A Place to Begin

."..an album that gives eerily accurate shape and movement, nearly definition, to the feeling of those bright-white days." - NPR Music's 36 Favorite Albums of 2022 (so far) "...outlining the soul of a unique and quiet corner of the world in these sparse, lush pieces." NPR Music's Best Experimental Records of 2022 --- After the near death of a loved one, I came to a frozen island in the far north on Lake Superior at the end of winter. I had been feeling stuck, but this encounter with death opened up a deep awareness of the present moment in me. I worked in the morning each day when the light was best in my studio, recording daily musical sketches. In the afternoons, I walked the frozen landscape of the island, listening to the sparse sounds of late winter. I watched as the frozen lake began to thaw - slowly at first, then all at once. A mass of water full of motion emerged and stretched out to meet the sky. As things melted, small pieces of color and sound filled the emptiness. Time deepened, and I settled into a place of lightness. Inviting an awareness of death into my daily life was not all darkness, as I expected, but rather filled with dualities: light and dark, peace and chaos, presence and distance. And in periods of clarity, I could see that life is beginning in every moment. --------------------------------------------- "Although primarily Brooklyn-based, the composer, multi-instrumentalist and filmmaker Peter Coccoma prefers to spend his winters not in some warm coastal town, but in the frozen landscape of Lake Superior’s Madeline Island. Boasting a population of 300 and a square footage comparable to Manhattan, the island is sometimes accessed from Wisconsin’s mainland by the “windsled,” a fan-propelled boat on skies that glides on the ice for weeks when it is too thick for ferries to break through and too thin for cars to drive across. In February 2020, Coccoma and his partner made their customary trip to Madeline for the winter, and when the pandemic hit, they decided to stay indefinitely. This meant that he was limited to a few modest tools for musical expression: a MIDI keyboard, a Portastudio tape machine, and his laptop. His new album A Place to Begin emerged gradually from daily improvisations using digital processing, sampling, and feeding synth lines back and forth between the tape machine and his computer—creative extensions of a meditation practice which put him in greater touch with the sounds and rhythms of life on the island. The resulting work is an extended tone poem evoking the ebb and flow of Coccoma’s natural surroundings. The album’s musical process was partially inspired by an inquiry into Buddhist practice following an unsettling and revelatory life event: a loved one was given three months to live, before discovering weeks later that they had been misdiagnosed. In the wake of this experience, Coccoma became fascinated with 'maranasati'—the practice of bringing an awareness of death into one’s daily life. According to this teaching, one of the effects of becoming familiar with death is that it can shine a light back on life and the beauty of the temporal nature of all things. Coccoma explains, on the island, maranasanti became “a tool to remind me to be present and, through that, to turn outwardly to all these things around me in the natural world.” On his afternoon walks on Madeline, Coccoma found the island to be filled with sound and motion even at its most still and quiet moments. Echoing his progenitor John Luther Adams’ concept of “sonic geography,” the textures in the pieces on a place to begin function almost like points plotted on a map. Many of its subterranean synth sounds were inspired by the low frequency reverberations from beneath the frozen surface of the lake, which split the difference between whale song or the aggressive low end of an EDM track. Meanwhile, the high intoned percussion that underscores “Toward Light” mimics the knocking of the pileated woodpecker, one of Madeline’s few winter birds. Instead of functioning as a static soundscape, A Place to Begin provides a decidedly active listening experience. Coccoma’s unclassifiable electroacoustic textures ease us back and forth along the continuum between tonality and noise, while searing string gestures—courtesy of cellist Clarice Jensen (Jóhann Jóhannsson, Max Richter) and violinist Oliver Hill—inaugurate new movements, cutting through the mix like beams of sunlight through a frozen forest canopy. On A Place to Begin, Coccoma plays the role of tour guide, leading us through his imagined landscape and gently guiding us towards its visceral extremes." -Winston Cook Wilson