You could argue that devotion has always driven the urge to create music—or maybe even create any kind of art—dating back to its earliest forms. Even in a time prior to polyphony, creativity’s nature is such that people will want to indulge the urge to reflect through the medium that most closely brushes heaven. Even when a deity’s grace or attention drove all societal reason or meaning, music was still self-actualization, an assertion of who you are to those around you in hopes you’ll see yourself in that which you’re devoted to. Even love songs reflect a hope for the highest self to be revealed, capturing the essence of a connection and hoping that memorializing it through repetition and tone will render it holy. A teenager making beats on their laptop might (arguably) still be working in the lineage of a personalized mantra crafted to express your faith in hopes of being saved.
When New York-based multidisciplinary artist Anastasia Coope notes that the recording of her debut record, Darning Woman, marks the time where she “start[ed] to think spatially about music,” everything about said record is suddenly heightened for the acute listener—because that awareness of space makes the record. The 21-year-old may not specifically be singing about a higher power, but her command over repetition—that basic marker of devotional song—and her commitment to building atmosphere creates something that exists out of time. The record clocks in at a slight 22 minutes, with only about half of the tracks exceeding the two-minute mark, but it comes off as a charmingly homemade song cycle, more interested in perpetuating a potent sense of environment than it is in verse-chorus-verse structure. Though it’s indebted to both left-field folk and expressive avant-garde vocalists (Brigitte Fontaine, who Coope cites as an influence, comes to mind immediately on first listen), it feels like it works just as much in the realm of true traditional folk music—not of the singer-songwriter variety, but that which catalogs literal folklore.
Maybe this is communicated most clearly through the album’s central character (possibly a titular one): a woman maker, a woman seemingly bound to her hearth as war rages around her. Of course, this concept alone feels plucked out of another time. Still, through a modern lens, the folklore surrounding this impressionistic sketch of a woman’s form feels it relies more on strength of character than on dutifully completing household chores. Listening to the title track, a sing-song hymn where Coope calls the woman her own, it arrives as an ode to someone stubborn enough to maintain their chosen shape, mending her world together with loose thread. The vision of this person weaves in and out of the audible depths which Coope’s music plumbs, moving like a shadowy figure we admire but dare not cross.
Even if you don’t want to read that deeply into Coope’s process or potential motives, the thing about the album which will hold your attention long after its end is the artist’s sonic palette, built around airy, minimal instrumentation—mostly acoustic guitar, sparingly used piano—dominated by layers and layers of voices. Often, those said voices are, in fact, the only sound on a given track, tying all elements of melody, harmony, rhythm and even percussion together artfully without ever dipping into hyper-arranged, a cappella group territory. It works so well in large part because Coope has such a distinct voice that also feels malleable, letting herself fill any empty role in the grand vocal arrangements—growling a bassline as often as she luxuriates in dense, angelic harmonies.
The most expansive version of Coope’s vision comes early with the record’s first single and opening track, “He is on His Way Home, We Don’t Live Together,” which sets the template for how most of the other songs that follow are patterned: introducing a central melody line before stretching and mutating it. Repeating the title phrase—of which most of the lyrics comprise—Coope pairs a dainty, childlike chant with rippling vocal backing, sighing vowels as rudimentary piano follows the former up the scale. It stands as a singular moment for featuring any prominent percussion at all, but when said percussion arrives, it announces itself with a chaotic clatter of tambourines disrupting a choir of near-yodeling voices. Instantly immersive and sprawling without apology, it opens a window to a future where Coope could, if she wanted to, make a more aggressive racket without ever sounding like she’s lost control.
The rest of the album is less unwieldy in its experimentation, but turns that follow settle into a groove equal in its beauty, even if it’s not quite as daring. The run of mid-album tracks “Woke Up and No Feet” and the shorter, wistful interlude of “Sorghum” stand as maybe the project’s most immediate one-two punch, working within that same structure of presenting its melodic thesis and then building off and deconstructing the original figure. With the former’s simple strumming and surreal lyrics, it almost presents itself as a nursery rhyme, tying the album directly back to its fantasy and folklore ambitions.
To place Coope’s understanding of space and atmosphere back at the fore: It cannot be emphasized enough how much her experience with visual art has clearly shaped her understanding of texture, even when it’s employed in an auditory medium. Cooing, syncopated vocals slip up against gently straining horns on closer “Return to Room,” wading through a copious amount of echo that sketches out the expanse of the imaginary room you can hear the full army of her. Though the effect is a constant throughout Darning Woman’s runtime, there is such a sense of expertise when it comes to introducing color when it would best serve the song while also showing restraint when necessary. A group of giggling voices will enter one ear and then leave immediately after, like a flash of light on the bare walls of our shared imaginary room that never overstays its welcome.
This cross-medium pollination can have the effect that the work feels like it’s being transmitted from out of time, but it also allows Coope to incorporate unmistakably modern pieces of sound—like the click of a laptop trackpad or an alarm beeping on the watch. The result feels like the bridging of sonic eras, coming off as both well-studied and reverential to artists of the past, while also creating something that collapses all markers of time in a way that cuts all artistic restraints loose. Coope sounds as if she literally floats—mostly for the better.
In a sense, this is the ideal way to position a daring debut album, by letting the work serve as synthesis of a mission statement and a representation of influences up to this point so that it can act as a launching pad for whatever comes next. Darning Woman successfully introduces us to Coope’s sensibility and should have those on its wavelength clamoring for however she evolves from here, having hopefully set the foundation to build something with even more dimension her next time around. What’s most exciting about the emergence of an artist with such a singular vision is that you can hear the potential—within each choral arrangement, each manipulated voice, each cough worked into the mix as an essential musical color. It all sings of its devotion for the space Coope has created until it evaporates into thin air, holding tangible love in each note as it hovers above us.
Read our recent interview with Anastasia Coope here.
Elise Soutar is a New York-born-and-based music and culture writer.
