush of a nearby road, perhaps some machinery. They talk, but the camera watches from behind a section of a glass divider, and the conversation is muffled, lost, fragmented. We, the audience, cannot make out much of what they’re saying. ‘The Nonsuch’ on this album has that exact feel, of the slow drift of time in hot places, of air conditioners, the way white painted walls reflect the voices of people passing without their words being comprehensible. That is to say, I really appreciate the subtlety in these pieces.”

• Jennifer Lucy Allen, Rum Music: The Quietus, Jan 30, 2020

Francis Plagne + crys cole

Two Words 

Black Truffle (AU/DE – 2018) 

“Even though cole and Plagne are using a complex sonic, linguistic and structural language, Two Words favors experience over analysis. The specific techniques and processes the duo employ are less important than how the finished product affects listeners. Knowing that the first half is built primarily out of recordings of rubbed surfaces certainly adds a degree of awe for the duo’s sound manipulation skills, but it’s just as fun to try to blindly search for recognizable sounds. Often the music almost sounds like a car engine or buzzing insects, or you can convince yourself that you’re hearing recorded breaths or lapping water. It’s a masterpiece of collage music, and here is the first iteration of the idea of creating music on the verge of intelligibility.”

• Connor Lockie, SLUG Magazine (excerpt from longer review)  2018

“The album features a painting by Anne Wallace, of a car travelling down a rural road. The branches reflected in the car windows and the road winding through the greenery. Before hearing the album, the sleeve made no sense. Afterwards though, it’s another surprisingly perfect layered representation of this strange and deeply beautiful album. The disc presents quite possibly the strangest ‘song’ you’ll hear this year, but the weirdness is totally magnetic.”

• Obladada magazine  (excerpt from longer article) 2018

• Wire Issue 415, September 2018

Oren Ambarchi + crys cole 

Hotel Record 

Black Truffle (AU/DE – 2017) 

“Built from improbable combinations of the electronic and acoustic – sonic demarcations of time, place, and emotion, Hotel Record transcends any reductive idea of music. Through synthesis, electronics, field recording, acoustic instrumentation and voice, it is an instalment in the duo’s aural diary. A sonic rendering of the transmogrification of self, falling within the undefinable realm between sound-art and and the outer boundaries of how musicality is understood. A rippling, profoundly intimate construction of texture and tone, so beautiful, surprising, and filled with humanity, that it overwhelms the ear.”

• Bradford Bailey, The Hum  (excerpt from longer review) 2017

• Wire Issue 407, January 2018 

crys cole

sand / layna

Black Truffle (AU/DE – 2015)

“Surprisingly the debut solo release by long-term experimental musician & advocate – via her own ongoing explorations of “Amplified Surfaces” & her yearly “Send + Receive” festival in Winnipeg, MB – crys cole, consisting of two side-length pieces of ritualistic performance-laced tape-collage, recalling the cited influence of Key Ransone inasmuchas the “Small Music” of Rolf Julius & the minimal Concète infiltrations of Françoise Barrière.

The consistent, backgrounded elements of circular motion & spry, iteratively triggered events create a narrative arc that requires an intense focus – the entire enterprise feels like a real-time construction in the same way that Luc Ferrari’s augmented realities feel unadorned – but the staggered layerings & opposed gain-stagins often create a cognitive dissonance that challenges the often “Natural” sequence of events. Deep, difficult, often meditative music the likes of which aren’t so easily brushed up against these days.”

 

Ora Clementi                                                                  

Cover you will softer me                                        

Penultimate Press (UK – 2014)

“Ora Clementi is Crys Cole (I’m not familiar with her work) and James Rushford (from the fabulous Manhunter LP). Although Cole and Rushford live far away from each other (Canada and Australia), this recording certainly sounds like two people interacting together, which, however it was accomplished, is something I quite enjoy. There are keyboard drones, lots of unidentifiable small percussive sounds, perhaps some tapes, as well as some truly remarkable vocals. There is not any singing or intelligible words, but the voices play a very interesting card. Often quite submerged, like a Burroughs throat tape, but sometimes engaged in a somewhat creepy and erotic boy/girl banter, that sounds like it is backwards, but not quite. The vocals are not the main element by any means, but really help locate the droning and ticking in a very peculiar area. This is fascinating music. I have heard it through six times now and it is still revealing hidden mysteries. Just superb.”

– Swill Radio

From the WIRE (UK), January 2015 (issue 371):

“…Using farfisa, contact mics, percussion, ocarinas, piano, junk, viola and recordings of Rushford’s pet chickens (?!), the duo spent two years assembling this beautiful long-form work that is thick with a strange melancholy nostalgia. Odd dub-damaged/time and space inflected percussive rhythms set the overall feeling of distance and memorial, with odd, spectral spoken word confusion over dancing, graceful melodies and accumulations of fuzzy tape sound that come over like a stoned and sad Basil Kirchin. This is the sound of the very ghost of memory, of time lost and found via mediumistic tape work alongside aspects of Euro soundtrack work and sound sculptors like Harry Bertoia, Harry Partch et al. A truly bewitching side, highly recommended.”

– Volcanic Tongue

an Ora Clementi review in POLISH on IRATEMUSIC here

Oren Ambarchi / Crys Cole                                         

Sonja Henies Vei 31

Planam (IT – 2014)

“Wow. I can’t remember the last time a record affected me the way this one has. It’s an uncomfortable experience, and definitely not something that anyone would find themselves listening to on a regular basis but as a field recording specimen and stunning example of sound art, Sonja Henies Vei 31 is a must have.

Promoted as a deeply personal record that places the listener into the most personal of spaces, I bought a copy of Sonja Henies Vei 31 almost on a whim. Perhaps it’s that element of surprise which made this such an intense listen for me, and for that reason I almost don’t want to give too much away. Which makes this a difficult record to write about. What ever you read in relation to Sonja Henies Vei 31, it’s no lie that Ambarchi and Cole invite listeners into an incredibly private space. The listener takes on the role of voyuer in an uncomfortable and awkward way; we learn that real life can be stranger than fiction. This private (head)space is cleverly balanced out by an allusion to an outer, public space which heightens the sense of being privvy to something you shouldn’t be.

I’m curious about why Ambarchi and Cole decided to make this record. It’s a gutsy move that leaves them vulnerable to all manner of judgement. I’ve poked around the internet and can’t find much written about it. Thankfully both artists are experienced at making challenging work; a record like this couldn’t be pulled off by just anyone.

Fans of field recordings will definitely appreciate Sonja Henies Vei 31. Truly an unusual, and unforgettable listen.”

– Evol Kween blogspot

Oren Ambarchi, crys cole, Keith Rowe

Black Plume

Bocian Records (PL – 2012)

“An LP release documenting portions of the trio’s North American tour in late 2010. I caught their set at Littlefield in Brooklyn (which occurred roughly a week after the excerpts here) and recall it as being fine if not earthshaking, notable for being my first exposure to Crys Cole and having been impressed by her musicianship. As there are three dates listed here, from Winnipeg, Toronto and Montreal, I take it that Ambarchi has stitched together segments into a whole, or in any case, two sections separated by vinyl sides.

Cole played with great subtlety and reticence in Brooklyn and I’m assuming it’s the case here as well, her contributions tinting the atmosphere limned on the one hand by Rowe’s fairly rough-edged scrabbling and on the other by Ambarchi’s more tonal washes, though when I heard them I was also impressed that the latter didn’t play nearly as smoothly as I feared given my most recent exposure to releases under his own name (which, I should say, I like well enough, only that they seem to have drifted well away from where Rowe has found himself in recent years). So, one can pick up certain Rowe-isms and assign, perhaps, the more drone-like sound to Ambarchi, ceding Cole the remainder, if one chooses to parse things that way. Or you can just sit back and enjoy.

It’s an interesting exercise to listen to Rowe when he’s involved in a project that’s not so conceptually important to him. Not at all to denigrate this trio, but it was more of an offer to tour with people he liked and he did so. Around the same time, he was working with Kjell Bjørgeengen on something that was far closer to his heart and which he simply approached differently. Here, it’s a more relaxed affair, Rowe simply trying to fit in as best he can. This often results in a “smoother” flow as is the case here, though a dark one, like very strong coffee laced with some unidentified but potent liquor, It simply involves a different aim, an effort to evoke a more direct sensory experience than elsewhere, where much subsequent processing is often necessary, In that sense, it’s e fine, satisfying set, kind of an update on the myriad recordings he did with Ambarchi early in the oughts, tougher and more cynical and with the refreshing presence of Cole, from whom I *still* would like to hear more.”

– Brian Olewnick, Just Outside

crys cole, Jamie Drouin, Lance Austin Olsen   

Linnaeus’ Hydra                                                

Infrequency Editions (2012)

“This is a lovely recording yet one of those that, when pressed to describe “why”, leaves me with few descriptives. In a a sense, it fits easily enough into quasi-similar work from the recent past–a trio wending their careful, quiet-yet-bumpy way through a field of intimate sounds. As I know I’ve said before, rather unhelpfully, it boils down to the choices involved and how those choices mesh with my own (hopefully always changing) sensibility. The means employed (Cole: contact microphones, no-input mixer; Drouin: modular synthesizer, radio; Olsen: amplified copper plates, objects) are, these days, unremarkable enough, but the combination works and breathes quite well, plastically here, ethereally there, metallic sometimes, sandy and scratchy others, generally at low volume but, crucially, with no feeling of constraint in that regard, simply not happening, on that day, to get very loud. 

I suppose the best one can say is that my attention never wandered. I was always willing to be led down these paths, always finding more than enough to perk my interest, to tickle my brain and ears. A very good job indeed.”

– Brian Olewnick, Just Outside

“Tonight a new release on the beautifully packaged Infrequency Editions label run by the Canadian musicians Jamie Drouin and Lance Austin Olsen, who until recently both seemed to be living in Berlin, where this trio recording, alongside fellow visiting musician Crys Cole was captured. The disc is entitled Linnaeus’ Hydra, taking its name curiously from the tale of an eighteenth century Hamburg taxidermist who claims to have found the remains of a seven headed hydra, only for it to be proved a fake. I have no idea how this CD connects in any way to that story, but its a nice old tale all the same and I guess you have to name albums of improvised music something…

PERFORMANCE PRESS

• Solo performance on Friday, Nov 9, 2018 at Moore at 60, a 2-day event at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis curated by Thurston Moore. Excerpt from review by Erik Thompson from City Pages. 

• Ora Clementi live at Constellation (Chicago) in the WIRE (UK), October 2015 #380 

• live at Tectonics, Adelaide Festival, Australia, March 2014

“Redefining the word ‘understated’, Crys Cole then graced the solo stage, playing to an audience transfixed. Producing fascinating sounds, she very cleverly took us on a journey, rondo style, which finished right back at the beginning.”

– Gordon Forester, GlamAdelaide.com.au

• live at NOW Now Festival in Sydney, Australia, January 2013

“Set four was the gorgeously sublime Crys Cole… This was a delicate, breathtaking sound, a combination of her voice and long finger scratches over her amplified surfaces. This was a performance designed to engage deep listening and have the listener use their ears to locate themselves and their body within the space of the room. That is, the listening requires an openness that allows for every sound around, particularly the sound of one’s own breathing and the sound of ones own listening. Her fingertips would produce a delicate crackle and soft whoosh of a sound that had to be listened for, which lead to feeling the sound within. The sound, when listened to deeply, gave the sense of complete openness, as if one were free from a coffin or escaping from a closed off environment.  The harder I found myself engaging with the light delicate sounds that had to be tasted, seen, felt as well as heard, the more I found myself opening up to a broader sound scape, something larger than I had before I listened. The breathless anticipating falls away, as Cole invokes the silence and all its noise, inviting the listener to participate in brief moment of fingertip touch with the alternative. Alternative to what?  Well, whatever you brought in with you.”

– Lisa Thatcher, lisathatcher.wordpress.com

• live in Kyoto, Urban Guild, January 2012:

“Crys Cole, who played first, picked up the sounds around her body, for example the sound of her fingers and a brush on the table top, the sound of her clothing and her breath, without excessive processing or amplification so as not to lose the details, connecting the sounds carefully to make her own abstract improvised world. Natural avant-garde living sounds, coolly and quietly gathered in a musique concrete style.”

– ikegayaishiguro blog (translated by Tim Olive)

• live at SubStrata festival, Seattle, July 2011:

“Canadian improvisational artist Crys Cole began Day 1 with a modest demonstration of how an all-encompassing musical atmosphere can be created with minimal equipment and processing.”

– Mike Reid, residentadvisor.net

• live trio with Oren Ambarchi & Keith Rowe in Brooklyn, LIttlefield, December 2010:

• live in Vancouver, OR Gallery – Open Circuits festival, 2003:

“Crys Cole is the highlight. Recently moved from Montréal, she delivers riveting onkyo minimalism. With a steel meditation ball and a silver necklace, which she rolls and drags over a contact mic, adjusting the sound on a small mixing board, Cole has the focus and patience to allow the room to absorb every prickle, wince and reverberation.”

– Lee Henderson, The WIRE (UK) issue 238, 2003

– Aesthetica Magazine (UK)