Land's End Eternal by Cole Pulice

Electroacoustic saxophonist, improviser, and composer Cole Pulice traffics in shimmering, otherworldly beauty. On the meditative ambient jazz of Land’s End Eternal, Cole adds a welcome new texture with the introduction of the electric guitar, an instrument previously unheard in their music, which took on a central role as a compositional and sonic tool for this record. In 2021, a friend asked to temporarily store their Stratocaster at Cole's during a move. In that window of time, Cole began experimenting with guitar as part of their compositional palette.

Before we cross the bridge into new sonic worlds, we have to approach it. That’s just what Cole does on album opener “Fragments of a Slipstream Dream,” the last track made for this record but one that charts the clearest throughline to the celestial ambient soundscape of their previous release, the stunning 22-minute “If I Don’t See You in the Future, I’ll See You In the Pasture.” A similar ghostly touch pervades “Fragments,” an electroacoustic composition created almost entirely from signal processed saxophone, its undulating melodies rippling atop stippled, clipping textures. One hears shades of Coltrane but the intercession of technology pushes the maximalism of the saxophone drone into full-on deterioration. It’s jarring, snapping you to attention. Hard-cut edits further dissolve the piece from one plane to another, the aural embodiment of decay as seed for growth.

Because the guitar is a new instrument for them, Cole describes their experience with it as akin to “child’s brain,” approaching the instrument with a playful sense of directionless curiosity, rather than the years of history they have with the saxophone. The fruits of this approach are all over Land’s End Eternal, most notably on the suite of tracks called “A Hidden Nook Between Worlds I, II, III.” Both genesis and backbone, these aptly-titled, radiant pieces are composed only of live signal processed saxophone and electric guitar, expanding upon a melody that Cole had been ruminating on for years, one which came to singular life when transported to the guitar. A pastoral, nearly folk-jazz riff opens “Part I,” with an accompanying saxophone melody that’s sweet and low, processed elements rising up around the music like a magnetic cloud. It’s eerie, the way the guitar and saxophone seem to move together yet separately through the fragile space of the song. It’s the resonance between planes captured in the curve of light, refractory yet not without a sense of being settled, like airy bits of debris shaken up when poured into a glass coming to repose at the bottom. That sense of being washed over manifests on “Part II,” strums of guitar falling like raindrops into sonic puddles while the saxophone quietly oscillates outward. On “Part III,” the guitar is at its warmest yet, joined by evocative sax lines worthy of the setting sun. A tender yet buoyant tension exists between the two instruments; one gets the sense they’re holding each other aloft across dimensions.

The notion of a bridge between worlds is a connective thread that runs through all of Land’s End Eternal, but it may be most literal on the elegiac “In This & Every Life,” a piano requiem-composition that blends a field recording of a grand piano, roughed up by its abandonment to the outdoors, with an intimate, hi-fi recording of a felted piano. A very close miked saxophone hovers over the plunking, plangent sounds of the thrashed instrument, the effect of which is to place the piece out of both space and time. The piano abruptly changes, relocating us to the safe and warm confines of a studio, nearly transforming the requiem into a lullaby. But not quite, as the lush threnody of the saxophone keeps the track from fully melting away. The two piano recordings are naturally disparate but when Cole realized they were more or less in the same key, the song came to bright, startling life.

The album concludes with “After the Rain,” a brilliant pastoral chamber-jazz piece for saxophone, multiple guitars, brass choir, and voice. Written shortly after the heavy rains of an atmospheric river swept through the Bay, the music deftly and sweetly captures something of the sublime, the ebb and flow of the transitional chapters of life and all that comes with navigating them. (The title also serves as an homage to Coltrane’s track of the same name). The guitars create and maintain an effervescent foundation, supporting Cole’s saxophone lines in communion with the only other musician on the album: Maria BC, whose gorgeous voice is imbued with a quiet, choral quality that immediately suits the floating, out-of-time magic of the composition.

The Bay Area is a charged place, overflowing with a musical history that infuses Cole's approach to the work on Land's End Eternal; home at various points to visionary composers-performers Pauline Oliveros, David Behrman, Terry Riley, and Pharoah Sanders. The real Lands End is a park in San Francisco, a beach with a rocky shoreline and the capacity to evoke the sensation of an edge. It’s the ‘hidden nook’ of the album’s centerpiece, an actual place transformed into an astral plane where two instruments can orbit one another without end. When the fog rolls in while the sun is setting, if you’re able to catch it at just the right moment, the effect is glistening and luminous. You are enveloped in the bright glow, a phenomenon that is both wholly natural and deeply uncanny. This is the sound of Land’s End Eternal, prismatic and textured, subtly shifting yet never formless, a humming portal into another world.

Cole Pulice (they/them) is an electroacoustic saxophonist, improviser, and composer based in Oakland, California.

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