Disquiet review of "Too Late Distracted"

SKITTERY SOUNDSCAPE MP3

Cole Pierce refers to his track “Too Late Distracted” as a “textured electronic soundscape exploring a structure in flux,” and he goes a step further by employing the word “skittery” to qualify the effort.

The work in question is reportedly derived from a collaboration withTyler Carter, who like Pierce houses his music at the great community site soundcloud.com. Pierce is at soundcloud.com/colepierce, Carter at soundcloud.com/tyler-carter, and the two of them apparently can make beautiful jittery ambience (or skittery soundscapes) together.

Too late distracted by colepierce

Like many solid efforts in abstraction, the piece includes its own decoder ring. While it eventually expands into a spacious if serrated sound field, it opens with the sort of all-rough-edges effect that Pierce’s chosen adjective, “skittery,” suggests. The introduction’s distinction from the majority of the track is plainly evident in the waveform that appears in the SoundCloud player (see above); it’s the short, bottle-brush tail that wags the music’s dog.

That initial segment is all stop’n’start glitch noise, and it sets down the textural equivalent of a downbeat before Pierce ventures into more quasi-ethereal realms. While the work does achieve a certain level of cloudy haze, it’s still marked throughout by the stuttered, broken-glass vibe of its opening salvo.

Original track at soundcloud.com/colepierce. More on Pierce atcolepierce.com. He was previously featured on this site in mid-October of last year (disquiet.com).

By Marc Weidenbaum

Original Post

Later featured on Headphone Commute Podcast

Later, the mix cd I sent out earlier this year is featured on Headphone Commute this week. Check out the post here, which gave me a good excuse to write about the mix.

Last summer I found four tracks that embodied everything I love about ambient music. I listened to this short 17 minute set repeatedly; Machinefabriek’s guitar over a field recording of ice skaters on a frozen pond, The Humble Bee’s pleasant tones and Greg Haines’ minimal orchestra that shifts to drones, eventually breaking to pieces before transitioning to the casual, incidental tones layered over the sounds of a coffee shop created by Molly Berg + Stephen Vitiello. This set of glitchy ambient music served as the impetus for the track selection and frame of the overall structure. The basic ingredients for the whole mix can be found in the subtleties mentioned in this short set in the middle of Later; which is a genre study in music emphasizing modern classical harmonies and a balance between experimental production techniques. That said, I believe a good mix is one of thoughtful variety and the rest of the tracks transition through multiple genres that can all be described as ambient. Regardless of the instruments used, the pace is gentle, repetitive, even tempered and anticlimactic. Post-rock, modern classical, sublime electronic, field recordings, and spoken word pieces are patched together to provide interesting comparisons and juxtapositions. Nils Frahm plays piano and Mokira plays electronics, yet both are inspired by a Phillip Glass type of sublime meditation. These two tracks are connected by an equally meditative interlude which is a field recording of someone talking to himself during a night hike, calmly identifying his surroundings and admiring the amount of visible stars.

New Work

The Triangle is the Strongest Shape (2010)
Acrylic on Canvas, 40"x 40"

Work in Progress (2010)
Acrylic on Canvas, 60"x 72"

Fishing, 2010

Fishing, 2010
Video - Cole Pierce
Audio - Kendrick Shackleford and Cole Pierce


Fishing was created from footage captured with an underwater video camera attached to fishing line and controlled by a fishing pole in the middle of Lake Hayward, WI. Governed by chance, the video drifts back and forth between chaos and order. The murky green monochrome and shifting pattern of bubbles is a sublime landscape that occasionally gets interrupted by the reality of a school of fish swimming by. The soundtrack is equally alienating, which is an ambient glitch filled soundscape of processed guitar, ethereal textures and a flux of structures created by Cole Pierce with help from Kendrick Shackleford and Tyler Carter.

Audio

Too late distracted by colepierce

textured soundscape, structure in flux, based on a collaboration with Tyler Carter. 2010

2=4=8 by colepierce

Guitar by Kendrick Shackleford, electronic manipulation by Cole Pierce. 2010

Cheers by colepierce

Manipulated music box samples, NYE field recording. 2010

I am currently editing a video installation, comprised of footage of an underwater video camera tied to the end of a fishing pole. These tracks will be part of the soundtrack.