The Chair and the Faucet, a new release from Alex Cobb’s Etelin project, confirms that inspiration is an invitation. And Cobb’s latest has a very specific genesis: a short poem, spontaneously created during a Zen Buddhist meditation retreat. This poem was an attempt to transcribe the experience of intensive zazen through a simple image of a chair tied to a faucet by a length of rope. For the composer, the memory of this inscrutable scene persisted long after the retreat itself; for eventual listeners, it serves as the origin of a probing album of tonal curiosity.

This record is an attempt to realize that image in sound – to articulate something of the mindstate of zazen through musical materials and processes. The poem clarified the approach and led to every decision on the album: the choice to work exclusively with a Serge Modular system; the use of an almost entirely dry signal path, interrupted only by small, intentionally deployed instances of reverb; the willingness to leave in mistakes and moments of inelegance; and a commitment to sit with passages that can seem uneventful or static.

The Serge system proved particularly suited for the project, as its design joins audio signal and control voltages. Treating these as one invites direct engagement with the slippery materiality of electricity itself and encourages a way of working shaped as much by attention as by control. Similarly, in developing this work, Cobb returned repeatedly to rudimentary early electronic music and the appealing notion that “a piece of music might consist only of a function generator cycling for a while.” Duration, restraint, and the unfolding of simple processes thus became compositional values unto themselves.

On The Chair and the Faucet, linearity evaporates as the 33-minute album progresses. The sounds emitted from the Serge expand horizontally and diagonally in paths and structures that evolve but don’t repeat and may eventually end but never fully resolve.

The spartan textures introduced in the first track shift throughout the recording, allowing for diff use strata to adhere, desynchronize, and form anew. Cobb is also keen to emphasize microtonal drones, spatial disparities, and beating auditory particles in closely tuned pitches. This creates immersive psychoacoustic effects where the temperature in the room impacts the listening experience, and a turn of the head alters the frequency spectrum. Taken as a whole, it is a startling album of wavering harmonics and subtly shifting perspectives, opening another chapter in Cobb’s prolific catalog.

-Ryan Potts, June 2026