Cello Octet’s new album Cocon, out on November 13th on exploratory label 7K, is an invitation to listen beyond familiar boundaries. Suspended somewhere between the tactile resonance of eight cellos and the imagined echoes of electronic sound, the album unfolds as a meditation on transformation – on what is sheltered, what emerges, and what remains hidden beneath the surface.
For this project, Cello Octet Amsterdam turned to Caterina Barbieri, Kara-Lis Coverdale, Qasim Naqvi, Jesse Broekman and Abul Mogard & KMRU whose artistic voices have been shaped by electronic and electroacoustic music. Rather than asking them to abandon their sonic worlds, the ensemble invited them to translate those rich, often digitally mediated soundscapes into the physical language of strings. During the process, a transformational theme emerged as composers developed music that gradually transformed into versions for eight cellos, mirroring a caterpillar’s metamorphosis into a butterfly via a cocoon.
The spellbinding result is a collection of works that reveals an unexpected kinship between contemporary classical performance and electronic music – a relationship that reaches back to the pioneering experiments of composers such as Iannis Xenakis, Karlheinz Stockhausen and György Ligeti, whose explorations continually blurred the boundaries between acoustic and electronic sound. Their work explored spatialisation, serial composition and the transformation of recorded sound into pure electronic texture, which was then extended into micropolyphony and timbral density. Importantly, these composers understood sound as material to be shaped – a philosophy that runs directly through Cocon.
Releases November 13, 2026
