FATHM

The age of the water, residence time, is the measurement of how long, on average, water stays in a lake. It is how long one has to be held by ghosts. It is to lay at the edge of a lake, the water gently lilting against and across half of the body, and be embraced by those in the history of that lake who have also done this, within the span of the water’s residence time. The residence time of water in Lake Michigan is 99 years.

TRACKLIST:

1. A thread held between your fingers - 4:50
2. Illinois - 5:41
3. To beget - 2:35
4. FAVN - 8:22

Every recording is a portal—we all know this truth. 
FATHM is a portal to a time before each action was measured. This portal marks days before a year-long freeze

There are bits of language, intimations towards feeling that I have retained, but their soul and my body are disentangled and something lays on the floor, something is moving cinderblocks, something is watching an early sun rise all orange all electric

This portal offers a transubstantiation of self into self, for a moment. A translation, a transference, a this that is also a that that I cannot touch and cannot hear.

Artist: Laura Cocks • Album: FATHM • Format: CD | LP | Digital • Release 2/21/25 • Labels: Relative Pitch / Out Of Your Head • Cat no.: RPRSS041 • EAN/UPC: 5904224873882

Recording Engineer: Joseph Branciforte at Greyfade Audio
Mixing Engineer: David Bird
Mastering Engineer: Murat Çolak
Album Art: Laura Cocks & TJ Huff
Liner Notes & Poetry: Shara Lunon

Special thanks to:
robert, ann, judy, david, gabby, adam, kevin, marina, madison, anoop
RELATIVE PITCH / OUT OF YOUR HEAD RECORDS

FATHM isn’t so much an album as it is a question—a pause in the middle of a conversation no one’s having, but everyone’s pretending to understand. It asks nothing of you, but demands your presence, your ear, your breath. The flute, a tender and fragile instrument, becomes almost otherworldly—like a butterfly in another dimension with teeth, or a marsh wren that screams only in windings. It speaks in fragmented thoughts, tracing edges of longing, absence, and memory. Each note emerges from a distant place and dissolves just as quickly. It’s both the sound and the space between it, the breath before it, and the quiet that follows.

Before each note, there’s a silence—a gap, a waiting room—like the universe is about to explain itself, but it’s just been put on hold. You can feel it, that space holding the possibility of everything and nothing, a breath that hasn’t yet exhaled. It lingers, like something on the tip of your tongue, familiar but unnamed. The flute doesn’t rush; it moves through the silence with patience, lingering in the void with an endurance that says, we can hold this forever if you want.

And then, the sound. But not in the way you might expect. These notes don’t land where you think they should. They drift, suspended in air like thoughts that float just out of reach. The space between the notes gives them meaning—what they leave behind, what they never quite say. You might listen for something known, but instead, you’re met with something softer, something almost too delicate to hold onto. In "To outstretch," you listen, but the listening itself feels like the point. The flute isn’t trying to be heard so much as trying to make you feel how you listen. It speaks in pieces of melodies, like memories slipping away—only you’re not sure you were supposed to remember anyway.

This isn’t music about loss. It’s music about absence, about the heavy gap where something used to be. Not everything can be filled, and some things shouldn’t be. The silence isn’t empty—it’s a presence, holding what the sound can’t. In “FAVN,” the flute breathes into this space, honoring what’s not there with a gentleness that feels almost like the rage in an apology that bites back. The silence is never an absence of sound, but a sound of its own, heavy and quiet, pressing itself into your ribs, into your heart.

The breath of the flute is its own kind of body, moving through time but refusing to be pinned down by it. FATHM doesn’t follow a narrative; it bends and stretches like it’s still figuring out what it wants to be. It moves through time like a wave through water—sometimes still, sometimes crashing—but always with the same patient pull. There’s release in that, a reminder that time, like sound, is fluid. It passes but never fully disappears. It finds new ways to exist, over and over.

And then, as quickly as it arrives, the sound is gone. The record ends not because it’s finished but because it’s unfurled into itself and can go no further. The silence that follows is heavy, like everything unsaid. Maybe it’s not about what you hear in the end, but what you’re left with—the feeling of the music as it lingers, breathing its last note into the air. There is no closure here, no neat resolution. There is only the pause, the breath, the stillness between.

This is music that asks you to stay—not just to listen, but to be in the space it creates. Let it unfold slowly. Let it breathe through you. And when it ends, let the silence find you. Let it hold you.

— Liner notes by Shara Lunon

Laura Cocks (they/she) is a flutist with “febrile instrumental prowess” (The New York Times), who works in a wide array of environments as a performer of experimental music and “creates intricate, spellbinding works that have a visceral physicality to them” (Foxy Digitalis).

Laura is the executive director and flutist of TAK ensemble, “one of the most prominent ensembles in the United States practicing truly experimental music” (I Care If You Listen), with whom Laura makes musics "that combine crystalline clarity with the disorienting turbulence of a sonic vortex” (WIRE Magazine). They are also a member of Talea Ensemble, noted for their “astonishing fluidity,” “compelling lucidity, ” and “precise control” (The New York Times).

As a soloist, improviser, and chamber musician, they have performed with musicians such as DoYeon Kim, Shara Lunon, Timothy Angulo, yuniya edi kwon, Luke Stewart, Wendy Eisenberg, Lester St. Louis, Brandon Lopez, Madison Greenstone, International Contemporary Ensemble, Sun Ra Arkestra, Wet Ink Ensemble, London Sinfonietta, and many others in NYC and abroad.

Their recent solo album, field anatomies (Carrier Records), noted as one of Stereogum’s top-ten experimental releases of the year, charted in the Billboard top ten “Classical Crossover” releases and was praised for its “superhuman physicality” and “disciplined patience” (Bandcamp Best Contemporary Release and Experimental Release). Laura can be heard on labels such as ECM, Denovali Records, Catalytic Sound, TAK editions, Tripticks Tapes, Carrier Records, Chambray Records, Double Whammy Whammy, New Focus Records, Sound American, Orange Mountain Music, Supertrain, Gold Bolus, Hideous Replica, Sideband Records, and many others.

My father had four dreams in his life, their contents too dear to me to share in writing. Except the one about the shore of a lake. This one I can share with you because we shared it with one another.

In the dream, he lays at the waters’ edge of a lake, the water gently lilts against and across half of his body. He is alone, the reeds and the grasses sway. It is a perfect day.

On days I don’t drive him, I am alone and I walk in forest preserves and along the lake, making infrequent conversation with other people looking for birds, for snakes, for solace. The most holy grounds are in Waukegan—the home of three superfund sites along the southwestern shore of Lake Michigan. I don’t swim in the municipal beach that abuts the sewage processing plant and power station—instead I walk along the shore until the lighthouse, turn north, and walk between the shaggy dunes and the lakefront until the forest hiding the power plant comes into view. Driftwood, reeds, one day three Bonaparte’s Gulls. Amble, feet in water, or sit on the sand, be alone, listen to the reeds, listen to the water, listen to the birds.
To sit at the edge of so much freshwater is a feeling of possibility. The Midwest: you can always see what lays ahead—the flatness requires a level change for shift and for possibility. The waters’ edge is all levels.
Each time at the shore alone, I long to lay at the waters’ edge, reeds at my head and feet, the fresh water gently lilting against and across half of my body.
Fear stops me and I have never done this.
It doesn’t seem right to do alone, and yet it can only be done alone. 

Some months into the regular pull of this temptation, I describe to my father how enveloped I am with longing to lay on my back at the waters’ edge, reeds at my head and feet, the fresh water gently lilting against and across half of my body. The walk past the lighthouse and shaggy dunes, that secret special area where the forest that hides the power plant comes into view, where there is some vague reservation in fear. 

It is then that he tells me his dream. 

I would write more about this but I cannot. I cannot make the words come out and if I could, I wouldn’t share them. 

It is then that he tells me his dream.