Dame Cook is a self-described “electroacoustic sound demon girl thing” that lurks in the dark, nether-reaches of Toronto’s experimental music scene. If you press your ear to the ground, you can hear her emitting frequencies that gurgle, ooze, creak and sigh as they flow through layers of the earth’s crust. On “Isle of Gold,” we drift along with Dame through ebbing waters, cornfields and forest canopies.
This synthesized nature walk is formulated through collage and superimposition. Field recordings parse ringing synth tones that rise and fall like leaves drifting along a waterfront breeze. Pastoral wonder is presented in digitized fragments, a sign of technological impingement on biophysical environments. The “return to nature” that was once so idealized by the transcendentalists of olde is no longer possible.
On “Isle of Gold,” Dame Cook immerses us in an environment that is at once ‘real’ and not real. Although it bears a semblance of tangibility, our attempts to engage and make sense of it ultimately fail. We find that our perception of the natural world has been corrupted and it slips away from us in a series of zeroes and ones.
“Isle of Gold” is part of an album of the same name that came about as a “reaction to the climate change crisis and the impact of technology on the environment.” Dame Cook is self-releasing the album which you can now download here.