Anastasia Coope Communicates Her Influences and Ambitions on the Daring and Spacial Darning Woman

You could argue that devotion has always driven the urge to create music—or maybe even create any kind of art—dating back to its earliest forms. Even in a time prior to polyphony, creativity’s nature is such that people will want to indulge the urge to reflect through the medium that most closely brushes heaven. Even when a deity’s grace or attention drove all societal reason or meaning, music was still self-actualization, an assertion of who you are to those around you in hopes you’ll see yourself in that which you’re devoted to. Even love songs reflect a hope for the highest self to be revealed, capturing the essence of a connection and hoping that memorializing it through repetition and tone will render it holy. A teenager making beats on their laptop might (arguably) still be working in the lineage of a personalized mantra crafted to express your faith in hopes of being saved.

When New York-based multidisciplinary artist Anastasia Coope notes that the recording of her debut record, Darning Woman, marks the time where she “start[ed] to think spatially about music,” everything about said record is suddenly heightened for the acute listener—because that awareness of space makes the record. The 21-year-old may not specifically be singing about a higher power, but her command over repetition—that basic marker of devotional song—and her commitment to building atmosphere creates something that exists out of time. The record clocks in at a slight 22 minutes, with only about half of the tracks exceeding the two-minute mark, but it comes off as a charmingly homemade song cycle, more interested in perpetuating a potent sense of environment than it is in verse-chorus-verse structure. Though it’s indebted to both left-field folk and expressive avant-garde vocalists (Brigitte Fontaine, who Coope cites as an influence, comes to mind immediately on first listen), it feels like it works just as much in the realm of true traditional folk music—not of the singer-songwriter variety, but that which catalogs literal folklore.

Maybe this is communicated most clearly through the album’s central character (possibly a titular one): a woman maker, a woman seemingly bound to her hearth as war rages around her. Of course, this concept alone feels plucked out of another time. Still, through a modern lens, the folklore surrounding this impressionistic sketch of a woman’s form feels it relies more on strength of character than on dutifully completing household chores. Listening to the title track, a sing-song hymn where Coope calls the woman her own, it arrives as an ode to someone stubborn enough to maintain their chosen shape, mending her world together with loose thread. The vision of this person weaves in and out of the audible depths which Coope’s music plumbs, moving like a shadowy figure we admire but dare not cross.

Even if you don’t want to read that deeply into Coope’s process or potential motives, the thing about the album which will hold your attention long after its end is the artist’s sonic palette, built around airy, minimal instrumentation—mostly acoustic guitar, sparingly used piano—dominated by layers and layers of voices. Often, those said voices are, in fact, the only sound on a given track, tying all elements of melody, harmony, rhythm and even percussion together artfully without ever dipping into hyper-arranged, a cappella group territory. It works so well in large part because Coope has such a distinct voice that also feels malleable, letting herself fill any empty role in the grand vocal arrangements—growling a bassline as often as she luxuriates in dense, angelic harmonies.

The most expansive version of Coope’s vision comes early with the record’s first single and opening track, “He is on His Way Home, We Don’t Live Together,” which sets the template for how most of the other songs that follow are patterned: introducing a central melody line before stretching and mutating it. Repeating the title phrase—of which most of the lyrics comprise—Coope pairs a dainty, childlike chant with rippling vocal backing, sighing vowels as rudimentary piano follows the former up the scale. It stands as a singular moment for featuring any prominent percussion at all, but when said percussion arrives, it announces itself with a chaotic clatter of tambourines disrupting a choir of near-yodeling voices. Instantly immersive and sprawling without apology, it opens a window to a future where Coope could, if she wanted to, make a more aggressive racket without ever sounding like she’s lost control.