• COLE PULICE - LAND'S END ETERNAL

COLE PULICE - LAND'S END ETERNAL

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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.

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.