When longtime collaborator Lynn Avery accidentally left her electric guitar at their house when she moved to New York, Cole Pulice took that coincidence as a sign of where to go next. Having already felt the need to diverge from the focused directions of 2022’s time-stopping If I Don’t See You in the Future, I’ll See You in the Pasture, the Oakland-based avant-garde saxophonist – who also crossed paths with Bon Iver and Godspeed You! Black Emperor – decided to mark this new beginning by diving into a previously unexplored instrument. The pieces on Land’s End Eternal certainly spark with a prog-like sense of limitless curiosity, intertwining their trademark signal processing setup on the saxophone with sprawling riffs, choir sections, and abandoned grand pianos to bring together a stunning soundscape of spacious proportions.
Before their tour stop at Braga’s gnration, we spoke with Pulice about playing nearly everything on their latest record, how their saxophone practice translates to the guitar, as well as the artistic scene and range of emotions provided by life in the Bay Area.
How has your relationship with the saxophone evolved over the years, and how have you grown as a musician through it?
I spent my teens and 20s playing in other people's bands and doing recording sessions for others, which was amazing and super fun. But at the end of that, I started getting interested in doing solo saxophone music. I was shifting from playing in horn sections to figuring out what it would be like to play a solo saxophone set. For a while, I was doing it without any electronics or anything, just acoustic. I was circular breathing and doing some extended technique stuff, and then I started messing around with signal processing. I still do a lot of solo saxophone performances with that, and that's really where I've settled and enjoy being.
Given how long you’ve refined your signal processing setup, how do you go about recording the saxophone overall, whether in its natural or processed state?
Most of my recordings of saxophone material are live. I'm doing the signal processing as I'm playing it, and not very often am I overdubbing any of it. With my most recent record [Land’s End Eternal], I did the guitar and then the saxophone stuff, or vice versa, but all the processing stuff is pretty much done live. I like to do it that way. It makes recording a little bit more difficult, because it's harder to balance the processing in the saxophone afterwards, and it all has to go right when you're doing it. I like to do everything as live as possible.
How have your live shows evolved over the years, in terms of setup, the way you perform the pieces, and the different forms they’ve taken (solo, duo, and with multiple guitarists)?
With Land’s End Eternal and this tour, it has been the first time I've had a band, which has been really fun but also a huge learning experience. I recorded all the guitar parts on the record, but I wouldn't call myself a guitar player either. I was mostly just having fun playing an instrument that I didn't have any experience with. It’s a totally new instrument for me, but it's one that I've loved for a long time. I have so much baggage with the saxophone from having played it for such a long time that doing some writing and improvising on an instrument that I wasn't trained in actually felt very playful. On the record, I was able to do multiple takes and redo things for all of the guitar parts, but for playing live, it's been amazing to have a guitar player with me. The person I'm playing with [Patrick Horigan] is a brilliant guitarist and is able to really bring the guitar parts to life and make them sing in a way that I just can't if I'm also playing saxophone. I can't do everything at once. In the States, I did some shows with three guitar players, kind of like a guitar choir, a chamber group almost. And then I did some beautiful shows that were composed of guitar, organ and voice, with someone just singing wordless melody lines alongside the saxophone. It's been fun to experiment with different live band setups in order to play this record live, after doing so much stuff with just a solo saxophone.
You mentioned just now that you play almost everything yourself on the record. What do you see as the pros and cons of doing so, in comparison to having people onstage to help you with bringing these songs to life?
With the compositions on Land’s End Eternal, I was really interested in these long melody lines that were sort of floating outside of a tempo. There's not a driving beat to the music itself, they're sort of blooming out in the open and it’s really special when it hits. Having multiple instruments – like saxophone and guitar, or sometimes saxophone, guitar and voice – playing these dreamy, out-of-time melody lines together is easier for me to do by myself, because I’ve internalized what the line is. It's easier for me to do those things together by myself, whereas getting other people involved takes a lot of time for them to internalize this sort of unmarked floating feel, with an almost alien, dream-like quality to it.
The story of what led you to discover and introduce the guitar for the first time in your music is well-known, but was it also a way for you to move towards something new after nailing what you wanted to on Scry and If I Don’t See You in the Future, I’ll See You in the Pasture?
I really felt like that was a capstone of the set of gestures that I was playing with beforehand, on both of those solo records. If I Don’t See You in the Future, I’ll See You in the Pasture is such a long piece, so dialed-in, the scope of it is narrow and precise in what it's doing. Moving past that, I wanted to do something completely different. Also, there's something with the pedal setup that I use with the guitar and saxophone that allows me to let loose. I often capture notes and let them ring out into infinity while I'm playing other stuff, creating these clusters of notes that are really close together and effectively turning the saxophone – which is generally a one-note-at-a-time instrument – into feeling more polyphonic. But when I started messing around with the guitar, that gesture of letting multiple notes ring out at once became so much easier to do. Guitars are kind of made to do that, so it honestly felt like an easy transition between the two. It was like scratching a playful, new itch for me.
Between you fully embracing the guitar and the whole album sounding vaster overall, how different was the recording process for Land’s End Eternal in comparison to your previous work?
Land's End Eternal felt more compositional, in the sense that the pieces were longer and more thoroughly composed than on Scry and my first solo record, Gloam. The recording process for those was more improvisational: a lot more studio experimenting, tinkering with gear, improvising, and then clipping out the moments that I felt had a little bit of magic, in order to retry them or explore where they could go. They felt more playful, electronic and improvisatory. And while Land's End Eternal still has a lot of improvisation on it, it felt more long-form and centered around chamber compositions.
This is your first record fully made in the Bay Area. Did that change in environment also influence this new direction?
I see place as something that always influences the work that's being made, even if it's indirect. The title of the record is taken from a place in San Francisco. It’s funny, that might lead one to believe that it's a really direct reference to it, but I actually feel like it's less exact and more gestural or impressionistic. Even though the title is a direct reference to that, I feel like the record itself is more about a set of feelings, even if my time in the Bay Area and acclimating to the art scene there has definitely influenced it.
Speaking of Bay Area artists, what was it like collaborating with Maria BC on “After the Rain”, and how does working with other incredible musicians – like Lynn Avery or the community choir – shape your creative process?
Hugely, collaboration is a central part of my creative process. Always has been, especially coming from a lot of improvised music backgrounds. It's very important for me to creatively work with other people, and Maria BC is one of my favorite singers and songwriters. I felt like the timbre of their voice was perfect for that piece, and I was also stoked to record on their record. I also want to mention Chuck Johnson, an amazing composer, sound artist, guitarist and pedal steel player who lives in the Bay and helped with mixing and mastering the record. But “After the Rain” is the one track on the record that has people playing other than myself, with a bunch of guitar and bass players, and those are mostly, if not all Bay Area people too. I grew up in Minneapolis, which is a very different part of the country where there are a lot of musicians I love, but it was fun to expand my network.
On the topic of “After the Rain”, how did that track evolve from being initially arranged for the Free Key Choir to becoming the first song you wrote for guitar?
Basically, I got asked by the Free Key Choir from the Bay Area to write a piece for them and that was it. I was still starting to play guitar and it was fun, but when adapting [“After the Rain”] to fit Land’s End Eternal, I didn't want the album version to sound the same. I wanted it to have its own life, and I feel like what ended up there has a bit more of a chamber jazz vibe. The arrangement is a little different: there's a brass choir on it, it's one voice instead of a hundred, and the vocals are more intertwined with the saxophone. There's a video somewhere online that has the Free Key tape with the choir version. I adore it as well, but I wanted them both to have their own spirit.
I also wanted to touch on “In This & Every Life”, where you use piano field recordings. What other everyday sounds do you feel match the album’s soundscape?
I feel like the album has what it needs from the standpoint of the everyday soundscape. On Scry, there are a bunch of field recordings I took while out in the woods, walking around my neighborhood or inside an industrial rehearsal building, but I approach them more like a collage. On Land’s End Eternal, the piano one felt like a really good fit, because that track includes this iPhone recording of me playing on a basically destroyed piano that I found outside a venue while I was on tour with a different band, waiting for soundcheck. A year later, I used that recording for “In This & Every Life”, but it basically transitions from the field recording to this hi-fi studio piano. The effect it creates reminded me of turning the dial on a radio, or waking up from a dream, and switching between those fidelities just felt like it created some sort of magical spark.
I like to end these interviews by asking what’s been on your radar lately, in terms of music, film, books or art in general. Are there any recent obsessions that have grabbed your attention?
There’s a favorite band of mine from the Bay called April Magazine. I saw them perform recently and it was incredible. There’s also this organist named Brendan Glasson, who just put out a tape called h i g h l a n d and it's fantastic.