Abstract:
Born in 1986, Louis Cole is an LA-based singer and multi-instrumentalist who plays the roles of songwriter, performer, and producer. Cole’s tastes were formed via exposure to a wide variety of music: on his recent albums, Miles Davis rubs shoulders with Meshuggah, Stevie Wonder with Skrillex, and Jamiroquai with Gustav Mahler. While such eclecticism has become a feature of today’s hyper-networked musical landscape, Cole’s absorption of these influences is idiosyncratic and revealing insofar as it recursively combines a native fluency in digital production techniques and online presentation with a renewed commitment to “analog” instrumental skills. Similarly, Cole’s music fuses the trans-registral virtuosity and cocky braggadocio of 80s pop stars such as Prince with a lo-fi vulnerability conveyed by mumbled lyrics on recurringly vague topics (“life,” “time,” “things”) and gestures of disavowal (“who cares,” “doesn’t matter”) that reflect the effects of industrial, economic, and environmental collapse on musicians’ mental and physical well-being. Ultimately, I argue, the joie de vivre of Cole’s music insists on the lasting importance of ephemerality while embracing the inevitability of entropy, thereby exposing some of the unsustainable paradoxes of contemporary American life without pretending to resolve them.
About the artist:
As director of the Cornell Center for Historical Keyboards, as a scholar, and as a performer, Roger Moseley focuses on intersections and overlaps between keyboard music, digital games, and the diverse ways both can be played. Through his research and teaching, he is committed to bringing thought and practice together by reflecting on the mechanics, dynamics, and consequences of musical acts. In particular, he investigates how the concept of play can sharpen our awareness of music’s joys and risks while addressing the underlying question of how materials, processes, interfaces, and media make both music and play conceivable as such.
Join the Colloquium on Thursday, February 27th at Lincoln Hall, Room 124 at 4:30pm. This event is free and open to the public.
