SOUNDWAVE : 160 : COLE PETERS

Today’s guest deejay is Cole Peters.

I had the good fortune to meet Cole through Yann Novak (listen to Yann’s mixes four Soundwave here). I asked Yann who he thought would share a mix with us, and he highly recommended Cole. I could have sent Cole an invitation to guest deejay on Soundwave without listening to a note of his music. I trust Yann’s taste in music and artists that much. But of course, I listened to Cole’s music. Yann was spot on.

Cole’s mix is a unique blend of electronic and organic elements, creating a captivating sonic landscape that will take you on a mesmerizing journey. It’s okay if you lose yourself. That’s part of the journey, too.

Be sure to lose yourself in Cole’s latest album, Traces Blurs Signs, where he continues to eschew categorization.

Cole has much to say about the mix you’re about to experience, so I will get out of his way, except to mention that next week’s guest deejay is Carmen Rizzo.

See you then.

Cole Peters

I realized not long ago that so much of my work in music over the past 20+ years has been based on the practice of collage. When I started assembling my own music in the early 2000s, it was awful techno cobbled together out of random samples scavenged off the internet. In the mid-2000s, I’d transitioned into producing instrumental hip hop, composed from samples pulled from old vinyl records. From 2010–2013, my work took more experimental turns, and sampled material merged with my recordings of effects-laden guitar. Collaged electronics and field recordings were the recipes that helped me find my way back to music and sound art in 2019, and these have remained at the core of my work since then.

Through all of these eras, assembling mixes of other artist’s work has been a constant practice alongside creating my work (though often, these mixes have remained a private exercise). A mix is, to varying degrees, also an exercise in collage. In some ways, I view my approach to constructing mixes and assembling my work as complementary and mutually instructive.

I’ve always been somewhat obsessive about the transitional moments that string a mix together — those passages where one work seeps into another, the interplay of compositions that, for a short time, enter into an unexpected dialogue. These moments largely guide me in the composition of a mix, as opposed to selecting tracks first and then determining their sequence. I work best when starting with a single piece of work and letting that piece’s tone, texture, pace, dynamics, and nuances inform my following selection and onwards until the mix feels complete.

Often, this leads me to identify previously unrealized sympathies between otherwise unrelated works, such as the complementary tonalities between Alyssa Moxley’s “Night smoke over the caldera” and Chloe Alexandra Thompson’s “Glass Bits” or crys cole’s “A Piece of Work” and Ayami Suzuki’s “Glade.” I found that these pairings especially seemed to merge hypnotically. Similarly, I appreciated how well B.P. and Masaya Ozaki’s pieces on this mix came together — both titled by GPS coordinates, both exploring textures between the subtle and the barely contained.

Of course, a mix doesn’t need to be composed solely of perfectly seamless transitions. I quite like the sudden shift between “Glass Bits” and B.P.’s field recording and the melodic tension between “Glade” and Philip Samartzis & Eugene Ughetti’s “Katabatic Winds Part 1,” where Ayami’s voice and the electronic tone in “Katabatic” seem to drift awkwardly in and out of harmony. Elsewhere: I hadn’t initially intended to place John Bence’s “Disquiet Part 1” immediately after Lawrence English’s “Evocation at Peron,” but the transition between the caustic layers of wind and the soft choral voices turned out to be an unexpectedly haunting shift in texture and intensity. And I never would’ve expected that “Disquiet” would flow so perfectly into Jeremiah Cymerman and John McCowen’s “Gospel Hill” — this was truly the happiest of accidents. (I was also amused that “Disquiet,” being based on reconstituted choral voices, matched so well with a track titled the word “gospel.”)

For me, these moments where previously unrelated works come together to form new and complementary statements are something truly fascinating and worthy of considered enjoyment — not because of any cleverness on the part of the mixer, but because of the sheer delight and beauty of unexpected synchronicity.

Cole Peters “Enclosure”

Leila Bordreuil “Past Continuous (excerpt)”

Mika Vainio “Takaísin / Returning”

Alyssa Moxley “Night smoke over the caldera”

Chloe Alexandra Thompson “Glass Bits”

B.P. “a3 – 50.6578° N, 99.9636° W”

Masaya Ozaki “N 65°04’49.2 E 139°00’17.4”

Oliver Thurley “sanguine”

crys cole “A Piece Of Work (excerpt)”

Ayami Suzuki “Glade (excerpt)”

Philip Samartzis + Eugene Ughetti “Katabatic Winds Pt1”

Lawrence English “Evocation At Peron”

John Bence “Disquiet, Part 1”

Jeremiah Cymerman & John McCowen “Gospel Hill”

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