London-based musician Luke Cowan delivers his most expansive work yet with ‘Six Places’, a quietly dazzling suite that renders memory, geography and imagination as sound. Across six extended pieces recorded in Ely, Cambridge, York and London, Cowan bends the borders between composition and improvisation, everyday resonance and ensemble interplay, to arrive at a music that feels porous, fragile and strangely luminous.
Cowan calls it “a collection of impressions of places. Some are real and some imagined. They all are idealisations.” That ambiguity seeps into every corner of the record. Piano, guitars, dulcimer and harmonium are set against pinecones, spoons, tankards, cake stands and wine glasses – objects that sound like themselves but also like something else, blurred and recontextualised. Around this core, friends appear on trumpet, saxophone, pedal steel, cello, violin, tuba, upright bass: an ensemble that never settles into the obvious grammar of chamber music, but instead stumbles across fleeting harmonies and collisions, guided more by instinct than design.
These pieces are thick with location. Trumpet and saxophone echo in the Greenwich foot tunnel; nocturnal winds rattle leaves in an Ely garden; wine glasses sing in a York Lidl. Elsewhere, piano figures emerge from kitchens, violin lines are pulled from half-forgotten improvisations, drones accrue over years. The sense is of music taking root in the incidental – ideas overheard, accidents preserved – then expanded until they become whole geographies.
Like his earlier work, ‘Six Places’ is pastoral but never nostalgic. It resists polish, holding onto imperfections as though they were clues. There’s a deep attention here to balance: sustained tones offset by staccato knocks, rhythmic pulses continually stretched out of shape, melodies remembered and replayed in shifting contexts. The album closes with ‘Diet of figs / Spirit ascent’, the only solo piece, which circles ideas of death and renewal with clarinet, spoons and singing wine glasses – a reminder that Cowan’s music is at once utterly ordinary in its materials and quietly transcendent in its effect.
Mastered by Mikey Young and visually imagined by London-based artist Finlay Abbott Ellwood, ‘Six Places’ is a work of idealised geographies, intimate and expansive in equal measure. It’s music that carries the texture of lived places while constantly reaching beyond them, opening into landscapes you half-recognise but can never quite locate.
