Title: A Concrete Pasture
Artist: Coen Oscar Polack
Label: Moving Furniture Records
Genre: Ambient, Experimental
Catalog number: MFR107
Format: 12″
Condition: Media: Near Mint / Sleeve: Near Mint

A Concrete Pasture by Coen Oscar Polack is the follow-up to Haarlemmerhout (2020), an album named after a park close to his home in Haarlem in the Netherlands. A Concrete Pasture brings Polacks interest in exploring the larger world around him back into his music. Polack is a magician in combining field recordings from all over the world, be it a temple in Bangkok, the Dutch Wadden Islands or a the percussive Gamelan instruments, and electronic processing of these recordings. With all these ingredients he creates a vivid, nostalgic, futuristic but familiar world of sounds and emotions.

At first, the colors of the recordings seem scattered, the sounds unrelated, but there is a deeper train of thought running through the music. It is the persistent impression of a travelogue; of places, family and friends, helping Polack in co-creating his music. In Cuore Nero, nostalgic powerchords are composed into tapestries of ambient-noise, Unseen Shores uses a recomposed recording of Polacks children on the Dutch island of Schiermonnikoog and develops into visceral, almost spiritual music, and a field recording of Wat Po in Bangkok in Phra Buddhasaiyas becomes a luminous homage that the incorporated guitar sound burns into your skull.

While listening, it becomes evident that Polack is being reflective in auditive images and memory, giving a meaning to a music that is liberated of its formalities and charged with a poignant imagery by transformation, one that is bright and lucid and respects the process from recording until ornamentation.

The longest piece of the album Kraaiennest, starts with the recording of a Hong Kong traffic light, later to be cut up and transformed into a technoid Musique Concrte piece, with a slow progression into a warm crescendo-decrescendo themed electroacoustic piece, which takes on a life on its own. The finale is Polack on this tenor saxophone putting a stamp on the completion of his work, a performance reminiscing of the raw expressiveness of Albert Ayler.

A Concrete Pasture points to a landscape, or to a persons current situation in life. Coen Oscar Polack did himself justice by writing an elegant, vibrant album, a tribute to his reflection of reality, his aesthetics, and with raw authenticity and skill, leaving a great space for the audiences imagination.

A Concrete Pasture by Coen Oscar Polack