CORA DOUBLE LP

If there was ever an musician who embodied these ideas of intermingling frequencies with the spontaneous and passions for life and love, then it has to be experimental Dutch artist Cora Emens, who during the 1980s crafted some of the most intricately balanced soundscapes, often pairing the most intriguing of layers together into experiences that felt like no other.

Beautiful stuff. Wonderful stuff. Gorgeous stuff. Excellent stuff.

…and Cora on the right, whispering into our ears with the most delicate of audial embraces, and you feel the love wash right over you.

Truly sublime music, that connects right into you.

Truly extraordinary, unique and colourful, it will make you fall in love with the idea of escapism once again, and that is very powerful indeed.

Another complimentary product review I found on Boomkat.com

Japan’s Calax push all the right buttons with reissue of sex educator Cora Emens’ ‘80s tape of sensuous experiments, compiled by her then partner, and Fluxus co-founder, Willem de Ridder.

Remastered by Cora herself for this first reissue of a tape that only exists in the sound archives of the Allard Pierson Museum in Amsterdam, ‘Cora’ is a necessary introduction to her intoxicating, gently steamy sound, recalling everything from a lighter adjunct to Cosey Fanni Tutti’s ‘Time To tell, thru to the naif melodies of Tara Cross or From Nursery to Misery, and the heady slow-burn psychedelia of Teresa Winter. It’s really quite a special one that, despite existing on YouTube for a few years now, and its stellar avant garde roll call including the pivotal figure de Ridder, Alvin Curran (Musica Elettronica Viva) and Enno Velthuis, has really flown under the radar of most listeners due to its extreme scarcity on physical format, until now. 

The music was all recorded during an era when Cora was married to Willem de Ridder (other releases are credited to Cora de Ridder), and when she was beginning a career as sex educator and performer that spanned music, as well as working on the first erotic sex-line services in Holland. Perhaps surprising, there’s actually nothing quite explicit inside, but rather Cora implies her subject thru inference and sensuality, stroking synths and naked drum machine pulses under what could be heard as an early example of ASMR vocals, as with the shushed intimacies of ‘Come On’, or the more elusive nature of ‘Telephone’, whilst the likes of her naif, Dutch language singing on ‘Earplay’ reminds to a more pagan, bucolic sort of eroticism, and ‘Lonely Tune’ emotes a sort of longing tristesse. Together with its non-musical elements, as in the field recording textures of ‘Running’, and the room recording of ‘Decadenzia’, and thru to the way it edges on sleazier lounge/erotica vibes in ‘Through Me’ this one’s every bit a lowkey overlooked classic of the ‘80s tape paradigm. 

He wrote: “It’s so great to discover lost gems like this album. I love the very loose, almost drowsy warmth of these tracks and the somehow smoky scent of desire that seems to linger and hang throughout the tracks. It’s incredibly appealing. Seems like this past entwines really nicely with a lot of similarly fluid and hazy contemporary music being made in the margins”.