Cole Peters
Sound & visual artist

A Recasting of Indices

Album (CD and digital download),
released 2024/12 by Unfathomless

A microphone on a stand nearly silhouetted against a flat sky in a low, golden field

This is an organic flow of telescoping elements cast in a mysterious, imperturbable sea… A washing wind erases reliefs, carving unseen routes, streams carrying small stones and pieces of wood… A splattering landscape, a sizzling coal, and tiny gestures trying to grasp all the aspects… scraping to the bone, exposing the roots.

— Daniel Chalk, Unfathomless

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Background

The first thirteen years of my life were inscribed, in part, by movement. During these formative years, our family relocated on a nearly annual basis, each shift in space uncovering a new stratum of surroundings, faces, and questions of belonging.

Despite the magnitude of these upheavals, it wasn’t until recently that I began to question how they might have impacted my psyche, both during their unfolding and across time.

This album began as a series of field trips back to many of the places I once called home, some of which I hadn’t returned to in decades.

Photograph of a burdock shrub against a backdrop of shadowy woods and tall grass Closup photograph of dust covered burdock plant, the flowers a deep purple against the dusted grey of its bracts Closup photograph of dust covered burdock plant, the flowers a deep purple against the dusted grey of its bracts

At each location, I sought to recollect the experiences, thoughts, and emotions of my younger self, while also cultivating new perspectives on these events and the environs in which they occurred.

This process of exploration and reflection served not only as a means of approaching a reconciliation of my personal history with my present sense of self, but also as an instinctual system of reference which directed my attention, listening, and interactions with each locale.

Black and white photograph of a hand holding a microphone inside a wind guard in front of a large ship. Black and white photograph of a hand holding a contact microphone against an old rusted water pump.

This album’s two compositions trace their origins from the recordings I made during those field trips, comprising traditional stationary listenings as well as my own manipulation of rediscovered objects and structures within their environments.

Some of these recordings are presented as nearly verbatim; others have been more substantially modified in terms of speed, playback direction, and frequency response.

Black and white photograph of a hand holding a contact microphone against an old rusted water pump.

While my associations with these recordings and their locations of origin are unavoidably steeped in narrative, I approached the composition of this work in a fundamentally intuitive and formalist sense, as an exercise in processing the recordings’ material properties (and the emergent work as a whole) experientially.

Having sat with these pieces for several months as of this writing, they feel to me now very much like kōans — objects of meditation which reject analytical interpretation, yet are suffused with a sense of the fundamental and ineffable.

Black and white photograph of a hand holding a contact microphone against an old rusted water pump.

Recorded, assembled, and mixed in Treaty One territory, Canada, 2022–2024.

Mastered by Lawrence English at Negative Space, August 2024.

Cover, card design, and treatments by Daniel Crokaert, based exclusively on photos taken at the album’s recording sites.

Released in editions of 170 standard editions, and 30 limited editions featuring hand numbered and signed prints on Hahnemuhle Photo Rag.