Review: Coppice - Cores/Eruct

Coppice sound restless. “Son Form” could be a pipe organ snoring at night, tossing uncomfortably in dirty bed clothes as it emits a dry nasal wheezing every couple of seconds. “Bluing” sits on a slant across the stereo frame; I feel like one of my ears is drooping under the excess of pumped low frequencies on one side, only occasionally alleviated by the sudden, transmission-jamming bursts of static that cast the music into the sky for fleeting stretches of time. Everything is so unreliable and ungainly. Even when the album approaches a state of equilibrium – such as during the steady, wobbling engine room hum of “Seam (Kinder)” – the equipment sounds unserviced and ready to pack up, withering gradually into a pile of perished fabric and clapped out hand-cranked mechanisms.

But where does this instability originate from? All of the instrumentation on Cores/Eruct is prone to erraticism and failure: prepared pump organ, shruti box, tape processes, transmitters, funnels. Signal quality dips and re-emerges, shruti drones quiver out of tune, pump organ notes rasp and clunk against the debris that deliberately interrupts the airflow. Halfway through “While Like Teem Or Bloom Comes (Tipping)”, there are several blasts of a rattling low organ note that seem to be dislodging the instrument mechanism through sheer force of air expulsion. I enjoy these 43 minutes all the more for knowing that the equipment may not survive another session, leaning in to the high-fidelity capture of cracked elastic and old, dehydrated bellow fabric.