Cole Pulice’s music manifests a state of animated suspension. Over the past five years, the Oakland saxophonist and synthesist has learned to untether their instrument from the laws of physics, thanks to a fusion of real-time playing with extensive digital signal processing. They have compared their setup to being strapped into a mech suit—working their horn, or a breath-based Yamaha MIDI controller, with their mouth and hands, while both feet manipulate an array of effects pedals that stretch and warp the flow of sound. Pulice’s breakthrough recording, 2023’s If I Don’t See You in the Future, I’ll See You in the Pasture, was a 22-minute meditation in which everything and nothing seemed to happen at once. Chords smeared outward toward the horizon, the progression so gradual you forgot where you were in the sequence, while a mercurial cadenza soared over the top. It epitomized the artist’s main organizing principle: the tension between movement and stasis.
Land’s End is Pulice’s first solo album since that Longform Editions release—last year they released the more lyrical Phantasy & Reality, their second collaboration with ambient composer Lynn Avery—and it represents a subtle but important progression in their work: While roughly half the 32-minute album builds upon the gentle amorphousness of their previous recordings, a three-part suite at the heart of the record brings electric guitar into the mix, yielding a more structured approach to songwriting.
The first song, “Fragments of a Slipstream Dream,” is a bridge, an extension of the gleaming arc that defines If I Don’t See You in the Future. At the outset, Pulice methodically plays four descending notes on their horn, a staircase smeared by digital processing into a broad, frozen expanse. Blushing chords, Cocteau Twins-like in their gauzy radiance, add harmonic complexity. After a minute or so, Pulice begins playing tentative melodic figures on their horn, its timbre at first tinny and compressed, then full and breathy. There’s a searching quality to their playing, which tends to move in fits and starts, traveling outward from the center, tracing tight circles as it goes, before looping back to the starting point. Yet tracing their horn’s line of flight would be an impossible task; its movements are unpredictable, a scale model of boundlessness.
The mode abruptly shifts with “In a Hidden Nook Between Worlds”; the artist’s habitual fog gives way to startling clarity as Pulice plucks out a clean-tone electric guitar melody. They were new to the instrument when they recorded the piece; the Stratocaster was loaned by a friend, and they’ve described their approach as being guided by “child’s brain.” Curiously, I don’t hear anything tentative about their playing—to the contrary, it sounds unusually deliberate and composed. Though tonally steeped in Americana, the song is the most jazz-like among the artist’s work to date, saxophone and guitar moving in unison through the head of the piece before both instruments veer into abstraction in part II. Where Pulice’s previous work was clearly indebted to technologically aided improvisation and post-processing, this is the first of their pieces you could imagine being notated on the stave; the guitar imposes a sense of order that extends to Pulice’s horn.
