FATHM by Laura Cocks

CDs via Relative Pitch: https://relativepitchrecords.bandcamp.com/album/fathm

Walking the lake
Half alone, half with him,
Fathom sinking into the water,
Into the dreams of bodies.
Voice soft like soaked soil
That hangs on the lips of waves.
A compass gone quiet,
Unable to trace shorelines
Unable to move.

[full poem by Shara Lunon included as PDF with purchase]

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.

--Shara Lunon

Laura Cocks is a flutist who works in a wide array of environments as a performer of creative and experimental musics & “creates intricate, spellbinding works that have a visceral physicality to them.”
Laura is the executive director and flutist of TAK ensemble and performs regularly with several ensembles and as a soloist in NYC and abroad.

lauracocks.biz