Coppice Copse and The Pleasance & The Purchase

Coppice was founded by Noé Cuéllar and Joseph Kramer in Chicago in 2009, as an inquiry into the capture and generation of music and its relationship to its physical sources.

Its compound studies include Bellows & Electronics (prepared pump organs, shruti boxes, and tape processors) between 2009–2014, and Physical Modeling & Modular Syntheses between 2014–2018; focusing on the interactions between direct and reproduced sound, and the perceptual links between original and emulated sources, respectively.

Its third study in Phonography & Fiction (in progress since 2018) scrutinizes the dynamics between its previous two studies, and their relationship to architecture and time: the acoustic preservation and obsolescence of the Yerkes Observatory’s refractor and reflector telescopes in Williams Bay being the locus of investigation.

With sustained interest in sound’s capacity to cross domains, Coppice crafts pathways between music and technology in a cross-disciplinary language, resulting in work that is an overarching documentation of experimental music in-formation. Operating in cycles of instrument construction and modification, recordings, and live presentations, its productions incorporate sound design, sculpture, installation, software, images, and video.

Copse and The Pleasance & The Purchase

2010-2011

Photo by Andy Amundsen

Prepared shruti box
Modified Boombox I
Inductive Mixing Table I
Cassette player
Vinculum audio
Acoustic filters
Harmonica
Pitch pipes and tuning forks
Eight small speakers (installation)

Copse proposed an “acousmatic dispersal” and sculptural extension of a shruti box in time and space, to invite the active perception of direct and reproduced sounds in relationship to their sources.

The products and byproducts of the shruti box were atomized, dispersed and shuffled spatially and temporally, in an effort to present the parts-to-the-whole relationships as fluid and continuous.

The live and recorded sounds were distributed to a set of installation speakers via the Inductive Mixing Table I, a flat surface designed to pick up signals from tiny speakers and other magnetic sources and dispatch them to eight speakers placed away from it. Inductive Mixing Table I functions as an expressive diffusion instrument in that it is immediately responsive to the manual gestures of speakers dragged across its surface.

The first two of three movements of Copse focused on the creation and designation of spaces concerned with the bodies that exist within the sound field in performance. Their arrangement for 7” record The Pleasance & The Purchase (Senufo Editions, 2012) presents a fixed perspective. The listener is not able to negotiate a multi-sourced sound environment, but is instead repositioned as a point existing within a stereo projection that they share responsibility for creating (the listener turns the recording on, sets the volume, places the speakers, selects a point from which to listen, etc.)

Fixed and flattened, The Pleasance & The Purchase invites a private question of where a listener finds their footing.

December 3, 2010 – Copse, ACRE Projects; Chicago, IL
October 2, 2010 – Sugar Maple; Milwaukee, WI
September 30, 2010 – Spark Festival of Electronic Music and Arts, Quarter Gallery, Regis Center for Art, University of Minnesota; Minneapolis, MN
September 4, 2010 – Sound & Cultivation, Campbell House; Chicago, IL

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