Anastasia Coope is in Command

For most of her life, music did not appeal to Anastasia Coope in any significant way. “I very unseriously did chorus when I was in grade school and maybe middle school. I was never musical,” says the 21-year-old Brooklyn artist. She furthers the sentiment again later in our conversation, stating that she was “interested in the stuff that my parents would play for me but from [ages] 10 to 15-16, I had a real lull in it. It really wasn’t something I was thinking about.”

Instead, Coope was more drawn to visual art as a toddler at a Montessori preschool, where she was encouraged to channel her emotions through a variety of collages, paintings and drawings. “I think that has always been my most tactical mode of expression or documentation for myself. I think once I started marking music, it felt like there was a large landscape of stuff that had been left undiscovered that doesn’t feel possible in painting,” she explains. “I think I’m a very fast, informational painter. I like getting information on a canvas and just leaving it. I’m quite unprescious as a painter. I think that recorded music, even just visually like the way that stems stack and information is stored on the screen, it feels like there’s room for a lot more precision and actual time spent. So maybe time is the biggest thing. Painting is very fast to me but recording music is much more geometric or celestial. It can be more ever-expanding than painting can be.”

When Coope received a laptop from her parents in preparation for college, it awakened an idea resting in her subconscious: “What would happen if I tried to record music?” She immediately began experimenting with the process, equipped with only GarageBand and a sense of fresh curiosity. “Very immediately, even before my interest in other people’s music was invigorated, my interest in my own music [was invigorated],” she says. “It was the genesis. I was really struck by how immediate it was and it felt like the most immediate click, but that’s sort of a boring word to use. It felt like the most immediate thing that had happened maybe in my life.”

She proceeded to sculpt an untraditional path in music for a novice musician, guided by the individual expression she found within the malleable art-form rather than from the influence of any specific musician or genre. At the time of writing and recording her debut album, Darning Woman, Coope was venturing into the sounds of avant-garde music and psychedelia with artists such as Charles Ives, Broadcast and Trish Keenan. However, Coope affirms that she drew the most significant inspiration from interviews with artists rather than the music itself, stating that she was “encyclopedic-ly tackling my version of music history, at least what sort of interested me because it was COVID so I was alone. I had a real moment with interviews, like people’s interviews so literally any band or musician or composer that I was even semi-interested in. I was scouring the internet on like the 20th page to find these interviews. I wasn’t reading any books or anything, but I was just reading and listening to a lot of interviews.”

Coope rummaged through the internet for conversations with musicians that resonated with her, poring over Amoeba’s “What’s in my Bag?” video series and interviews with artists like Floating Points and Laetitia Sadier. “I didn’t feel like I was utilizing people’s approaches to music as much as their approaches to thinking about stuff,” she continues. “The influences feel more deeply rooted in ideology than music.” Her conflicting identity as a New Yorker of the upstate variety and a born native to the city informed many of her early notions of artistry and creativity. She was born on 68th street in Manhattan and grew up in Cold Spring, a quaint village nestled along the Hudson River a little over an hour outside of the city. The distinctions between the two linger in her mind more often nowadays since she moved to Brooklyn several years ago.

“My parents both always worked in the city and my grandparents and the rest of my family live in Westchester closer to the city. So I always felt like I was going between the two,” she explains. “As a young kid, I was always projecting any creative idea I had onto the city, and then whenever I would go I would just be very excited to be somewhere metropolitan but I’m very glad that I grew up with expanses of green, I do miss that. By the time I was 15, I never wanted to be upstate. I always wanted to be in the city, so I spent most of my time near Union Square and Gramercy.”

Coope wrote and recorded Darning Woman throughout New York, alternating between residing at her uncle’s house in Beacon on weekdays and staying at her parents’ house in Cold Spring on the weekends. Several of the tracks were also written later on in her first apartment in Brooklyn. The enclosed, cozy environment of these familial spaces gave Coope the space to fully commit to her improvisational and uninhibited methods of songwriting.

“It was a process that I pretty much used for every song. So, most of the time what I would do was I would open GarageBand [and] hit record with no song written and then play out one and a half to three minutes and I would make a song up as I went along,” Coope says. “Obviously, I would just do hundreds of these and two out of every 50 would be good but I would immediately know once it had ended if it was workable. At the time, it was really important for me to have the genesis of the songwriting exist in the recording so under all the hundreds of vocal layers there’s the moment that I wrote the song. I kind of stumble through it but then all of those extra milliseconds where I’m trying to think of the next word to say become vital to the type of structure that the song has. All the hiccups become something that I need to work through with composing over it.”

As Coope experimented with her methods of songwriting, she found herself searching for words to inspire her own vision for the album. She was particularly struck by the word “darning” as she stumbled upon it during her search. “When I was in the process of making all of my first recordings, I was doing a lot of word hunting,” Coope recalls. “So, I was really keeping track of all the words that I was coming into that were like coming into my daily life. I was really listening to what people were saying, I was reading books just to find words that I liked because I always just like to have a list of words for when I’m writing songs and I guess that darning was one that came up. That was one that I feel like I thought I made it up or something like I was not thinking about like darning a sock or something. I was thinking about the word “darn.” “Darning” just felt more like a wheel turning or something as a word, like some sort of marching forward in daily life.”

“I feel like sometimes my titles are going off into the distance and just don’t feel super tangible but Darning Woman felt very austere and professional as a title,” Coope continues. Her songwriting process found strength within the limitations of her rudimentary equipment. “I recorded it so badly. I literally did not use anything except for my laptop and my guitar. I didn’t even use a microphone. I thought it was all very cool until I wanted to finish the record and then I was like, ‘This really sounds awful at points,’” she continues. “I mixed it with Jeff Zeigler in his studio and what we did was we ran all of the MacBook laptop mic recordings through various pieces of equipment and then it sort of physicalized the sound a little bit and then it got mastered. It was kind of like salvaging [but] it wasn’t a salvaging process. My original mixes do sound very similar. I have a microphone now, luckily, and that sounds a lot better.”

When listening to Darning Woman, it becomes apparent that Coope’s command and direction of the album parallels that of seasoned musicians. The record is saturated with bright, haunting cacophonies of rich psychedelic sound. Spacious, echoing chambers of layered droning vocals float and swirl above sparse instrumentation, as she imagines the far-away struggles of “old princess movies” and “a posh woman” while she sings—detaching herself from the grounds of reality and channeling the fantastical.

Individual threads of vocals and instrumentals bleed into one another, melding into massive and vibrant mirages of noise. Coope’s voice is multifaceted and striking, shifting from feathery, elongated drifts to sharp, percussive deliveries. It’s quaint and unsettling all at once. A wistful, underlying sorrow is woven into the sound, rooting the whimsical arrangements in a tangible sense of unease. There’s a miraculous quality to Darning Woman as a debut album. It’s rare to come across an introduction that so brazenly asserts itself. Anastasia Coope’s fearless, unfettered experimentation is singular and vital.