Seth Cooke describes most of his practice as “filling noise with space”, adopting an accidental turn of phrase coined by his daughter. This side of his work attempts to say something useful about “place” by snookering himself via broadband noise, scavenged data, media artefacts, graph theory, or his flimsy strawman arguments about other artists. The other side of his work involves snookering himself in performance through bloody-minded rules-based adherence to feedback, resonance, routing or mathematical processes that he can barely control, if he can control them at all. Sometimes he escapes through luck, sometimes it’s all just excruciatingly high effort/low reward.
“I saw Seth Cooke play tonight and he did something I’ve been trying to capture for a while. Completely pure music that does one thing but that one thing does everything. Whole, super-nutritious music in one tone-stew.” – Matt Loveridge (MXLX, Knife Library, Gnar Hest, Fairhorns)
“… richly investigated, purposeful work looking into the sonic artifacts of the unresolved dissonances in constellations of history, politics, and media. Through his no-input field recording technique, Cooke brings into consideration the materiality of the inscription devices, a sort of sonic ghost hunting that rewards investigative listening.” – Derek Baron (Reading Group)
