Like her previous album (2022’s Spectral), Madeleine Cocolas‘ new record begins with external sources. Whereas last time she took a variety of field recordings of the world around her, on Bodies the Australian musician focuses on the sound of water as a starting point. Taking recordings made along the Australian coastline and creeks and waterfalls in Far North Queensland, Cocolas uses aquatic sounds to explore the relationship between bodies of water and human bodies, trying to “blur the boundaries between them” as sounds crash, melt, and form into one another.
The watery backdrop is fertile stuff for Cocolas to build her music around. Often the tracks on Bodies will start with the low murmur of the aqueous source material, a strangely unsettling bassy rumble. It’s simultaneously calming and unnerving; you can imagine waves and currents washing over you, but equally conjuring up the image of some deadly creature suddenly appearing out of the watery mist lurks in the back of your mind throughout. Even married to the cavernous and cathedral-like shimmer of the drones on “The Creek”, or the the centrifugal spin of fluttering wordless vocals on “Exhale”, a sense of foreboding persists.
But similar to Spectral, Bodies seems to be missing that tangible connective tissue. It veers away from recognisable instruments and instead favours drones, electronic noise and wordless vocals. Landscapes are pretty and sometimes engulfing, but (and perhaps appropriately), it washes over the listener all too easily. Even for ambient/neoclassical-leaning music, it feels strangely absent of a palpable hook and heart. The album’s most curiously enchanting moment, “Drift”, presents jittery bioluminescent synths and mystical organ tones, like watching deep sea creatures and coral sway and swim with the dark current. Yet after six minutes it disappears all too suddenly, Cocolas seemingly unsure where to take it.
There’s still plenty to be said for Bodies though. Crank it up on some good headphones in a quiet room and it plays out the best it can: aforementioned “Exhale” boasts a sumptuous crescendo of velvety electrical noise; the 10-plus minute final track “Bodies II” has glistening choral-like notes clamouring against thunderous noise akin to the sound of waves slowly crashing; and “Bodies I” has a rhythmic sway to it amidst the scratchy strings and almost imperceptible low rumbles. As a whole and an immersive experience, Bodies definitely works, but the album requires that bit more attention and focus than you might want to put into an ambient/noise album.
But it still lives in the shadow of its predecessor. It’s fitting perhaps then that Cocolas considers the two albums linked, both companions to the other, as Bodies echoes similar mannerisms of Spectral. Like the 2022 album, Bodies curves to its peak in its middle: “A Current Runs Through” has a rippling blizzard of doomy distortion as a sporadic electronic beat underpins it all. It’s fascinating and absorbing, but also feels like a shadow of Spectral’s centrepiece “And Then I Watch It Fall Apart”. Two great tracks themselves and two great moments, but there is the ache for something that pushes further afield, especially from a musician as talented and innovative as Cocolas.
