Vestibule is an album by composer Ed Cooper, performed by Ben Finlay, Jack Adler-McKean, and Octandre Ensemble. Structured as a diptych enclosed within a triptych, its two longer works utilise the performers’ heartbeats as tempi. These pulses offer irregular yet regulatory anchors, both affected by and affecting the players’ gestures, guiding them through drifting, splintering deepness—a duo of eclipsing mobiles of arrhythmia. The pieces’ extended durations and static structures invite an absorbed attentiveness, yet, simultaneously, displace the listener, evoking an experience more akin to eavesdropping than immersion: this detachment is the very mode of their expression. The three shorter pieces similarly occupy low frequencies but, in contrast, present sonic worlds constructed from clearer melodic materials. They suggest something of a framing gesture for the album, but are, paradoxically, themselves transient and intimate, as if disorientated, miniature requiems for the spectral corporeality of their longer counterparts.
Released through Thanatosis, May 2026.
HEKATE’S VOICES is the latest fruit of the collaborative partnership between composer Ed Cooper and pianist Kate Ledger. Sitting between ambient and experimental genres, this work is a meditation on transience and intimacy. The 40-minute piece uses witchcraft as its inspiration, attempting to invoke the powerful but ever elusive Hekate between its materials: recordings of Mother Shipton’s Cave and Pendle Hill, multi-tracked piano, distant vocals, and unexpected heartbeats. These materials often hover around and within each other, collapsing as they come into focus, as if the piece is a mediator between internal and external realities. Contorted, bittersweet expression is entangled with emotional blankness, making the two indistinct from each other. HEKATE’S VOICES is an exercise in deceptive catoptromancy and acceptance.
Released through Sawyer Spaces, April 2025. Featured on Bandcamp’s Best Field Recordings, April 2025: ‘If the spirit of Hekate can truly be summoned, the ritual would surely sound something like this’.
YouTube
Example: As the space functions without me (2024) — AATT soloists, spatialised choir, audio
Soundcloud
Example: SUB ECLIPSE BLOOD WORK (2023) — harp, humming, audio