#alison cotton

[musicktoplayinthedark]

My albums selection for the next week;

Phill Niblock – Music For Organ

Die Form - Some Experience With Shock

Ectoplasm Girls – TxN

Eros Necropsique – Plénitude Éphémère

Sarah Davachi - Five Cadences

Rozz Williams And Gitane Demone – Dream Home Heartache

Delphine Dora – L'au-delà

Coalminer - Beautiful Deterioration

Alison Cotton – All Is Quiet At The Ancient Theatre

Katatonia – Brave Murder Day

[theejaculationofserpents]

Alison Cotton

[sandmoonyelse]

 Mumurations Over the Moor,

inspired  by Alison Cotton music’s

 https://alisoncotton-uk.bandcamp.com/album/the-portrait-you-painted-of-me        

[vinylrecordspleasures]

Alison Cotton – The Portrait You Painted Of Me

[countingupyourbones]

https://alisoncotton-uk.bandcamp.com/releases

[heidismagblog]

[dustedmagazine]

Alison Cotton — Engelchen (Rocket /Feeding Tube)

Following up Portrait You Painted to Me (2022), a concept album about the sinking of a British ship in the 1960s, Alison Cotton’s latest addresses a much larger-scale 20th-century disaster, the Holocaust. The engelchen (“little angels”) of the title are Ida and Louise Cook, sisters from London who used their passion for opera as a pretext for touring Germany in the years leading up to World War II and helping secure the safe passage of 29 Jews out of the grip of the Nazis. The music, befitting the subject matter, is at turns somber and hopeful, developing slowly and deliberately and captivating from start to finish.

Cotton’s by now well-developed approach involving the blending of viola and vocal lines, often multi-tracked, with drones produced by instruments such as harmonium and shruti box along with spare percussion is well on display in the 20-minute opening track, “We Were Smuggling People’s Lives.” The title is drawn from the sisters’ description of their efforts to transport refugees’ valuables—furs, jewelry, and so on— in their luggage as they traveled out of Germany. Sustained strings are punctuated by wordless vocals and occasional percussion that suggest the undoubtedly bizarre experience of traveling across Europe as it began to tear itself apart. The narrative arc of the piece ends with a martial snare drowned out by viola, voice, and sounds of the seashore.

The term “cinematic” is so often applied to music that it is nearly meaningless, but, as Tobias Carroll pointed out in a review of one of Cotton’s earlier releases for Dusted, it really is appropriate for her musical storytelling. Thus, the impressionistic (rather than narrative) video for the funereal “The Letter Burning” nicely illustrates the shifting mood of the song, which dramatizes Louise’s unexplained destruction of most of the sisters’ correspondence regarding their lifesaving efforts, hinting at a sense of despair amid their heroics. This despair is in tension with the title track, which foregrounds lyrics from the sisters’ perspective about their sense of responsibility and accomplishment (“think of how many we saved”). Such is the nuance of Cotton’s take on the story, which eschews mere hagiography and, in the a cappella reprise of the title track that closes the album, ties the sisters’ efforts to the contemporary efforts of refugees to find safety in the United Kingdom.

Jim Marks

[myxomycota]

Arcyria denudata by Alison Pollack

[chiropteracupola]

curse of People Frequently Assume I Know Nothing About Anything

[2shy]

Alison Knowles, Man’s Shirt (BLINK), 1964, screen print on cotton shirt, 65 x 70 cm

[musicktoplayinthedark]

Alison Cotton

[theejaculationofserpents]

Alison Cotton

[aptrophia]

tags

[countingupyourbones]

[milksockets]

national cotton council ads, 1967-9 in 20th century fashion - jim heimann + alison a. nieder (2021)