In Lynn Avery’s hands, the cosmos feels like it could fit in your pocket. The Oakland artist’s homespun style of ambient music delicately balances the tactile with the mystical, weaving freeform jazz and lo-fi collage together into playfully diffuse semblances of songs. Over the last several years, Avery has gradually nurtured her peculiar little sound worlds, regularly working with saxophonist Cole Pulice and flutist Mitch Stahlmann to explore her ideas from different angles. She achieved one of her headiest concoctions yet earlier this year with To Live & Die in Space & Time, where she and Pulice stretched their new-agey jams out into negative space, tapping into a stately and surreal calm suspended in zero gravity. Now, Avery follows that record with a reissue of 2020’s Carpet Cocoon—her wondrous, charmingly offbeat debut album as Iceblink.
Where Avery’s other collaborations with Pulice and Stahlmann often reach way up into the clouds, Carpet Cocoon has its feet planted firmly in the soil. Describing it as a “comfort album” to “retreat to in the winter,” Avery adorns the record in tenderly plucked nylon string guitars, lending even its more uncategorizable tracks a sweet, earthy air. From the moment the album opens with the acoustic “Healer,” Carpet Cocoon shrouds itself in a snowy intimacy, as Pulice’s saxophone lines waltz with Avery’s melancholy fingerpicking in a lonely yet soothing lament. Avery and Pulice continually expand on the song’s winding, folky theme, granting it an almost epic quality, like thumbing through the pages of a hardbound book found buried in your grandmother’s attic.
Carpet Cocoon’s most special moments are those where Avery lets her ambitions loose. “Cellphone in the Bath,” with its chirpy, tick-tocking mallets, recalls the more whimsical experiments of Inoyama Land, but on a bedroom scale (it certainly wouldn’t sound out of place as a video-game merchant background theme). Avery continues to swerve with each track, dipping into a slanted bass groove on the muted “Vocoder Upright” and looping in Stahlmann’s radiant flute accompaniment on the blossoming, Isik Kural-like synth vignette “Microsong.” But her various experiments never disturb the album’s peaceful essence. Even darker tracks like “August Von Koenig,” whose mysterious guitars and ringing bells feel as if they were lifted straight out of an eerie folk tale, fit neatly into Avery’s warm patchwork.
Though Avery has taken her craft to hypnotizing, otherworldly new places in the years since Carpet Cocoon, there’s a certain magic to her debut album that’s distinct. Carpet Cocoon feels as lovingly assembled as an old photo album, each hissy field recording infused with a serenely nostalgic quality, like overexposed Polaroids too fuzzy to make out the clear details. It’s so organic that it almost seems to breathe on its own, revealing tiny new textural details with every new spin. In an ambient scene where soft, easy vibes often rule above all, Avery has proven herself to be incredibly adept at threading the needle between accessibility and adventurousness. Tracing her journey back to its beginning shows just how many different directions her sounds can go.
