When a caterpillar has stored up enough energy and is ready to make the transition from larva to pupa, it begins to draw silk from the spinneret on the lower lip of its mouth and forms a small pad which it hooks into with its cremaster, attaching its hind end to the pad as a sort of anchor. Through contortions the caterpillar then winds silk behind itself, creating a sling or hammock. While some caterpillars proceed to shed their skin to reveal a hardened chrysalis, most moth caterpillars will continue to draw silk around themselves until they are encased in a cocoon, which might be hard or soft, opaque or translucent and from which they begin the process of metamorphosis.
The phenomena has given its name to an assortment of music, from the girdled pop rock-cum-electroclash of the Japanese singer Anna Tsuchiya to the staggered swing and blocky chords of the Thelonious Monk scholar Pandelis Karayorgis to the glitching breathlessness and swirling gorgeousness of Björk. Yet perhaps nobody has cultivated or inhabited the materiality and processes of a cocoon more than S. Hollis Mickey, who suffers from severe myalgic encephalomyelitis which is sometimes known as chronic fatigue syndrome, and sat within a specially arranged recording setup which included a lap harp, flute, harmonium, kalimba, toy piano and various effects pedals as she spun her latest album Cocoon day by day.
Housebound and offered up as a space for connection, a shared meditation on the body in a transformative state of rest, the nine lengthy tracks of Cocoon were captured whenever Hollis felt able, tender and careful improvisations named in diaristic fashion after their recording dates. Her winding voice and variegated instruments sometimes summon medieval organum as plainsong splintered into the first strains of polyphony, as on the third track of the album, which is dated ‘February 16’. Sometimes her songs sound like warped ragas, where twining woodwinds saunter over distended synthetic drones, and sometimes they conjure the Japanese environmental genre of kankyō ongaku, which might be embedded within nature but can also encode a detached looking out. ‘March 30’ highlights the kalimba, while ‘April 7’ might echo the cooing vocals of Elizabeth Fraser as filtered through a contemporary loop machine, and ‘April 13’ briefly recalls the rebounding pluck of the harp on the foundational Joanna Newsom track ‘Bridges and Balloons’.
