Cobey Rokes, 2024, monochrome motif records
When I ask people about music they listen to, for the most part I get one of two answers. The first is that they listen to music from their teenage years or music that played during their teenage years from another era — music that if they listened to in a physical format would be worn to the point of oblivion. The second possible answer is that they listen to what they describe as soundtracks. They often encounter these soundtracks as part of the sonic landscape of the video games they play. They then detach the music from the video games and carry it around with them in their headphones. What once scored a video game now becomes the soundtrack to their life. It still surprises me to chat to a group of young people and learn that they spend a substantial part of each day listening to post-classical and orchestral music. It is within this growing landscape of post-classical music that composer Cobey Rokes released his latest album a place i’ve only seen in pictures, an album I’ve had on heavy rotation for the last few weeks.
In a place i’ve only seen in pictures, Cobey Rokes takes us on a journey he’s never been on through a sonic exploration of images from places he’s never visited, from lives he’s never lived. This concept seems fitting for a heavily image-based culture. Whether we realise it, we spend substantial time projecting ideas onto images we see. We attach importance and emotions to rectangular representations of other people’s lives — images that both amplify our desires and fill us with dread.
a place i’ve only seen in pictures demonstrates a dynamic compositional range. As Above So Below opens the album with the anticipation of the adventure that lies ahead while tracks like Nostalgia Hangs provide more self-reflective moments. The high spirits of A Glimpse into Our Past dissolve into a set of sonic questions that give rise to further questions in the repetitive patterns that define Reminding us of Days. It’s testament to Cobey Rokes’s compositional ability that Reminding us of Days manages to resolve this underlying darkness in such a satisfying manner. Tired Bones concludes the album with echoes of the initial promise of adventure that seems more informed by the experience of a life lived.
Cobey Rokes provides us with the sonic imprint of images without providing the images themselves, leaving us little choice but to go out into the world and project his soundscapes onto our own images. In doing so, a place i’ve only seen in pictures becomes intertwined with our own lives, lived and imagined.
You can grab a copy of a place I’ve only seen in pictures on Bandcamp.