A Place to Begin
Release date: May 20, 2022 on Whatever’s Clever
Stream/Buy: Link to Bandcamp

After the near death of a loved one, I came to a frozen island in the far north on Lake Superior at the end of winter. I had been feeling stuck, but this encounter with death opened up a deep awareness of the present moment in me.

I worked in the morning each day when the light was best in my studio, recording daily musical sketches. In the afternoons, I walked the frozen landscape of the island, listening to the sparse sounds of late winter. I watched as the frozen lake began to thaw - slowly at first, then all at once. A mass of water full of motion emerged and stretched out to meet the sky. As things melted, small pieces of color and sound filled the emptiness. Time deepened, and I settled into a place of lightness.

Inviting an awareness of death into my daily life was not all darkness, as I expected, but rather filled with dualities: light and dark, peace and chaos, presence and distance. And in periods of clarity, I could see that life is beginning in every moment.

Produced, written, and recorded by Peter Coccoma
Mixed by Zubin Hensler
Mastered by Taylor Duepree (12k)
Cello: Clarice Jensen
Violin: Oliver Hill
Album Photo by Sky Hopinka, Around the Edge of Encircling Lake (2018)
Cover Design: Alex Geller
Packaging and Design Layout: Michael Ryan Brennan

Selected Press:

NPR’s Best Albums of 2022
NPR’s 11 Best Experimental Albums of 2022
15 Questions Interview
Tone Madison Interview

At the deepest point of winter, the miles of water between Superior’s islands become a sheet of ice. For this brief (and becoming briefer) period, the world’s largest body of fresh water becomes a temporary landscape akin to a vast desert. A magical place that seemingly appeared out of nothing and could be gone the next day you return. For a stretch of time, I walked the ice each morning, noticing new cracks that had formed overnight, and listening to the occasional low pitched tones that sound like 808s pulsing under the ice. To walk on the ice is an enthralling and visceral experience because no matter how comfortable you get out there, it keeps you at the edge of your senses, for, inevitably, you remember how only a dozen inches of ice separates you from hundreds of feet of freezing water below.

On a frozen island in Lake Superior, there is a period when the ice is forming on the lake, and the ferry boat to the mainland must break a channel everyday in the sheet of ice to get across (until it can’t anymore and the real fun begins). It is a mesmerizing experience to break through miles of a thick ice sheet on a large steel boat, but like anything that becomes commonplace in our daily life, after a while you can stop really seeing it, zone out, and distract yourself staring into your phone like any other daily commute. In this video, I wanted to reconnect with some of that feeling of surrealness I had the first times I stood on the boat and looked down at the breaking ice. This is an unedited take on my phone of walking out of the sheltered passenger area to peer over the side of one of the last ice breaker ferries of the season and into that liminal space between ice and water.