Pingipung / Germany / 2021
Cole Pulice is a saxophone player from Minneapolis. An improviser of ambient jazz who earned their merits touring with Bon Iver, working with Godspeed You! Black Emperor and releasing wonderful electroacoustic gems with the groups Iceblink (Moon Glyph) and LCM (Orange Milk).
With Gloam - their solo debut - they offer us six spacious audio holograms, one-take recordings of saxophone entangled with live electronic hardware. We hear undulating pitch shifters, ring modulations and spectrally rich harmonizers. Pulice applies all signal processing live, augmenting the calm, serene melodies they play on the saxophone.
The electronics never serve as a mere effect here. Instead, Pulice’s fine-tuned setup functions as one whole instrument with which they effortlessly morph shapes and colors, like fractals within a kaleidoscope or fragments of stained glass in a rock tumbler.
Pulice mentions the Synchromism visual art movement as an influence for this record, an American avant garde style of the early 20th century in which colour and sound were treated as equivalents. It’s a spot-on analogy for these musical gems which serve to immerse us in imaginatory prisms. Pulice’s sessions conjoin artificial processes with the vibrations of (often circular) breathing to create electro-acoustic lullabies which reveal ever more timbral layers with each listen.
Gloam was released on tape by the Moon Glyph imprint from Portland during lockdown in 2020 and is licensed to Pingipung for this vinyl edition.