When you’re ensconced in a circle of 29 piccolos, no one can hear you scream. New York-based flutist and TAK Ensemble cofounder Laura Cocks re-creates this otherworldly sonic scenario in David Bird’s “Atolls,” the first piece off their new debut solo album,. Bird says his piece derived the auxiliary performers’ pitches by employing “combined spectral analysis” of a cymbal crashing and Janet Leigh’s iconic shriek in.
The album’s tour de force is a 2014 piece by Catalan composer Joan Arnau Pàmies, “Produktionsmittel I” , where Cocks eventually trades their flute for an aluminum foil sheet and glass bottle. Bethany Younge wrote “Oxygen and Reality” for Cocks in 2017, the same year Younge left Chicago for New York. Like Pàmies’s piece here, “Oxygen and Reality” employs unusual materials—in this case balloons—to dramatic effect.