Cole Pulice is enjoying what seems to be a woodwind instrument. However it’s truly a MIDI controller, turning all of the qualities that will inform the tone of a conventional saxophone—breath management, finger positioning, and so forth—into information. Their preliminary breaths change into staccato digital blurts, the sound of a chiptune composer beginning to draft an 8-bit online game rating. As Pulice’s enjoying turns into extra concerned, their music jolts to life with a kaleidoscopic smear of ambient sound.
The 34-year-old musician is demonstrating this course of over a tangle of wires in an Oakland apply house, a mop of lengthy hair pulled loosely again from their face and chunky hoops hanging from their ears. Although they’re a stunning saxophonist, the community of cables, pedals, and synthesizers round them are as central to their current data as any old school instrument.
Pulice is enjoying “HP / MP,” the opening observe from Scry, their current album of experimental jazz, which mixes conventional saxophone enjoying with digital psychedelia and passages of ambient music that sound as if Pulice carried out them from inside a cathedral of rose quartz. “I wished to lean into that ephemeral, fragmentary, dream-like surrealism of betweenness,” Pulice says. Their sonic landscapes could be meditative and peaceable or, like “HP / MP,” invigoratingly disorienting. Together with To Dwell & Die in House & Time, their collaboration with synth artist Lynn Avery, Pulice was accountable for two of 2022’s best experimental data.
Pulice, who’s presently engaged on a PhD in cultural research and comparative literature, solutions questions thoughtfully, taking temporary pauses to completely contemplate what they need to say. Their composition course of is equally gradual, with improvisation adopted by deep reflection of what the music represents and communicates. As they tinkered with Scry, the album began to disclose itself as being autobiographical. “I used to be fascinated about gestures, states of being, and headspaces in plenty of ways in which had been actually private,” they are saying. “Pre-pandemic, post-pandemic, transferring from Minneapolis to Oakland—it’s actually crystallizing what I’m working with proper now.”
