The transcendent takes the front seat on Copenhagen-based Nausia’s latest album, Finding a Circle. Slow builds and intense demolitions form the band’s basic structure, and a web of saxophone harmonies floats through a tight and daring interplay. Not every band manages to preserve the intense feeling of a live concert on a recording. But on Finding a Circle, Nausia succeeds in hammering the gap between stage and studio down to an irrelevant trifle, through a phenomenal and remarkably great-sounding ensemble performance.

There is something about the physical conditions of the saxophone that makes it easy to sense the musician’s presence. The clatter of the keys and the intense breathing make it effortless to form an inner image of the human behind the brass. On the track »E.D Interlude«, the saxophones’ airy exhalations and mechanical flapping ensure that, as a listener, I behave with the same quiet reverence as I would at a concert. So when the next track, »Eco Death«, kicks the door in on the silence, it is hard not to feel almost physically exhilarated by the album’s intense contrasts between presence and destruction.

Titles such as »flowers grow through concrete too« and »Eco Death« cast the wordless album in a bleak light of climate collapse. Finding a sense of community in a chaotic world – whether at a concert, on an album, or elsewhere – is essential to life in a time of crisis. Finding a Circle is a fine example of exactly that.

So dextrous a musician is the flutist Laura Cocks that, at shows, their instrument occurs to the eye as merely another limb. A powerhouse New York-based collaborator and interpreter within new classical and experimental music, notably as director of the leading-edge new music group TAK Ensemble, Cocks now releases their first solo statement of improvised compositions with FATHM, an acrobatic intertwining of flute and voice that nods to strange and fleeting visions: among them, birds, string, seeds between the teeth. On FATHM, Cocks applies all the facility of their work as an interpreter of commissioned works – on extensive display in their last solo venture, 2022’s field anatomies – towards the development of an uninhibited, yet highly focused musical language. 

If the album’s mysterious tracklist reads as a sort of cryptogram, then listening to FATHM evokes a process of decoding, parsing the bounds between vocalization and instrument. The album’s opening track, »A thread held between your fingers«, finds Cocks as their own flickering shadow, simultaneously playing the flute and squealing in tones just slightly removed in pitch. »Illinois« is then reclaimed from Sufjan Stevens’ relentless grip as a furious mumble of half-blown notes with underlying trickles of voice. Cocks experiments further with these hoarse timbres on the three infinitive tracks: »To beget« and its later variations »To outstretch« and concluding track »To fly«, which trace the evolution of a dancelike triplet motif. »FAVN«, apparently a faithful depiction of an elephant with severe sleep apnea, may reconcile itself to the sensitive listener through its sheer commitment to the grotesque, while »A seed sucked between your teeth«, orbiting languidly around a major ninth, invites more celestial considerations. »A marsh wren« might take the titular bird as a point of departure, but it quickly imagines a species of its own, singing a song of bustle and snaps and smacks. On »YARN«, Cocks suggests another sort of animal song by making a counterpoint of mews and growls. The flutist’s skill with balancing these peculiar hybrids ultimately distinguishes FATHM as much as Cocks’ ferocious energy; this is an album as happy to shout as it is to slither. 

Against enemies in outer space, »music is the strongest weapon we have,« Mads Brügger recently stated here in Seismograf. Snöleopard and musical friends made this idea strikingly concrete by sending music directly from the Planetarium in Copenhagen out into space, targeting satellites between 500 and 35,000 kilometers away. The tones returned altered by delay, radio noise, and cosmic interference. On the large screen, the Earth’s surface – seen from a satellite – rolled by with all its illuminated cities, while Theis Ørntoft read from his forthcoming climate-conscious novel, delivering lines such as: »The day there is no more oil, the lights will go out in the world.« Meanwhile, we could see small green dots of confused satellites racing across the Earth’s beautiful curvature and hear Lotte Anker, Kresten Osgood, and Snöleopard free-jazzing on saxophone, drums, and sitar respectively.

The small crackling beep-sounds from the satellites’ resonance also generated music, but the most interesting moments came when the musicians received fragments of their own motifs back – thrown down from outer space – and a kind of internal interplay emerged. Is there something out there, or are we merely talking to ourselves?

Cosmic resonance filled the dome, but one could wish for more internal resonance. There is a beautiful trend in ensembles that include a poet, allowing many delightfully twisted formulations to surface, but the musicians must also interpret the words – enter into a musical exegesis, as they would with a traditional jazz singer – otherwise the music easily becomes background or secondary. As if each musician were a green satellite dot in their own orbital path. Many good ideas were in play – and music is not a weapon. But it does require internal resonance. Not only cosmic.

English translation: Andreo Michaelo Mielczarek