Review: Alison Cotton ‘Engelchen’
It’s like a thunderstorm slowly rolling in, the way Alison Cotton’s Engelchen begins. A rush of wind, then the droning harmonies like pitched thunder reverberating through the walls as you look out the window of some isolated stone cottage by the sea where you’ve come to rest, or escape, or try to exist. When the ringing gong begins, it’s those raindrops hitting the glass of the window, or the sound of the sky cracking open.
Alison’s voice breaks in, adding to the feeling of a deep reverie this song has pulled you into. Then a wailing, scraping of metal, like the rising of that sea you also watch out the window, before Alison’s voice again swirls throughout, her wordless singing plaintive, full of some sorrow, a longing, but as inscrutable as that sea. There’s an interlude near the middle of the song’s nineteen-plus minute mark where a snare set to a marching tempo takes over for a moment, but somehow this too sits perfectly and says so much wordlessly.
As I listen, I’m overwhelmed with how masterfully the song holds its shape while continuously morphing in subtle, repeating ways. It’s alive with a shimmering, haunting beauty that some of us chase after in our music, myself included. But it is an elusive sound, and though you follow it, you don’t always manage to get even a hint. Here, Alison has not only heard it clearly, she’s also transported it back here for us to marvel at, this sound that seems to come from elsewhere.
When the cries of gulls and the crashing of waves move through the song as it nears its ending, those initial visions it brought of a seashore and rolling waves, some kind of weary sorrow and longing seem confirmed. The sound of her voice at the end changes slightly, and there’s almost a hint of farewell, or of resignation.
This first piece, We Were Smuggling People’s Lives, traces the journey of the album’s inspirations: Ida and Louise Cook. These two sisters used their love of music to secure escape from Nazi-occupied Europe for twenty-nine people, a feat they achieved through their own resourcefulness and, as Ida put it, by ‘refuse[ing] to take no for an answer’.
The pair traveled around Europe to see their favorite sopranos and conductors, all the while making the connections that helped them to save the lives of the Jewish people they worked with. This title track comes from their role as smugglers of people’s belongings, things they couldn’t take with them as refugees. Dressed in the bare minimum and carrying empty bags, the sisters entered Europe with nothing and returned with everything they could carry for those they helped escape. Their story is the stuff of legend.
It’s alive with a shimmering, haunting beauty that some of us chase after in our music…
The rest of the album similarly focuses on aspects of the sister’s activity and is equally haunting, giving the impression that the music is not just about the music itself, as for Ida and Louise, it is something more. This collection of songs is a ritual, a hymn. The album as a whole can also be thought of as something of a recreation of the Cook sister’s lives and work.
A story told through song, just as it is done in the operas they loved and which aided their critically important efforts to save lives. And we see in that recreation both joy and sorrow. Joy comes in the form of Crépuscule, a beautiful version of an aria beloved by the sisters, or in Dolphin Square, a song located in and describing the London flat the refugees arrived at. Their first stop out of harm’s way.
The sorrowing tones of The Letter Burning, which comes at the album’s midpoint, remind us that even these women who took daring risks, saved lives, brought relief and gave safety to many, still felt they could not do enough. The title is drawn from Louis’s burning of a large portion of the correspondence around their efforts to save lives.
While no record remains to tell us why she made the choice to burn these letters, some have considered it an act borne of remorse and regret for all those they could not save. Lives lost, futures unwoven. Despite their achievements, all that could not be done still haunted Louise. The tense strings, the droning atmosphere, Alison’s voice is a solo cry and simultaneously a chorused wash of sound reflecting that loss, regret, that haunting by a never-will-be future.
The album as a whole is haunting, a ghost of the lives of two sisters who did all they could to save the lives of others singing to us from across decades. Their efforts and the reasons for them still resonate today. The spectres of the socio-political moment they operated in seem ever-present in our current world. The kind of care and unassuming fierceness they embodied is just as necessary now as then.
Englechen reminds us of these things, looking back to the past while reverberating through the present, linking the two like a shining thread. We would do well to listen.
Label: Rocket Recordings
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Scribed by: Amanda Votta
