Ivy Meissner
Shortly after finishing work on Big Time Things, his band Office Culture’s third studio album, Winston Cook-Wilson realized he’d pushed his process to its limit. Written alone and rehearsed from a safe distance in a drafty Red Hook warehouse in the depths of a lockdown midwinter, Big Time Things was a pitch-black comedy, weary and uneasy, painfully personal in places. It was also painstakingly complex. Cook-Wilson felt, in its immediate aftermath, as though he’d written a full-length musical and had his bandmates come in to score it with him, bar by bar. Its title track was so sinuous, thick with unexpected chord changes, that it seemed off-kilter, like a fragmented conversation from a dream. Hearing that song played back at the time, he thought, “Okay, enough of this for a while. This is about as weird as we can get.”
Enough, Office Culture’s new album, is the product of an entirely new approach to making music. Inspired by a wide range of late-90s albums that took full advantage of the CD format — crystal-cased long-form projects that caught Cook-Wilson’s eye as a kid at the mall — it is expansive and omnivorous; the atmosphere changes frequently and completely. There are tape loops and muffled glitches, slithering guitars and skittish drums, and otherworldly sounds that are hard to pin down. Cook-Wilson, a recovering full-time music journalist, cites as references Portishead’s Dummy, Janet Jackson’s The Velvet Rope, Nine Inch Nails’ The Fragile, and Björk’s Homogenic. Enough self-consciously borrows sounds and ideas from each of these. But above all it shares their sense of exploration, creativity, and grandeur.
This might confound people who marked Cook-Wilson’s earlier music as “smooth.” To some extent, I’m guilty here. I wrote about the “luxurious” qualities of 2019’s A Life of Crime, and I’ve mostly understood Office Culture in the context of sophisti-pop and jazz-rock, Prefab Sprout and Steely Dan — new slants on old sounds. That idea doesn’t bother him so much, but he bristles at the thought of people taking it a step further and reading Office Culture as using those sounds ironically. “I just have complicated feelings about it,” he says. “It's always been a very sincere thing, but some people think it was all some sardonic thing to use the sound palette of Life of Crime or Big Time Things. I think it's just the jazz chords. People hear jazz chords and they see red.”
He wanted Enough to be a reaction to that. “I was interested in stuff that sounded hypnotic,” he says. “I was interested in texture more than melody and delivery more than harmony."
Speaking over a Zoom call from New York City’s Lincoln Center, where he’s recently started working for the Chamber Music Society, Cook-Wilson still winces a little when he thinks about the immediate aftermath of Big Time Things. He couldn’t write after the process wrapped up, so he took up painting (it’s his work on Big Time Things’ cover), which convinced him that, like his canvases, “every song could be its own universe” with its own atmosphere and feel. Rather than going into the studio with the band, recording the basics, then overdubbing, he could mirror what he did with paint, “adding one thing at a time, mixing and matching.”
The skeletons of the songs on Enough often came from samples. “I think I've hopefully bent it all out of recognition, but I was sampling a lot of records,” he says. “I was acquiring a lot of records, some from my dad's basement — my dad's a record collector — and I really enjoy that bit of dust and the weird fluctuations there."
He’d sample himself too. Every morning, Cook-Wilson would improvise for 30 minutes to a click track, then go back and chop his own work up until he had the scaffolding for a song. (Armand Hammer employed a similar process for last year’s We Buy Diabetic Test Strips, and Cook-Wilson discussed the idea with Elucid around his most recent solo record, BLK LBL.)
“I was interested in texture more than melody and delivery more than harmony.”
With those bones in place, the tracks on Enough were opened up to a community Cook-Wilson has been fostering at least since the start of COVID. In 2023, he invited a small group of songwriters, including Alena Spanger (whose album Fire Escape he co-produced) and Brooklyn’s Ruination Records owner Dan Knishkowy, to his apartment for informal song-sharing sessions. The musical direction was set in place before those first salons, but those meet-ups added a more communal feel to Enough than there had been previously.
Cook-Wilson says he was inspired by “the experience of playing with more people, learning their languages, learning their strengths through playing with them.” Office Culture’s bassist Charlie Kaplan and guitarist Ryan El-Solh are ever-presents, but there are also contributions from almost two dozen other musicians on Enough. On three occasions, Cook-Wilson hands over lead vocal duties: to Spanger on the blissful “Secluded,” Sam Sodomsky of The Bird Calls on the title track, and Jackie West on “Everything,” the closer.
“There's a level of trust,” he says of that decision. “But all of my favorite musicians have taken these risks — the people that I think about that are always in the back of my head. Even though I'm referencing all this music and I think about it, I'm always trying to make something that doesn't sound like anyone else. That's my musical ego — that I believe maybe I can do that. I know that other people's voices can be a part of something unique.”
That collaboration with West at the end of the album is particularly striking. It begins with those disfigured samples, muffled like a music box in a bathtub. When West’s voice drops in with the drums, it seems as though at least two songs are playing at once. It resolves one piece at a time, discordance fading, until West and Cook-Wilson sing the title over and over, an octave apart. Little syncopations and blips drop in and out as West’s voice starts to swirl, lyricless, and the track drifts away.
“There's the ‘smooth’ that I do think I indulge in and all of us do,” Cook-Wilson says, “which is trying to make complicated things sound natural and have an easy conveyance — not let complexity get in the way of the emotional throughline and have it always serve that.” Enough is detailed and meticulous, expertly crafted and surprising and even chaotic in parts, but like the CDs Cook-Wilson was drawn to as an adolescent, what lingers after the fade-out is something unique and otherworldly.
