Talent and daring have led Cole Pulice to achieve a transmutation in which the traditional notions of jazz and ambient music are blurred into an eternal range of possibilities and forms. Celebrated as a studio musician who has accompanied Bon Iver, Godspeed You! Black Emperor and many others, the American’s solo career reveals an understanding of improvisation as a way of life (and, by extension, composition as a living medium). In recent years, his solo work has emerged as a major creative force in current experimentalism. Anchored in the saxophone, he takes the instrument to electroacoustic approaches, extracting from this simultaneity of natures paths to new worlds.
Using effects pedals, MIDI controllers and contact microphones, Pulice turns sound into an act of sculpture in real time, without resorting to overdubs. Sound holograms that recognise the hypnotic candour of Terry Riley or the exoplanetary landscapes of Jon Hassell, in a delicate melodic crystallisation. The presence of Alice Coltrane inevitably hovers as the eternal master of ceremonies of these transcendent movements, leaving the physical body of things behind. Each piece brings a common soothing element, infecting the senses and feeding the mind with a deeply telluric and kaleidoscopic imagery – where colours reach other shades. No detail is left out of this harmonic logic that not only agglutinates, but expands energy.
If I Don’t See You in the Future, I’ll See You in the Pasture is a singular composition of around twenty minutes, in one of the most ascendant moments of 2023. With the albums Gloam and Scry still as ubiquitous as they are essential, Cole Pulice’s visit will do justice to witnessing the marvellous vision of this artist already umbilical to our times. NA
