Compilation of video clips and audio samples of Coppice performances between 2009–2022. This video illustrates Coppice’s various sound palettes over the years. Many more images of past shows can be seen on Tumblr.
Video feature by The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, during the making of a 4-channel sound installation for the Florasonic series by Experimental Sound Studio in partnership with the Chicago Parks District, at the Lincoln Park Conservatory’s Fern Room in Chicago, curated by Lou Mallozzi in 2013.
With accompanying article by Anjulie Rao.
The “Navigation” menu on this website links to various writings. They are chapters in an overarching documentation of Coppice’s creative, technical, and conceptual processes since 2009. These demonstrate aspects of investigation in experimental composition, instrumentation, and installation with multichannel systems.
For Sonic Pavilion consideration, we would highlight Lightyears, published on Leonardo (2025) 58 (2): 126–134. This writing describes the layered production the large-scale work Draw Agreement, produced at the Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, Wisconsin, and at Elastic Arts in Chicago, Illinois, utilizing their Chicago Laboratory for Electroacoustic Theatre (CLEAT) 16-channel 96-speaker sound system.
A press quote by Simon Cummings for 5:4 (UK) in 2023, regarding the retrospective 3 CD set Draw Agreement, published by Fern Recordings (FR) in 2023 (the subject of the Lightyears article highlighted in Work Sample 3).
Few releases i’ve explored this year have pulled me into their orbit so completely, and so (in the best sense) puzzlingly, as Draw Agreement by the US experimental duo Coppice. i’ve been following the work of Noé Cuéllar and Joseph Kramer for around a decade, and have been consistently entranced by their unique approach to the production, and perception, of sound. For a pair of avant-garde experimentalists, Coppice’s output is extensive, and as the years have passed and i’ve acquired and got to know pretty much their entire catalogue, it’s become apparent that, far from thinking of them as mere ‘albums’, each one is just as much a research document, a testament to the latest stage in the duo’s evolving compositional methodology. My lengthy experience with and understanding of their work should make writing about Draw Agreement that much more straightforward, but it’s easy to feel a touch overwhelmed by both the scope, and the convolution of this particular project, being as it is a summation and synthesis of sorts of their entire body of work to date.
[…]
Where Draw Agreement is at its best is in its central panel, comprising the two snappily-titled sibling works Rotations in Refractor (Simulated Diffusion in the Likeness of the Yerkes Observatory) and Turning in Reflectors (Simulated Diffusion in Objects against the Yerkes Observatory). These form a pair of lengthy studies that recontexualise Compass and Circumpass within forms of real and simulated spatialisation, in relation to the Yerkes Observatory building in Wisconsin. These are among the most engrossing works Coppice has ever produced. The first, Rotations in Refractor, harnesses the hugely powerful mechanical sounds of the Observatory in a diptych-like structure. Its opening half is a play on the whirring mechanisms (with periods of silence that paradoxically seem no less full of microscopic sound), answered by a milder sequence of bubbling noise amid whirling and pitches, in another demonstration of relative (compositional) passivity yielding to activity. Turning in Reflectors is more collage-like, juxtaposing and superimposing elements to form a continually changing palette of click and clunk. The return of the lyrical passage from Compass is a delicious moment that here serves to create a similarly hypnotic period of glossy focus before becoming lost in a blur of sculpted and real-world actions that seem a world away from melodies and basslines.
All of which barely scratches the surface of the hugely ambitious sonic art Coppice have presented here. Equal parts research, experiment and music, Draw Agreement’s achievement isn’t just in the brilliant, mesmerising explorations […] but also in the way it makes one reflect on (and literally hear) their earlier work in a new context, which in turn has left me itching to go back and revisit their extensive back catalogue all over again.
The following year, Cummings continued:
There are many things that draw me to [Coppice], one of the strongest being the way in which they create, such that it seems less appropriate to speak of a conventional composition process than of an experimental investigation, guided by a mixture of spontaneous curiosity and academic rigour. Another key feature that i love about their work is its intricate blurring of real and unreal, in which real world sounds and sources are heard alongside not merely artificial and electronic sounds, but altered and processed versions of themselves, in complex concentric patterns of interaction and juxtaposition.