Well, I have to say it again, I love YouTube. Once again I find a new artist, to add to others I’ve discovered there, such as the brilliant Vulfpeck and, going back a bit further, the interesting antipodean King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard.
The last of these – KG&tLW – was a refreshing blast of young prog strangeness, a little off my usual map, but overlapping in areas (odd time signatures, some stuff leaning towards the jazzy/funky or even folky spectrum), whilst Vulfpeck (and Jack Stratton, Theo Katzmann and the Fearless Flyers, etc.) were gobsmackingly poifeck for me.
Louis Cole is somewhere between these two, in that his output is quite prolific, and kind of balanced between Knower, a duo/band project with singer Genevieve Artadi and others, and his own eponymously titled output.
The stuff he does with Knower is very interesting, and most often also very good. But like KG&tLW, it’s a bit off my usual musical map. And, like the proggers from Down Under, that’s partly due to youthful exuberance. Knower has a level of intensity – I find their video-songs more enjoyable than the many live performances that are online – I find wearying!
You might say, ah, you sorry ol’ duffer. But, truth be told, I’ve always preferred the mellower thide of sings, even though I do like everything from Coltrane’s Interstellar Space to Slayer or some Meshuggah. And I love intense funk and rock, prog, folk, etc. It’s not intensity per se, it’s the particular qualities, or specifics of how it’s done in any given instance.
So, Knower aren’t always my cup o’ tea. But Louis Cole? Now that’s another matter! I love Vulfpeck and Jack Stratton. I really love ’em! But Louis Cole is somethin’ else. For starters, he’s a phenomenal drummer. And as a drummer I love that. Actually both Jack Stratton and Theo Katzmann (no to mention the many guest drummers they’ve had, which includes Louis Cole as it happens) are superb drummers. But LC is at an altogether ‘nother level.
There’s a drummer that used to live local to me, Ric (Byers?), who does stuff under the 05Ric moniker with Gavin Harrison. Any knowledgeable drummer will know Harrison is choptastically mind-boggling. But I actually prefer Ric’s ‘chaos jazz’ drumming style, over Gav’s metronomically polished super-clean super-tight style.
Louis Cole, on the other hand, can do everything from tight simple minimalist drumming to clattering jungle or chaotic jazz, and has that kind of bubbling polyrhythmic intensity that conjures all sorts of potential influences, from Tony Williams and Rashied Ali to Mike Clark, or possibly even Jake Leibezeit, or Dave Garibaldi?
Funnily enough (funkily enough?), however, it was only after I’d listened to him quite a lot that I realised how great a drummer he is. This was partly because several of the times I first encountered him found him playing with other folk (e.g. sitting in with Vulfpeck), or not drumming, but singing, playing keys, etc. (e.g. the monstrously magnificent Thinking Live Sesh, on which Nate Wood is drumming).
But even just seeing him pumping out the groove to Vulfpeck’s It Gets Funkier made it very obvious there was something different and special about him: looking like he’d just got out of bed, and still had on his jammy’s, he plays a deceptively intense funk groove open-handed – left hand on hi-hat, right hand on the snare – and looks like he’s in a world of his own.
And that last observation kind of captures the essence of LC: he really is in a world of his own. A musical one-man-band world of his own making. And it’s a beautiful world. It really is. Cole looks much more comfortable multitracking and multivideoing himself on YouTube than he does in most his collaborations (Knower excepted). As he says in an excellent talk he gave [where? Link?], when it comes to his own music, he’s a bit of a control freak, he knows what he’s aiming for, and he’s the best placed to realise his own audio and and visual visions.
I think he’s been putting stuff out, mainly/mostly via YouTube, for about a decade now. The vast majority of it is simply sublime. And even the stuff I’m less keen on (and there’s actually very little of that) is both very interesting in itself, and… well, I could blather on. Just check it out yourself.
His earlier material is slightly more lo-fi, not unexpectedly, seeing as he’s learning on the job as an online content creator. But it’s also more varied and eclectic. Some is downright weird, whilst other stuff can be quite ‘sweet’, it’s all both very good and very interesting. It’s still early days for me, in terms of exploring his complete back-catalogue, but at present my favourite of his earlier material is Below The Valleys:
That was a more recent discovery for me. The stuff I’ve been mostly diggin’ on is more recent, i.e. within the last year, and includes all of the following: Blimp, Weird Part Of The Night, Things, Sometimes, Thinking, Phone, Drive, blah…
So, not only is he a brilliant drummer, but he’s a superb singer – those high notes in Sometimes! – a sublime songwriter (and mixer/producer, etc.), an excellent keys player, and a dab hand on sundry other instruments, such as guitar, percussion, and so on. And as if all that wasn’t enough, he’s witty, edits/directs fantastic videos, and looks like (and appears to be) an incredibly cool cat! Damn!!
But whereas all this talent might make one nauseous, envious, deflated, or all three, Cole’s music, indeed his whole vibe, is so beautiful, so joyous, that many (clearly, from the comments on his YouTube videos), myself included, are utterly seduced and charmed, captivated and inspired, by his creative output.
I’m a bit of an occasional one man band myself. And I’ve got a fairly huge back-catalogue of music languishing on hard drives. The blissful intensity of experiencing the sound worlds of Louis Cole is making me wonder if perhaps I should pick up my own musical threads, and put it all out there.