Crys Cole
Crys Cole is a Canadian sound artist working in composition, performance and sound installation. Cole’s approach to sound emphasizes subtlety and discretion, guided by a fascination with microsonics that test the limits of audibility and intentionality. By drawing attention to the texture and delicacy of minimal sonic environments, cole aims to create a heightened awareness not only of the sounds she creates, but of the environmental sounds that arise during listening – and ideally, of the listener’s own self-consciousness as a perceptual body and agent.
Crys Cole is a Canadian sound artist working in composition, performance and sound installation. Cole’s approach to sound emphasizes subtlety and discretion, guided by a fascination with microsonics that test the limits of audibility and intentionality. By drawing attention to the texture and delicacy of minimal sonic environments, cole aims to create a heightened awareness not only of the sounds she creates, but of the environmental sounds that arise during listening – and ideally, of the listener’s own self-consciousness as a perceptual body and agent.
Members: Ora Clementi
Making Conversation
Crys Cole returns to Black Truffle with Making Conversation, her third solo release for the label. After the intimate song-like constructions of Other Meetings, Making Conversation documents a different facet of cole’s work, presenting three rigorously conceptualised commissioned pieces, each of which extend her signature approach to highly amplified small sounds into new directions.
Other Meetings (LP)
Following on from last year’s acclaimed Sylva Sylvarum, the epic double LP from Ora Clementi (her collaborative project with James Rushford), crys cole returns to Black Truffle with Other Meetings. Originally commissioned and released on cassette by Boomkat Editions in 2021, Other Meetings is a major addition to the body of carefully hewn solo work cole has released over the last decade, offering up two side-long suites of her radically intimate approach to sound. After many years dominated by t…
A Piece Of Work
**Edition of 300 copies** Sound can be a labyrinth, a twilight drift. Sound can truely unfold when it escapes logic or categorisation. For it is never really one thing or another, especially abstract, collaged or found sound, as it is always connected to a time and a place, or sometimes to an intention, or a notion, or – even more vague – to something as dubious as a feeling. So all this is inevitably inherent in a sound too. Sound is a fact but also an inbetween. In A Piece Of Work, concrete co…
Sylva Sylvarum
Black Truffle is pleased to present Sylva Sylvarum, an epic new work from Ora Clementi, the collaborative project of crys cole and James Rushford. Primarily conceived and recorded over several months together in Melbourne, Sylva Sylvarum is a stunning step forward from the mumbled, creaking sound world of the duo’s debut, Cover You Will Softer Me (Penultimate Press, 2014). From the opening ‘Peach of Immortality’, which takes an unpredictable journey from layers of chiming bells, vocal harmonies …
Gallivant
This LP is a document of a live concert from the duo of Crys Cole & Oren Ambarchi, recorded Feb 16, 2020 in Nanaimo, BC, Canada. "My own first experience with the music of Oren Ambarchi reaches way back into his pre-history, when he was a young, Sydney-based noise freak, playing drums or guitar in bands like Phlegm or the Menstruation Sisters. Oren began to show his Apollonian bent when he released the first volume of his Stacte series in '98, but re-stoked his Dionysian side by undertaking a pa…
Oren Ambarchi, crys cole, Leif Elggren
Edition of 300. The only thing Australia, Canada and Sweden have in common is taking in an abstract position in a vague situation! In July 2016, a strong arctic wind blew open the windows that separate the mean streets of Stockholm from the city's legendary EMS Studios. Oren Ambarchi, Crys Cole and Leif Elggren were the only folks present in the studio at that point; not much could be done besides making the best out of a bad situation. Ambarchi burned the studio carpet to stay warm; Cole made a…
Two Words
Two Words is the debut release from the duo of Canadian sound artist Crys Cole and Australian songwriter Francis Plagne. Building on a series of experimental live performances in which the pair toyed with possible common languages for their seemingly unrelated approaches to music, the LP's two sides present a single piece that brings together abstract texture and slow-motion song in a sonic space where genre cedes to the logic of dreams. The piece begins with a long, nearly static sequence built…
Hotel Record
For many, the geography defying partnership of crys cole and Oren Ambarchi is the likely source of envy and awe - a creatively rigorous adventure in sound, egged forward by the romance they share. Ambarchi needs little introduction. Over the last 20 years, he has risen as a leading light of experimental and electroacoustic practice, as recognised for his collaborations with Jim O'Rourke, Keiji Haino, Sunn O))), Keith Rowe, Fire!, John Tilbury and countless others, as he is for his solo work.…
Sand/Layna
"Sand/Layna is the first full-length solo release by Canadian sound artist crys cole. While cole is known to many through her collaborative work with a host of Canadian artists and internationals such as Oren Ambarchi, Keith Rowe, and James Rushford, this LP presents the first opportunity for an extended appreciation of her singular approach to amplified sound. Using contact and other microphones to amplify her interactions with small objects and the surfaces on which they rest, cole's work …
Cover You Will Soften Me
Ora Clementi is the pen name of Canadian sound artist and improvisor Crys Cole and Australian performer and composer James Rushford. crys has previously collaborated with Keith Rowe and Oren Ambarchi (Bocian records) whilst James worked alongside Joe Talia on the highly acclaimed 'Manhunter' LP (Kye). Penultimate Press is proud to unveil this duo's new hermetic world of sound, song and speech. Employing farfisa, contact mics, percussion, viola, recordings of James' pet chickens, ocarinas, pia…
Sonja Henies Vei 31
“Sonja Henies Vei 31" is a profoundly moving document of the personal and artistic union between Crys Cole and Oren Ambarchi. Abandoning their usual instrumental artillery, both performers make themselves vulnerable to the listener, undertaking a committed exploration of pure physical gesture. Surrounding an explicitly intimate duo performance is a hazy collage of field recordings, tape hiss, metallic clinks and wandering voices. This forces the listener to hover in a disorienting psychological …
Black Plume
Amongst the first generation of innovators in non-idiomatic and non-composed music, Keith Rowe has distinguished himself through his intense collaboration with younger musicians, collaborations that have engaged all involved in processes of reciprocal influence. Rowe has clearly been a teacher, or in his own words a 'permission-maker', for international groups of musicians who (especially in the last twenty years) have taken up his exploration of dislocated instrumental technique, new modes of l…