Stuart Cook - Flower Blocks

Released: October 9

Flower Blocks is a rather peculiar album from both a musical and thematic perspective. For the theme, we are given a collection of pieces that ostensibly model the formation of a flower as a sort of metaphor or allegory. The idea that things are starting out quite small and gradually, after periods of stasis and growth, become fully fleshed out ideas. Or, a flower that grows and blooms gradually. To this end, the sonic qualities of the album convey this message well, even if the tones are sometimes jerky or dissonant. Each track on the album starts from a very small sound, one that gradually builds into what its true form is. To soldify this thematic use of sound, each song also plays into an overall narrative of the growth of a flower with titles such as “Dormancy,” “Radicle Emergence,” and “Falling Seed.” 

What stands out about this album in terms of its cohesion, is this sense of space in each track. It almost feels unreal, like a space that purports to be natural but also seemingly isolated from the real world. I find this comes through wonderfully on tracks like “Favorable Conditions.” There’s a jerky percussive tone here, one that has less a sense of natural rhythm and more a sensation of something trying to break free from inside a heavy box or shell of some type until it relents and the track morphs into the next action. “Imbibition” follows this up with soft droplet textures, implying the presence of water and a sense of sudden growth as the droplets increase in speed and intensity. This flower motif carries all the way to the final track “Falling Seed,” which shows us the logical end of this in the form of a twenty-four second track that swells quickly into its crescendo and fades away quickly, implying the end of this growth cycle and the dormant start of a new one. 

The album is wonderfully cohesive in theme, really tying all of it together beautifully over nine tracks. The sonic aspects are deeply experimental in nature, but maintain a air of plausibility and a tight adherence to the theme of growth and a sporadic event, happening in fits and starts rather than a smooth linear process. Both the theme and music are tightly intertwined in each track and as a whole album as well.