Cole Pulice (they/them) is a saxophonist, composer, and improviser living in Oakland, California via Minneapolis, Minnesota. Drawn to the intersection of improvisation, modern composition, and electroacoustic experimentalism, Cole combines their saxophone playing with live signal processing to explore sonic spaces both surreal and delicately beautiful. Their work explores dynamic scales of time and place; senses of self, gender and identity; ephemerality, dream, and memory. Cole has released music on Moon Glyph, Orange Milk, Cached Media, and Aural Canyon.
If I Don’t See You in the Future, I’ll See You in the Pasture is influenced by the ephemerality of time with those I hold dearly, processing love and the grief of loss, and the interconnected Eternal Now of memories across the past, present, and future. I wrote this piece amidst a transitional moment where some important chapters in my life were coming to a close just as new chapters were beginning to open, and I really wanted the landscape of the music to be imbued with the duality of that experience. In other words: holding the grief of letting go with the hopeful emotions of embracing new horizons, and the sort of cosmic intertwining of all of life’s possible unfoldings, regardless of how things feel like they’re shaking out on a small day-to-day scale.
The seed for this piece appeared to me during an improvised solo set I played at the January 2023 Drone Not Drones festival in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Immediately after the set was over, I could already sense the totality of the final piece hidden somewhere within what I had just played, so I was very excited to get back to the Bay and start uncovering it. I knew I really wanted to preserve the energy and aura of the live solo performances in the recorded studio version. My recorded work tends to represent more crafted and distilled versions of ideas I find while improvising live or in the studio, but the nature of this being for Longform Editions felt like the perfect moment to try and capture the breadth, pace, sonic landscape of what I try to do when I play solo electroacoustic saxophone live.
To that end: the only instrument I used for the piece was tenor saxophone with live hardware signal processing (in other words, there’s no post-production signal processing happening, everything you hear is happening live). This piece unfolded in the studio really intuitively: I only recorded two complete takes of this piece, and while there is some light editing in a couple spots between takes, what you hear is effectively one live take that is played, performed, and processed live and in the moment (I control the saxophone with the hands and mouth and the signal processing with my feet). I think with my recorded music it’s easy to think that there’s lots of overdubbing and layering…while I have a couple pieces where that is true, largely all my signal processing saxophone music is done completely live in single takes with minimal post-production, and I really wanted this piece to capture that!
Lastly: If I Don’t See You in the Future, I’ll See You in the Pasture feels like a capstone to some creative threads and a certain sonic palette that I’ve felt deeply intertwined with the last few years (both technically and aesthetically). This piece feels like the most complete and direct manifestation of something I feel like I have just been capturing glimpses of some of my other recent work.
Deep and deliberate practices of listening can be both incredibly personal and communal experiences that are portals into alternate planes. It can change your perception of time and space, your sense of self, the way you feel and process emotions, how your interior world interfaces with your exterior surroundings…listening rituals are forms of magic. I used to feel this figuratively, but increasingly I find myself thinking this more literally, as in: literally a form of spellcasting.
I’ve frequently heard music making and listening practices spoken about in ways that are mutually exclusive (for instance: when asking people if they make music I’ve often been met with responses like “Not really, I’m more of a listener/appreciator.”)…but it seems to me that the relationship between musical listening and creating is deeply interrelated, even symbiotic – they necessitate each other. In other words: listening can be a form of composition, and composition a form of listening.