Copula

The debut album by this short-lived New Zealand quartet is engagingly tentative at points, remarkably confident at others. Sarah Stephenson, Adria Morgan, Kim Pieters and Andre Richardson are perched here on the very edge of structure, balancing on a knife’s-edge; it’s thrilling to hear how they respond to one another across these six improvisations. There’s a low-fidelity murkiness to some of the performances – see the blurred contours of “We May Say ‘That’s Not It And Still That’s Not It’”, where the guitar and bass creep like fungi, or scuttle like crabs across sand; the opener, “Socrates Was Dreaming, And Many Centuries Later Hegel Is Dreaming Too” strands Pieters’s languorous sighs across an oil-slick of slowly morphing organ drone. It’s a private, inward-looking music, of esoterica and spirit, but also very much the result of people interacting in a room, an everyday kind of engagement, made mysterious by the obscuring effects of the recording device.