Cooper Wolken Cassette

While some kids may have been imagining space adventures or searching for buried treasure, Cooper Wolken was contemplating life and death. The multi-instrumentalist grew up in a small town in rural Massachusetts, spending much of his free time wandering the woods just beyond his home at the end of a long winding road—climbing trees and trudging through the knee-high riverbed until it was dark. “All that time out in the woods, I was really close to the processes of the forest, seeing the way life interacts with itself, as well as with death and decay,” he says. “It was an intimate way of understanding the world, and finding the beauty even in all of the darkness.” Years later, Wolken’s first album released under his own name, Chapters (out June 9, 2023 via Earth Libraries), translates that beautiful duality in personal vignettes.