Anastasia Coope's voice in song or speech is cardinal, self-governed. Her voice, mezzo-soprano, is fit for highs and lows and filmy dresses, dewy meadows, not trouser rolls. Darning Woman was my first flight with Ms. Coope's music, a full-length record preceding the DOT EP (released on Halloween on her own Bonzo Records). Prior media dubbed her earliest recordings folk music, as if Ms. Coope had been a part of that scene or any scene. I didn't hear it, but she concedes there's truth in those claims. Yet Darning Woman, and more so DOT, are extensions of Coope's effortless distancing from any singular genre, going PRE, in contrast to post, making music exactly as she wants with the reasonable expectation to ask us all to listen.
Her voice is bona fide. Fragrant and guileless, it directs the songs. And she said, "The voice itself . . . I've just spent a lot of time singing—the way I play most instruments (specifically guitar) is just to guide my voice. I am able to think most freely through my voice, so I've naturally weeded out poor technique that leads to vocal runs sounding more contrived. But I'm always learning. The voice is so challenging, an interesting voice is so valuable, and it is learned as much as it is innate. My relationship with my voice improved as soon as I started writing my own music, because I was able to explore my own range much better."
Having spun DOT 'til the digital needle is worn, here follow some words upon the EP: Silver Apples playing through one speaker, smiling Helen Frankenthaler in turquoise capris beside a newly stretched canvas, faded Polaroid pictures of family gatherings taped above doorways, summer camp, the keyboard overture in "Baba O'Riley" guiding bedazzled fireflies into and out of a lidless Smuckers jam jar. Glass, (Su) Tissue, anything but arid desert, some ideas, but in things.
In our video chat and email correspondence, Ms. Coope was polite, attentive, forthright, and indulgent when I stumbled, "I'm tryin', I'm tryin'." We discussed her upbringing in Cold Spring, NY, and New York City, the relationships among her visual and audio worlds, recording processes and creative goals, the sum of DOT, and her relationship to the great outdoors—the natural world.
Her music is 21st-century, but Coope's breadth of music knowledge serves to inform rather than dictate how she creates. She notes regarding the ease of today's pushbutton music platforms that, "I agree that it [Spotify et al] is a gift; however, I try not to use too many algorithmic music discovery methods. I value word of mouth and physical discovery more, because those discoveries are much better retained than strings of user suggestions. I think where I most benefit from the accessibility is the research I can conduct after finding out about an artist or a scene—googling and reading old interviews archived online to see what artists were interested in at any given point. That is very valuable."
She's namechecked influences or interests in other interviews. Film, hymns, ‘60s pop singers . . . she's made discoveries, and like her paintings, they influence how she writes. Familiar with her Pratt education, an A/V nexus seemed assured. Of painting's impact on her music, she said, "I feel like with painting, I'm definitely getting finished products, but they're obviously not as broadcasted as what I'm doing musically. I haven't decided yet to try to get shown in galleries or anything like that. But I feel like when I'm painting, a lot of the time, I'm just constantly thinking about how things look.
"I'm looking at pictures and saving things and categorizing things into references and my ideal, like what the ideal lamp would look like. I don't know why. Maybe it's having so much access to the way things look because of growing up on social media or something, but I'm very obsessed with creating perfect images, but then I don't find that in painting. Maybe I'm trying to visualize myself working through all of the stimuli that I'm seeing, and I think that can help with music because it's the same thing. I have a lot of ideas about how things should sound, and like the way the most perfect thing would sound. The more I do painting and music, the more I realize that I am not sure how interested I am in getting there. I guess with painting it's a similar thing where I go into a painting with all these ideas about how something could or should look, but then, a lot of the time, I just finish it after one sitting."
Coope merges her mental blueprints with a smidgen of spontaneity. Of DOT, she explains, "I recorded and produced DOT myself, except for the drum production. Recorded it in Oregon, did some extra instrumentation after returning home (mostly textural stuff and vox). There are generally more tracks on this record compared to Darning Woman, but the volume placements of most of the tracks are quite low, so it still feels spartan and mechanical. I was interested in creating a sort of 'weather' or air to the recordings without having those low-position stems change the geography of the recordings. I didn't have any of the songs written when I went to Oregon for nine days. And I wanted to make an EP—pretty much that was my goal. Nine days is not very long. I just wrote all of it, and then once I returned home, I had the basic skeleton, and I just wanted to give a bed to the ideas." Quilts and comforters.
So why record the basics in Oregon? Family friends made an offer, and then there's Oregon's topography and foliage. But she's a New Yorker. Topography and foliage. Anastasia qualified that, "Since my family has lived in New York for so, so long, I think it is ingrained in me . . . the lower part of the state, utilizing all that it has. I love the city, but I also find it a lot easier to deal with when there is the Hudson Valley. The bottom three hours of the state, I think, is like a perfect cyclical kind of thing for me. So, sometimes I'm like, I really don't know if I'll ever move out of this part of New York, whether it's the Hudson Valley or New York City. I don't know."
Her songs are inviting, dreamlike but not hallucinatory, revealing and intimate but not clumsily so. These are not true confessions but instead fragments which, I propose, speak to universal truths and the collective consciousness of those for whom beauty and order would ideally be magnified.
I'd recently read a series of essays by Paul Kingsnorth, a contemporary writer residing in Ireland. When wandering the countryside to find abandoned wells and spaces once sacred to Christian mystics, Kingsnorth mulls the menaces of technocracy, of what he calls "the Machine," and how the post-modern soul craves a corrected relationship with the Creator, and how this may be accomplished by leaning into presumed relics of order, in thoughts, words, the deeds. Was her incorporation of nature—what's timeless—any sign of a personal spiritual journey? After a brief pause to search Kingsnorth, she replied she hadn't heard of him. Instead of a conversational dead-end, she remarked at length, "I didn't grow up religious, and I wouldn't call myself a religious person, but I try to stay really attentive, to pay a lot of attention to my immediate reaction to situations. Sometimes I joke, and I say the devil is here, and I really feel that about a lot of things, whether or not a piece of art is actually demonically bad or something. I have aversive reactions to the things that I don't like, and I try my best to use those reactions to refocus myself towards the things that I do appreciate and find real and true. A lot of the time, I am dividing things into the untrue and true when it comes to people's experiences of the world being broadcast through art."
She paused and reflected on neighborhood construction observable from her window: "The ideology that quality can exist without the injection of creative human thought seems wrong. And in terms of craft, the undervaluing of tradespeople and creatives such as architects, furniture designers, people designing kitchen appliances, cars, really anything, is a psyche that will lead away from sustainable invention."
In most of Coope's music videos, there are green worlds, hills and alcoves, vines, a dog keeping pace beside her along a woodsline, visual variety in one picturesque view, and often simply Coope, prone, adorned in original fashion on a plush chaise in a room rich with antiques. Her press kit proposes, "In Anastasia Coope's world, there is little difference between a confrontation and a welcoming gesture. Listening to her music, one is struck by her gift for vocal harmony and rich personal vision that borrows as much from the light and color of painting as it does from experimental music." Given such verbiage, I asked what she's getting at. DOT, in particular, is a record of 'other music.’ Can lushness be spartan? Is this experimental pop? And she said, "Yeah, none of it's conceptually 'on purpose' in terms of how experimental the songs are. I make a lot of compositions and things by myself that I like, but don't release them—that are much less easy to listen to, I would say. And they, I wouldn't say they interest me less, but I do find it to be more of a challenge to make something that really peaks and then drops and is like a package deal. Weirdly enough, even though I think my music is so easy to listen to, I definitely feel like I run up against what people want to hear at my age. People like it, but it confuses me a little bit sometimes how people react. To me, it seems so straightforward and like a pop song."
I wondered if a fleshed-out album with a string section or such might follow. And she said, "I think eventually, yeah, that's what I want to do. I always like to play everything by myself. Other than on the EP, I always just want to do more, add more instruments myself, because I am not that good at playing any single instrument.
"I feel like I'm really good at combining all of my sort of abilities. Eventually, the music is going to get too hard to perform as one or two people. So, I'll probably have to start working with people who can play the parts I've written, which is a stressful thought. But eventually I'll get there. And then I think through working with other musicians, I would like to make pieces that I can record live, in a room, all together, and then weave that into the original demo. But I don't know what the notes and everything are. I have no idea about any of that stuff. So, I'm going to need someone who can transcribe what I've written and then be able to give it to other musicians. Or they just have to have a really good ear."
I don't think this reads as false humility. Rather, these are the words of an artist with big ideas who is incrementally working toward the final brush stroke and isn't bent on meeting imaginary deadlines or others' expectations. And Bonzo is her label, where one can see her invitation for musicians to pitch their music for release. Who is she looking to bring aboard? "I'll know it when I hear it."
During our conversations, I detected something more meaningful than the babbling brooks of Cold Spring or the coolness of NYC. Family.
SG: I can imagine in your household there have been many holiday dinners, multigenerational conversations, and assurances that you are loved and supported. Could you speak to any of that?
AC: I am lucky to have grown up with a family that has maintained contact throughout generations. I know distant cousins and aunts and uncles, and whatnot. But my core family in New York (my dad's side is in England; I sadly don't see that side as much), my mom's three brothers, my two cousins, and my grandparents, were definitely very influential to me growing up.
Courtesy of cynical theorists across recent decades, any 21st-century young person is unlikely to miss the dissected detritus of ideas and gestures both True and False. Given her savvy, a tender heart, and curious mind, Ms. Coope knows what to do with those remnants—as all the best pieces she's stitched together.
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