Audiopile Review: Canadian sound artist Crys Cole is precisely the type of uncompromising lifer whose work cannot be easily boiled down to trite sound bites. Or at least, it seems frankly tacky to sully these delicate audio constructions with reductive comparisons and pigeonholing. Critics usually draw attention to her brain-tickling treatments of small sound details. But a Crys Cole album is far more than just a series of pleasing sounds. Her practice is deeply rooted in the history of electro-acoustic composition and improvisation. As such, it has the rigour of academic electronic music and the knife-edge spontaneity of the best free improv. And while it may initially seem austere and cerebral, there’s something deeply psychedelic about her labyrinthine sound structures. So, while Cole’s new album for Black Truffle, ‘Making Conversations’ is certainly serious business, there’s no denying that it IS also a very pleasing series of brain-tickling sounds. In fact, it might be simultaneously her most ambitious collection of work and her most straightforwardly enjoyable album. Those who like to dwell at the outer limits of sonic esoterica will 100% need this. But there’s also plenty here to draw the merely curious into Crys Cole’s enchanting sound world.

crys cole returns to Black Truffle with Making Conversation, her third solo release for the label. After the intimate song-like constructions of Other Meetings (BT 096LP), Making Conversation documents a different facet of cole’s work, presenting three rigorously conceptualized commissioned pieces, each of which extend her signature approach to highly amplified small sounds into new directions. The side-long title piece is a stereo version of an eight-channel sound installation exhibited in 2023 at the Tabakalera Art Center in Donostia/San Sebastian, Spain. The piece uses a multitude of instrumental, vocal, concrete and electronic sounds to evoke the soundscapes cole encountered during nocturnal listening session in Bali, Indonesia in 2018 and 2019. In this world of night sounds, she explains, she “observed the complex interplay between amphibian, lizard, bird and insect communication, domestic animals (roosters, dogs), man-made sounds (airplanes, vehicles, conversations and evening activities) and sounds that were difficult to place.” Drawing on field recordings as memory aids (but including none in the finished piece), cole’s piece uncannily reproduces the spatiality and pacing of environmental sound without attempting strictly to replicate it. While at times it can be difficult to imagine the source of these sounds, at other points they are clearly instrumental or electronic in origin; in its placement and layering, though, the whole assemblage suggests the glorious, unthinking richness of a non-musical sound environment. Suggesting at once the electronic gardens of Rolf Julius and the little instrument expanses of classic AACM, the piece is a brilliant enactment of the Cage-ian drive to “imitate nature in her manner of operation.” “Valid ForeverrRrrRRrrr? (pt. 1)” began as cole’s contribution to an Issue Project Room commission to realize a score from Alison Knowles and Annea Lockwood’s Women’s Work, a 1975 collection of text and conceptual scores by women artists and composers. cole’s piece begins from Beth Anderson’s “Valid for Life,” a complex arrangement of the letter R in various typefaces. Accompanied with extensive liner notes, photographic documentation and a download code, Making Conversation is an exciting next step in cole’s work, extending her signature concerns in new sonic and conceptual directions.