In at All Night Flight!
“Top tier cardigan-core from NYC amateur classical chamber music ensemble Cop Tears (the trio comprised of Reading Group label head Derek Baron alongside John Andrew Wilhite and Cameron Kapoor), cherrypicking works between the mid-14th to 21st Century.
On this charming and woolly set, The Trilogy Tapes seems keen to remind us that the degree of separation between dilettante classical music and outsider techno is less than it might appear. Warm tape hiss and muffled room noise sets the scene of a group of friends gathered around Cameron’s NYC apartment. On the face of things, 19th century compositions from Friedrich Nietzsche, Guillaume de Machaut’s mid-14th c. ‘Puis qu’en oubli’ and a whole load of others I’ve certainly never heard of seems absolutely impenetrable, but the endearing amateurism has a disarming effect and suddenly you’re drifting away to warm, woody bass notes and soft flute whilst the day unfolds gently outside the window. Anyone who finds solace in the homey sentiment find in Tori Kudo’s more soothing works or Pascal Comelade’s chamber miniatures will find much comfort here. It’s only classical music, don’t be scared!!” All Night Flight (2026)
In at Boomkat!
“TTT tack to classical chamber music with the intimately fuzzy recital of richly melodic works written between mid-14th and 21st centuries and performed by NYC’s Cop Tears, a trio of early and avant garde music specialists; Derek Baron, Cameron kapoor, and John Andrew Wilhite.
Attending to an emergent TTT touchstone of recent times – as in Jack Sheen’s works, thru aspects of Will Bankhead’s What We and Guild mixes – Cop Tears lean into interests in quieter chamber music laced with threads of lo-fi, folk and jazz that tie ‘The Rules of the Game’ to the label’s key corpus. The 13 pieces follow five years from the trio’s ‘Theodor Adorno: Piano Works’, and five again from their debut ‘Thirteen Harmonies (1986) Selections From John Cage’s ‘Apartment House 1776’’, with enchanting slants on cherry picked pieces that endure, some over 600 years later, on the strength of their timeless arrangements.
In key with the label’s thing, everything is swaddled in ferric gauze – possibly posited on auld tape recorders – and holds a peculiar, homely, discordant charm (including fits of giggles and room noise) for the duration, which never tests the patience. The C.14th, polyphonic chanson Ars Nova masterpiece of Guillaume de Machaut ‘Puis qu’en oubli’ is the set’s oldest, along with ‘Quam pulchra est’, a mid-C.15th work for recorder trio by John Dunstable, placed on the same page with the more angular chamber jazz modernism of ‘Selections from Piano Sonata after a Conversation with Jonathan Gean (2016)’ and their take on the naïf wooze of ‘Children’s Music, No. 1, II: Modern Dance (1973)’ by Valentin Silvestrov. Our percy is the dreamy, creaking baroque elegance of ’S’io men vo (1618)’, but it’s best advised to take it all in one at your leisure…” Boomkat (2026)
