No, your stream is not buffering, and your headphones are not broken. But for the first two minutes of Terrain, the captivating second album from the conceptually intrepid and processing-minded composer Jacob Cooper, you will invariably wonder what is wrong with your sound. A fusillade of glitches and silences suggests an interrupted connection or a failing circuit. Soon enough, though, Cooper’s digital cacophony yields to the splendid consonance of Theo Bleckmann, a singer whose dashing fluidity made him a mensch of Meredith Monk’s Vocal Ensemble and shaped his stunning album of Kate Bush interpretations. “Nettles, daisies, and long purples,” he finally manages after the slurred start of “Ripple the Sky,” images of natural wonder barely outracing Cooper’s ruthless electronics.
For the next 15 minutes, Bleckmann serves as a sort of narrative tour guide, singing a poem about the depression and suffering that thread together Ophelia’s woe in Hamlet, the suicide-minded works of Robert Schumann, and our own inescapably anxious times. He rises above a snarling string section only to have his splendid tone chopped, screwed, doubled, and damaged to the edge of oblivion. “Ripple the Sky” is a daring piece about trying to hold onto shreds of beauty in a cold world that rarely cares about what you covet. Those stutters at the start, the ones that will make you check your connection, and the squeal of scraped strings at the end are ellipses, reminders that our worries were no more new to Ophelia than they are to us. Shakespeare, Schumann, and you—that’s the timeline Cooper is condensing.
Cooper has long been a fan of teasing his audience’s perception of time. In an opera, he constructed an alternate universe where Justin Timberlake again wooed Britney Spears. He also stretched the start of a hymn about Mary mourning Jesus’ crucifixion until you could almost visualize her forming tears. (That last work, Stabat Mater Dolorosa, is rapturous and highly recommended, as beautiful a buck as you will ever spend on Bandcamp.)
Terrain features three pieces written between 2016 and this year, each based around new poems commissioned by Cooper and sung by Bleckmann, his younger stylistic descendant Jodie Landau, and, for the finale, the two in tandem. These poems and the pieces at large consider the ways time reinforces or diminishes our individual experiences. Where “Ripple the Sky” is about the immortality of our woes, “Expiation” examines humanity’s customs of killing animals and, broadly, our inability to “escape past pressure.” The most recent work and title track, “Terrain,” tries to hold onto fleeting moments of beauty while the world races ahead.
All of this might sound dry or overly esoteric—and, yes, it’s a lot to ponder. But the wonder of Terrain is how Cooper makes these ideas and his rigorous treatments sound so vital and compulsive, in conversation with a world well beyond the conservatory. Late in “Ripple the Sky,” for instance, the strings become especially grating, and Bleckmann seems ready to succumb. It’s like the dreamworlds of Tim Hecker turned inside out, so that the music is pure hellish attack. For its magnetic middle, “Expiation” sounds like Animal Collective circa Strawberry Jam, when skywriting vocals crisscrossed intricate layers of surrealist sequences. The piece’s climax is a proper dance number, with hypnotic harmonies webbing a throbbing beat to Landau’s half-yelled pleas for empathy. “Each tongue troubles its dark canker,” he repeats, demanding that the past be reconsidered for the continually changing present.
During “Terrain,” a duet Cooper builds by processing both singers against the pensive cello drones of frequent collaborator Ashley Bathgate, Bleckmann is in the foreground, his voice given a kind of magisterial authority. Landau is below, squeezed until he sounds like a robot running out of electricity. The combination feels like hearing someone’s internal dialogue about some deep turmoil, an approach familiar from Moses Sumney’s græ or Bon Iver’s 22, A Million—extravagantly warped vocals and largely unadorned ones vying for limited space, slipping in and around one another in an uneasy exchange.
It’s fitting that Cooper continues to dwell on time and how we handle it, since Terrain feels like his futuristic view of classical music, firmly rooted both in the distant past and music much closer to the present. His audacious interpretation of these librettos stems from tradition. The tools he uses to do so, though, border on production’s bleeding edge, so much so that, now and again, you will wonder if something’s wrong with the sound itself.
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