A work of great sensitivity and skill, FATHM is animated by Cocks’s openness to its possibilities.
Cocks yields some extraordinary sounds from flute, from the keening multiphonics and two-note motifs of “A thread held between your fingers” to the rasps, pops and flutters of “A marsh wren.”

— The Wire (Stewart Smith)

And Cocks doesn’t just play it with extraordinary ferocity—their notes seem to fly at the listener like darts. Recorded with extraordinary wet, almost frightening closeness. It’s as if your head’s inside the flute. Or Cocks’ mouth.”

— The Wire (Phil Freeman)

“FATHM is Cocks at the most unfiltered…
The album is not just a rethinking of the flute and goes beyond the strange and otherworldly. Instead, it is better thought of as a detonation of expected timbres, with Cocks wielding the instrument as a shape-shifting channel for breath, grit, and distortion…
Laura Cocks plays the flute with a visceral physicality that is apparent even when it is just coming out of your speakers. Having seen live performances, the instrument is an extension of their body – a sound-making appendage that expresses the feelings and intent of their whole being…
As the avant-garde goes, this album is out there, but it also represents an openness and integrity. Cocks is an explorer who does not hold back.”

— Avant Music News

Laura Cocks takes every moment as a chance to do something new. The same goes for her latest solo album, a collection of flute improvisations that never rest, filled with fiery breaths and urgent notes. Every track on FATHM feels like an auditory workout, both for Cocks and the listener. There are many examples of her relentlessness, but my favorite is “Illinois,” an absolute throat-burner of a track in which Cocks huffs, spits, and blows as if she’s been tasked with setting fires and putting them out at the same time.”

— Bandcamp daily

this is one of the least predictable things I have heard in 2025. Legitimately, you will have no idea where Laura Cocks is going with this one. Yes, this is free improvisation, but usually such a unique approach and instrument is not taken…. her work has this living, breathing connotation… Here it is fully perfected and changed in some small ways. Nods to her background, of Lake Michigan and her current location in New York City, adorn the pieces, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly.
This is challenging music, and it's hard to predict what to expect due to the frequencies and unpredictability, but it's worth the effort. Beautiful, butterfly wing flutter type sort of things, and the squeal of brakes brought together as one.”
— Beach Sloth

“Laura Cocks’ new album displays the malleable nature sound can achieve when the symbiotic relationship between body and instrument isn’t bound by structure….The result is a serpentine chimeric creature made of metal, skin and breath, that emits different sounds out of every pore in their body…fueled by a rapid-burning intensity that only vulnerability and spontaneity can spark.”

—Densidad20.25

“The flutist’s skill with balancing these peculiar hybrids ultimately distinguishes FATHM as much as Cocks’ ferocious energy; this is an album as happy to shout as it is to slither…
listening to FATHM evokes a process of decoding, parsing the bounds between vocalization and instrument.”

— Seismograf

“Laura Cocks’ solo flute bears no resemblance to the typically bright and shiny instrument we all know, more like it’s just been dug up from a burial ground with clumps of dirt still between the keys…giving everything a dense, vegetative vibe that verges on claustrophobia… Well-placed rough breath and grubby fingering blur every pitch into something organic, like nature operating at its grimiest level.”

— Boring Like A Drill

“This comes highly recommended. One word of advice: listen to this in a quiet environment. The music deserves attentive listening…”

— Vital Weekly

Nine cleverly formatted improvisations for solo flute. From silence to noise, from delicacy to aggression, from pure phrasing to multiply distorted shreds of sound…
First, Laura breathes the full mass of the flute body, then accelerates, yet simultaneously warms the timbre of her delivery. When necessary, the flute stream enriches with her own voice…
She torments it, drowns it in a slimy sludge, tears it apart, and tramples it. Suddenly, she begins to meditate and grasps at melodies by the handful. She sings dark lullabies for naughty children… only to soon build a multi-story, as if she had at least several instruments in her hands and mouth. In the eighth episode, she meticulously builds a flow from squeals and grinds, and then dissects this entire stream of filth. For the last ninety seconds of the album, she weaves a simple, dynamic narrative, masterfully controlling her emotions.”

—Spontaneous Music Tribune

“She is not afraid to throw down such a challenge, least of all, to herself…
The music is full of events.”

— The Jazzist

“She explores dreams, trying to make Pan want to dance. With splitting sounds like bird beaks, with overblown trills, and spitfires in panicked, gasping excitement. Dark generative power breeds nocturnal song…Cocks’ mouth overflows animalistically, popping, rumbling. And finally, birdlike again. 'To fly' is all.”

— Bad Alchemy

“Throughout the entirety of field anatomies, Cocks wields complete command of not only the flute, but the flute-body. And it’s important to note that this album is not merely virtuosic for virtuosity sake. Cocks is adventurous, but more importantly, thoughtful. These five pieces, created through collaboration and experimentation with the composers, tesalate beautifully together, venturing through the wild and meditative, electronic and acoustic.

In the liner notes, Cocks describes the significance of the prairies of their childhood from which the album garnered its name, a detail that provides a nuanced layer to the curation of the album as a whole. The album itself comes in an ephemeral “eco-wallet” (without plastic shrink wrap) with detailing of hand-collaged dried flowers and beeswax. Each eco-wallet also includes a pack of seeds native to the recipient’s area, with instructions to scatter them. In this way, Cocks invites listeners to join in the powerful physical communion of field anatomies, a tender gesture that matches the fervent musical potency of this body of work.”

— I Care If You Listen

This set gets off to a vivacious start with the composer David Bird’s “Atolls,” for a solo live piccolo that often plays alongside 29 prerecorded parts. In its opening minutes, the composition wastes no time in showing off Cocks’s febrile instrumental prowess. But there’s also much to revel in as the background piccolo parts take on a greater presence in the mix…. That satisfying, subtle array of approaches finds consistent expression across the balance of the album.

— The New York Times

“Consistent vision courses through all five tracks with both disciplined patience and open indeterminacy…Cocks’s piccolo floats through the buzzes and scrapes of her electronics and rubbed balloons. During the album’s most stirring stretch, Cox’s “Spiritus,” Cocks goes with just a single flute to create something thoughtfully sparse and grippingly tense…”

—Bandcamp Daily, Best of Experimental Music, February 2022

“Laura Cocks pushes their instrument (and, here and there, their voice) to wild extremes on this bracing solo album, with five composers requesting feats of superhuman physicality…

…dizzying, fragmentary solo lines and pitched material…

…a strident dance of breathy sibilance applied to the piccolo and balloons and electronic noises…”

—Bandcamp Daily, Best Contemporary Classical February, 2022

“Captivating. Evocative. Nuanced. Expressive. Violent. These were the words that came to mind when I first sat down to write this review. In all honesty, it’s been difficult finding the words to describe my reaction to this album, and I mean that as high praise. I found Laura Cocks’ Field Anatomies to be an incredibly engaging and impressive album, one that’s so original in concept and execution that I don’t think any kind of analysis in this particular format could do the pieces and performances justice, but I’ll do my best to capture my takeaway.”

—KLANG

“Laura Cocks has a singular relationship with flutes…The sheer emotionality of this combination is hard to describe in words. It is beyond disconcerting…

Cocks’ technical prowess is second to none, and she plays with devastating fervor. If experimentalism is to go where no one has gone before, then mission accomplished. One of the more unique and compelling releases in quite some time.”

- Avant Music News

“The shapes Laura Cocks breathes into life with her various flutes is a bit of aural magic… Experimentation is as much a tool as it is a methodology and hearing Cocks’ use of it to get at the core of the real thesis here – the physical relationship of our bodies with playing an instrument – or a creative practice more generally…

The visceral textures of Cocks’s performance hurt. They are using so much air, pulling breath from the deepest reaches of her lungs, moving it in ways that push beyond the imagined limits of our bodies. It’s awe-inspiring, truly…

This is such a personal exposition that never turns away from the difficult passages and in the heaviest, rawest moments the connection between physical body and instrument becomes blurred as the two become a singular force of nature…

Cocks’s performance here is revelatory.”

“Monstrous spectacles out of recontextualized ingredients…

electrifying…

The instrument becomes a giver of breath rather than an insatiable taker. In the ongoing shocks of the pandemic era, Cocks’s asphyxiation feels all too visceral, all too soon. But where there is discomfort, I find there’s also some truth—and field anatomies will make you squirm.”

—The Chicago Reader

“Scariest album of flute music ever…a grueling, intimidating experience when heard in one sitting. Don’t let the pressed flowers on the cover fool you; get the message that these (genuine) preserved petals crushed flat between heavy black cards are sending. All five works, composed over the past ten years, are intensely physical and demanding pieces for performer and listener…All five composers represented here push intricacy of pitch and rhythm into the background, pushing their emphasis partly on sonority, but particularly on embodying the flute as an extension of breath – or an obstacle to it.

…Cocks presents a masterclass on the physicality of wind playing… [and] negotiates tortuous passages of overblown multiphonics with a smearin’ and sneerin’ attitude…”

— boring like a drill

“One winter I watched someone kill a stag and got into a terrible altercation. That night I dreamt that I showed up on the doorstep of Ornette Coleman who took me in, gave me a glass of water and a place to sit, and we talked until I felt loved again. This, of course, only happened in my dream, but it was a very influential experience for me, and I am grateful to Ornette.”

— LC in interview with Textura Magazine

“The five intensely physical works on field anatomies sound unlike any flute pieces I've heard before and probably any you've heard too. This extraordinary solo collection by TAK Ensemble co-founder Laura Cocks pushes far beyond the boundaries of the realm typically associated with the instrument. The New York-based artist involves the entire body in rendering the material into corporeal form, the result a fearless debut statement. field anatomies is also a profoundly personal project as each piece is the product of a long-standing collaborative relationship between composer and musician…

It isn't easy listening…but field anatomies is never less than gripping.”

— Textura Magazine

“…an unsustainable technical whirlpool devolving into gasping, groaning, horrified sighs and tortured utterances among electric hum, industrial noise, some digitized datasong twinkling to an end only to begin again as if some poor soul passed by the expired one stumbling into the grinder of capitalist labor…

“…this portrait of the performer showcases tendencies toward the technical - kaleidoscopic in the colors Cocks can coax from the flute and the body - and the thematically political.”

—Harmonic Series

“Always a throughline foregrounding the relationship between breath as a mechanism for flute and for life. And in line with their direction of TAK Ensemble and TAK Editions, this portrait of the performer showcases tendencies toward the technical - kaleidoscopic in the colors Cocks can coax from the flute and the body - and the thematically political.”

—Harmonic Series

“Brilliant and fearless…the results are striking.

…highly intimate and elegantly sculpted.”

—Wholenote Magazine

“…often sounds like anything but a flute…Cocks’ voice and breath feel one with the flute’s frenzied motion…

Every moment stretches out, reaching past the instrument.

Throughout field anatomies, Cocks finds the balance between light and dark, pummeling and airy. Much of the album breaks open our imagined conception of what a flute might be. But perhaps what’s most compelling about this music is its suggestion that flute has places yet to go. In the album’s final moments, Cocks takes a breath in as if they’ll play another note, but they don’t. Instead, we’re left to wonder what might come next.”

—The Road to Sound

“Cocks, a new music mainstay and director of the invigorating new music ensemble TAK, has kept these pieces in their rotation for years. That commitment is evident across this intimate study of what it means, as Cocks has described, to hold a musical work in your body…Cocks’ performance suddenly skews zoomorphic when they suddenly let out a low growl—a vivid glimpse of what creatures stand to emerge once the flute is at Cocks’ lips.”

— Which Sinfonia

“Cocks is a marvelous performer, linking the various phases as in a fantasy… with an infinite breath…Cocks and her flutes are the perfect vehicles to test some potentialities of extended techniques, to enrich the repertoire and instruct new temptations, to provide an incentive to change the direction of the path of the traditional figure of the flutist.”

— Percosi Musicali

“It is a totally different concept with the rhythmic sounds of fiercely blowing into the mouthpiece, blowing up a balloon, scratching them, and making visceral what oxygen and breathing means… As if a ghost speaks through the flute… This release is highly recommended for anyone interested in what's possible with the smallest symphonic wind instrument. Laura Cocks delivers all pieces with brilliant virtuosity and intensity.”

—Vital Weekly

“Laura Cocks, is a driving force for so much of their good work (and in New York more widely). Between their own solo works (read further to watch an incredible performance of their solo piece, LARUS LARUS), the ensemble work, and the music of others TAK Editions put out this year (these two releases are in must hear territory), I’m in awe.

Beyond their immense skill and talent, [is] Cocks’s enthusiasm for others’ success and helping them realize their own visions. This is especially evident in the incredible Ensemble Interactivo de La Habana album TAK released earlier in 2021 but is a constant in Cocks’s practice…As a flute player and composer, Cocks creates intricate, spellbinding works that often have a visceral physicality to them. Listening to the way they play has changed my perspective on all that is possible with the flute and even with how much Cocks has already done, it feels as though they’re just getting started.”

-Foxy Digitalis

“Cocks’ music exists in simultaneous spheres of deep, investigative realities and an effervescent glow of pure, joyous expression...Cocks performance is otherwordly, turning this intricate, difficult dance into an awe-inspiring aural spectacle. Each time I listen to this track or watch this video, I’m further entranced and amazed at their focused approach. Laura Cocks’ work is an invitation to think about our physical interactions with not just music and sound, but especially the world around us.”

— Foxy Digitalis

“…if anyone imagines that flute music is sweet and simple, they can completely abandon the idea…intense, even searing… a real sonic slap in the face…”

—Minimal is More

“…the flute shows its broad-spectrum potential as a solo instrument… zaps around between noise, hum, insect life, submarines and something that burns….In the foreground, Cocks unfolds with expressive flute, while the background builds up a drama of slowly fading sampling, digital overtones, and rotating noise. Evil warning!

…The flute has always been one of the most popular instruments for writing people into the music, and Laura Cocks' well-executed solo album shows how much drama the bent tones and aggressive breathing can set in motion.”

—Seismograf