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Zach Cooper - The Sentence 12" (Styles Upon Styles)

Zach Cooper The Sentence Styles Upon Styles
13 March 2016

North Carolina-based composer, Zach Cooper, delivers a stunning debut that weaves minimalism, avant-garde jazz and tape collage into a single sonic thought.

The Sentence sounds like Sun Ra’s Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy if William S. Burroughs had been the producer. A nightmarish music box drone segues into gently flowing jazz built around found sound before contorting into something that could be Cecil Taylor conducting Swans. Mysterious, lo-fi production hisses as another instrument, the space between sounds as they form focused thoughts. Each song title reveals another piece of a sentence, keeping the music constantly moving from capitalization to period, a single idea expressed in several words transformed into notes and rhythms to convey something beyond the barriers of language. It’s monumentally beautiful and lulling in drone, a captivating statement from one who speaks in tones and textures.

Everybody wants to be a composer these days, but few successfully balance the intellectual with the emotional. Zach Cooper does, and hopefully will for a long time.