#laura cocks

06.30.24 20th annual performance in Terry Riley's In C, performed by NYC In C.

Photo by Clayton Harley

BY JORDAN MAINZER

With his upcoming album Promise, Michael Beharie has made his most accessible music to date, though his influences remain as wide-ranging as ever. In 2018, the improviser and composer (and current member of Zs) was in the middle of a swath of experimental, noise-based projects when he decided he wanted to also do something basic: write songs. What resulted was a song cycle broadly about ideas of place and memory, a collection of gentle tunes that contrast the harshness of what he’s known for. 

On Promise, Beharie imbues songs like “Red”, “Silo”, and “Eclipse” with circular guitar fingerpicking, resulting in lilting, expansive folk tunes. He brought on friends like drummers Greg Fox (also of Zs), Noah Hecht, and Matt Mehlan and bassist Gui Duvignau, but the most involved collaborators were vocalist Charlotte Mundy and flutist Laura Cocks. Mundy doesn’t sing any lyrics; in fact, her atmospheric melodies and harmonies are really only noticeable on "Red”. For the most part, she gives the songs an unheralded sense of warmth and depth. Cocks, meanwhile, plays flute on songs that couldn’t be more different, like heartland 808s jams “Ghost” and “For Days” and the Renaissance-era sounding “Thakur”. On all of these songs, Beharie references his lifelong affection for North Indian Bansuri flute playing, even on the two stadium-sized rockers. “The North Indian classical tradition is really rule-based,” he told me over the phone earlier this month. “I’m not implying the note to note techniques of that music. But I wanted to make parts that reminded me of the way those flute players play.” Whether meshing disparate genres or juxtaposing organic and digital sounds, Beharie thrives on contrast, the ultimate evidence of Promise’s appeal.

Promise comes out April 8th. Earlier this month at Union Pool in Brooklyn, Beharie played his first show of the album’s songs, with a quartet: Beharie on acoustic guitar and vocals, Fox on drums, Grey McMurray on electric guitar, and Jason McMahon on bass. Expect announcements of more shows throughout the year, and read our conversation below, edited for length in clarity.

Photo by Lauryn Siegel

Since I Left You: What inspired you to make a song cycle about place and memory?

Michael Beharie: In 2018, I was doing a lot of touring with more noise-based groups, playing mainly abstract, improvised music. Aside from those activities, I was just making songs as a counterbalance to all of the noise stuff. I had been working ever since 2017 on a collection of these songs that are more internally facing and delicate. That was the main reason that I wanted to hone in on and pursue the song cycle idea, just to do something radically different from what I was involved in in a somewhat public way.

SILY: How did you approach the sequencing of the songs?

MB: I had about 80 ideas in 2018. Then I laid them out and wanted to try to create a story with some hills and valleys in it. Most of the material is pretty restrained other than “Ghost” and “For Days”. I wanted to feature [Laura Cocks,] the flute player, and the woman who did additional vocals, Charlotte Mundy, in the middle of it, with “Thakur”. But I had the sequence set pretty early in the process when all of the songs were in demo forms.

SILY: On a couple of the songs, you combine natural noise and digital noise. Are you trying to point out the differences between those types of noise or posit that they’re one and the same and question the distinction between the two?

MB: I find it kind of psychedelic to be in a totally organic world and all of a sudden have a very distinct digital sound come through. I think it contextualizes the organic stuff in a new way, and it contextualizes the digital. I love radically electroacoustic music where folks do that. Because I was taking the time to record so many organic sounds for this, I thought it would be really special and important to carefully have some digital elements in there.

SILY: How did you go about balancing your voice with Charlotte’s?

MB: I definitely didn’t want to write her anything with words. That was a big thing. But I also didn’t want to set her voice in a backup vocal kind of way. I wanted it to be really special and dreamy. I took two weeks making MIDI parts in Ableton with fake voice sets and treating the vocal readings of her parts as almost a synth, if that makes sense, rather than a straight-up melodic countermelody. The approach made particular sense for her voice because she can really do the Morton Feldman-esque straight tone with no vibrato. It’s very Anglican church sounding, in a way.

I think the only actual melody that she sings is on the first track on the record, “Red”. Other than that, all of her parts are real versions of voice synth pads, like an 80s Fairlight [CMI] synth.

SILY: A couple of the songs on here you’ve called your rock songs, “Ghost” and “For Days”. Can you talk about them in context of the record and the music you make in general? How new of a thing is it for you?

MB: It’s not really new in terms of daily experience over the past 14 years. It’s new in terms of putting out music. More outward-facing songs like “Ghost” and “For Days” I had been playing out and releasing but in very electronic forms. This is definitely the first time there’s more folk rock instrumentation. “Ghost” is a funny one because it’s definitely the most nostalgic sounding on there. It’s very much inspired by alt pop radio that I would listen to growing up in D.C. I just thought it would be important to have that more outward-facing energy to make the inward, more folky stuff resonate. 

SILY: Then there’s a song like “Thakur” that’s almost Renaissance-era.

MB: [laughs] Totally.

SILY: It, equally, makes the folky tunes stand out.

MB: Awesome. I love that.

SILY: What’s the meaning to you of Promise as a title?

MB: I don’t have a super clear thought about it, but I love the idea of “promise” in its usage of “I promise I will such and such.” I also love it as in, “This thing has promise.” One of the ideas behind the record was that I’m not trying to do anything cutting edge or dark, which is so much different from what I had been releasing. I felt that word, optimistic but not in any specific way, was appropriate for the vibe.

SILY: What’s the story behind the cover art?

MB: The cover art was made from an imaging of nematic crystals. It’s a riff off of the way liquid crystals look. They have this characteristic of being translucent and reflecting light the way crystals do when you look at them from certain angles. It just seemed like a nice bright and multi-hued paring with the music.

SILY: How was the show you just played? Was it your first time playing these songs live?

MB: Yeah, it was our first show. We had so much fun. We had rehearsed 5 or 6 times and had been going pretty hard trying to reimagine the songs in a slightly more rock way and giving time for intros and outros to bloom. We’re planning on doing more shows and bringing in different woodwind players and singers, but at the moment, we just have the core of the band really strong. It felt great to play live again. I hadn’t played a show since before the pandemic, so it was nice to come back to life a little bit.

SILY: How was adapting the songs to this set of musicians and instruments?

MB: Extremely easy and fun. I made pretty detailed charts of every part in the songs in score fashion, but as soon as we started playing, the riffs we needed to have from the record were so easy, everyone picked them up by ear. These musicians are used to playing much more complex music, and this is really basic for them, so it ended up being a really natural process to set them for a rock band. I’m really looking forward to recording the live versions. I want to do a live EP of at least 5 of the songs with the new arrangements.

SILY: What else is next for you?

MB: I wanna do a follow up to the record I made with the cellist [Teddy Rankin-Parker], A Heart From Your Shadow, which was released in 2018.

SILY: I was just listening to that before we started talking!

MB: Oh, nice. I wanna do a follow up to that record, and I want to do another song cycle with drum machine instead of acoustic drumming and oboe and bassoon and bass clarinet instead of flutes. I’m working on that right now.

SILY: Anything you’ve been listening to, watching, or reading lately that’s caught your attention?

MB: Such a good question. It’s strange, but I’ve been listening to mostly Greek bouzouki music. I’m obsessed with this one song “Oles Oi Daphnes” by Evgenia Verra. I kind of want to cover it with the band. I've been trying to learn how to play these bouzouki parts on the guitar.