Madeleine Cocolas Bodies

A companion album to 2022's restrained 'Spectral', 'Bodies' blurs the boundaries between bodies of water and human bodies, provoking presence by emulating wave cycles and heartbeats with deft electronic rhythms and obscuring vocals and field recordings with tense synths.

Cocolas headed to the Australian coast and explored the creeks and waterfalls of Far North Queensland to source environmental sounds for 'Bodies'. And although these recordings are mostly hidden, they provide the album with its backbone, over which Cocolas lavishes concealed chorals and orchestral waves of powerful, distorted electronics. There's a palpable tension to the material; we can hear Cocolas' cries on opening track 'Bodies I', but it's buried beneath saturated, cinematic washes that might be strings, and might be synths.

She wanted her collages to evoke memories and emotions rather than represent something more tangible, and handles this by drifting from digital to analog, electronic to acoustic, concealing everything almost beyond recognition. On 'A Current Runs Through', Cocolas turns her instrumentation into crashing, cinematic drones that emerge like bubbling waters, and on 'Exhale' it sounds as if she's sunk beneath the surface, her ensemble drowned by filtered bubbles and ominous groans.