Louis Cole’s musical vision is endless.
Whether he’s splicing videos of himself playing different instruments on YouTube, splitting creative duties with fellow polymath Genevieve Artadi for their collaborative project KNOWER, or playing drums (his primary instrument) with the late jazz prodigy Austin Peralta, Cole never stops trying new things.
But his latest project is the most ambitious in his career. It’s an album he wrote for the legendary Dutch pop orchestra, Metropole Orkest, and despite it being his most complex and involved work yet, the album is simply entitled nothing.
“I like the concept of nothing. It’s cool, and it makes you think,” Cole says before describing a documentary he recently viewed wherein scientists theorise that eventually, the universe will literally become nothing. “The only light and energy in the universe will be black holes colliding, and then, after that, it’s an era of scattered photons. Then eventually those die out and it’s actually nothing. That’s fucking tight.”
Before that day comes in 20-30 billion years, Cole wants to experiment with his music as much as possible, making him a perfect match for the Metropole Orkest and Jules Buckley.
Buckley is the orchestra conductor on nothing, and he’s also brought pop styles to orchestral forums numerous times in the past. He was the conductor on Starship Syncopation, the joint album between the Metropole Orkest and the prominent Vulf-signed guitarist Cory Wong. Buckley was also the conductor when the legendary DJ and broadcaster, Pete Tong led his Ibiza Classics performance alongside London’s Heritage Orchestra.
So, when Buckley approached Cole to write music for a series of performances with Metropole Orkest, Cole “went hard.”
“I have so many ideas that have built up over my lifetime of things I’ve wanted to write for an orchestra. They all came out, and I tried to write as many ideas that I was inspired to,” Cole says. “You have to write based on volumes of people.”
With volumes of people at his disposal, Cole expanded his compositional style to lengths he had never ventured before. On the album’s opener, Ludovici Cole Est Frigus (which translates to “Louis Cole is cold” in Latin), Cole moves through over 30 different chord changes in less than three minutes of music.
Despite graduating with a degree in jazz studies from the University of Southern California, Cole willfully admits he is not well-versed in traditional music theory. When he was writing this piece, he envisioned the sound he wanted to create, and then, using the pencil tool in Logic Pro, he wrote every chord note by note.
If he was only working with guitar, bass, keys, and drums (as is common in his solo releases), so much aural motion may have sounded convoluted. But with over 50 musicians, including dozens of instruments and even choral singers in his arsenal, he kept the same feeling as different instruments played various melodies over, around, and through each other, creating new chords and keys as they combined and separated.
“I always thought you had to be a genius to write anything complex. But if you have a great process and a great musical vision, you can do anything, which is something I would have loved to have heard more when I was coming up,” Cole says. “I’m doing this thing that’s ‘over my head’ and outside my abilities with the theory and keyboard knowledge that I have. But because I have such a strong musical vision of the end feeling and sound, I just go through these tiny little steps, one little tiny brick at a time, and I’m able to achieve it.”
By relying on his vision rather than traditional music and production theory, Cole sustains his originality. One song, Doesn’t Matter, runs over 11 minutes, the longest piece of music Cole has ever composed. It transitions between several different moods, gradually building into foreboding swells of the full string section, then diminishing into moments when it’s only Cole’s voice gently humming as he’s surrounded by a light wash of reverb.
Another standout from the album is Things Will Fall Apart, which employs funk horns that are so groovy and dialled in that listeners may not realise there’s an orchestra behind Cole if they weren’t told. His drums and voice link together as the lead while the horns pop out of the 1970s funk era.
“It comes from a pure place: ‘I really think this is gonna sound cool, and this is something that I would like to hear myself,’” Cole says of his approach to writing for the orchestra. “This is what I’m interested in. This is a sound combination that I’ve never heard in this way, and I would love to have that exist.”
If it hadn’t been for the pandemic, nothing might have never existed outside the live space. The orchestra didn’t plan to record any of the official performances (that are some of Cole’s favourite performances ever). He actually asked his manager and a few friends to film the gigs with their phones just so he could have a record of it, but one of the performances in 2021 ended up being cancelled due to COVID-19, which allowed Cole to get the orchestra into an official studio.
His next challenge after that was mixing the album. Instead of passing it off to a mix engineer who specialised in mixing orchestras, Cole elected to do it himself, which, with over 50 musicians, was another new experience. Though it might seem like such a large undertaking would be the most difficult post-production process in his career, it made it easier for him because of one key element: human energy.
In the past when he would mix his solo albums, he sometimes felt something was missing from the recording—a nebulous feeling that couldn’t be sufficed with more volume or a special EQ. When he was mixing nothing, he didn’t need anything extra. Having the combined force of dozens of musicians gave him a surplus of authentic musicality to manipulate in line with his vision.
“The sound and the human energy. The tiny little mistakes and the tiny interpretations. The air and the music. All the humans working together. It never needed an extra magical push. This is exactly what it’s supposed to sound like, I just needed to get it there. That made it active and made the mixing very pleasant and doable,” Cole says.
Cole will perform nothing with the Metropole Orkest for a series of dates throughout Europe in November and December, but in the interim, he’s been writing more music for large ensembles. Specifically choral music. He wrote original works for a 40-person choir that performed at the First Congregational Church of Los Angeles in August.
Cole’s musical vision transcends any kind of ensemble or sound. Whatever he decides to write is a precise extension of his taste.
“If people actually followed that more, music would be a lot better than it is,” Cole says. “It’s purely what I’m excited about and what I’m excited to hear. That’s the main motivation behind it all. On top of that. It’s fun to have different sounds and different things to try. I would love to try this thing that maybe doesn’t exist.”
At first, everything doesn’t exist. It all comes from nothing. But that’s where Louis Cole and his musical vision come into play.
