There are moments on Cole Pulice’s Land’s End Eternal where you might find yourself asking what, exactly, you’re listening to, and that’s by design. The saxophonist and composer has spent the better part of a decade cultivating a signal processing setup—expression pedals controlling pitch shifters, a sustain pedal for freeze effects—that allows them to push their primary instrument into uncanny territory: stacks of live saxophone that behave like synthesizers, glissandos that slide into the “in-between spaces” of notes, harmonies that feel at once organic and otherworldly. But on this, their first album fully recorded in the Bay Area since relocating from Minneapolis, and their first for LEAVING Records, Pulice introduces a new variable: the electric guitar.
The guitar arrived by happenstance. Collaborator Lynn Avery (Iceblink) left hers at Pulice’s house when she moved to New York, and Pulice—who doesn’t consider themself a guitarist—felt it “calling.” Picking it up absentmindedly, they discovered an instrument with “no baggage,” offering a “fresh perspective” at a moment of creative crossroads. After the Longform Editions piece If I Don’t See You in the Future, I’ll See You in the Pasture (2023), Pulice felt they had made “the most complete statement” of their previous sonic ideas. The guitar, along with deep dives into the Lovely Music catalog (Pauline Oliveros, Alvin Lucier, “Blue” Gene Tyranny) and quirky improv guitarists like Loren Connors and Daisuke Miyatani, provided an answer.
The resulting album finds Pulice playing nearly everything themselves—guitar and saxophone, with occasional piano and wind synth—while pursuing a specific feeling: music that is “out of time but really together,” floating as one unit in a way that feels “surreal or a little uncanny.” That quality is evident throughout, from the triptych “In a Hidden Nook Between Worlds”—whose core melody Pulice had played on sax for years before rediscovering it on guitar—to the gorgeous closer “After the Rain,” originally written for a choir and the first thing Pulice ever “really wrote on guitar.” The latter attempts to approximate the feeling of Bennie Maupin’s “Ensenada” (the opening track on the classic The Jewel in the Lotus), with a repetitive root figure and floating chords; here, Pulice is joined by a group of Bay Area guitarists, two brass players, and a vocalist, building to a stirring climax over nine minutes.
Throughout, Pulice’s enduring fascinations remain audible: tight harmonic clusters inherited from their years arranging for the nine-piece Afrobeat band Black Market Brass, now rendered even denser through expression pedal control; a love of the “minutia of spaces between the notes”; and a commitment to process that avoids the obvious crutch of looping pedals in favor of tools that “expand the expression” of what’s being played. The Yamaha WX5 wind synth, a late ‘80s rig Pulice learned about from a friend, adds further textural range, sending both audio and MIDI for a “kaleidoscopic use” of data and sound sources.
Land’s End Eternal arrives with impeccable West Coast credentials: mixed and mastered by Chuck Johnson, released on Matthewdavid’s LEAVING label, and steeped in the legacy of Mills College electroacoustic experimentation. But it’s also very much its own thing—a record about starting over with an unfamiliar instrument, about letting old melodies find new lives, about the creative potential of baggage-free play. For an artist who has spent years reworking the same core ideas, it feels like both a continuation and a departure: Pulice’s California guitar record, and something more. (Joseph Sannicandro)
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