Cole Peters - A Recasting of Indices

A Closer Listen

Two new releases from the reliable Brussels label Unfathomless tackle questions of memory and the weight of the past, each in a personal yet distinctive fashion. Cole Peters returns to a series of childhood homes, recorder in hand, renewing acquaintances with ghosts; Marcelo Cugliari returns to his father’s room after his death to record radio signals and muse on the contrast between presence and absence.  We’ll be covering the first today and the second tomorrow.

I feel a sense of kinship as I read Peters’ liner notes.  My family lived in five homes before I reached the age of ten; Peters moved nearly every year until he was thirteen.  In A Recasting of Indices, he makes a series of returns, seeking not only to recollect, but to reassess.  There is no indication that the sounds are presented in chronological order; instead, one imagines a metaphorical order.  Soft nature sounds are the first to arrive, connoting comfort, safety, home.  But soon a storm approaches, an upheaval, a threat; then transit, other voices, a shift in location and perspective.  Did the movement make the man, or did the man impose his interpretations on the movement?  Both are likely true.

“Setting Itself Out in Array” poses a heavy contrast between the sounds of nature and industry, although even the former can seem foreboding, like polluted water running through a factory’s corroded pipes.  Memory, too, can be corroded; one can endure trauma, suppress it or succumb to it.  In like manner, one may idealize a childhood that never existed, or imagine it as more painful than it might have been.  A harsh wind blows through the closing minutes, suggesting not only upheaval but the danger of upheaval; even the birds seem to be in disarray.  Once one has moved too many times, one begins to change, anticipating change.  Devoid of roots, one is less likely to develop deep relationships.

And yet, Peters does manage to forge a few connections, albeit with sound.  In “That Which is Indestructible,” he locates a particularly cold precipitation, akin to sleet on steel, coupling it with watery sweeps, distant hums and closer gulls.  I made my own connections with specific streams, trees and the moon, which offered a consistency absent from my nomadic life.  The unanswered question is of reconciliation.  As Peters plunges back into the past, captures sounds and returns them to the present, does he make peace, integrating the scattered fragments ~ a personal tikkun olam?  By fusing these snippets of sound, he creates a new narrative marked more by cohesion than disarray.  What then is “indestructible?”  The listener is left to wonder, to draw their own conclusions.  Perhaps it is the self, or at least the kernel of the soul.  (Richard Allen)