Eleven Wives

"Eleven Wives" deploys its rhythmic complexity with a kind of casual authority, the odd-time signature at its foundation feeling not like a challenge to the listener but like the most natural possible way to organize these particular notes at this particular tempo. Cohen's bass is commanding throughout — this is music where the instrument traditionally understood as support has claimed the foreground without apology. The percussion is intricate and multilayered, drawing on traditions from multiple continents without fetishizing any of them. The piece accumulates energy through repetition and variation rather than through dramatic structural changes, each iteration of the main theme arriving with slightly different weight. There's a ceremonial quality to the music, something that recalls ritual without specifying which ritual — the title's suggestion of plural union, of ancient domestic complexity, runs beneath the music as an atmospheric undertone rather than an explicit program. The ensemble playing is extraordinarily tight, each musician listening with an intensity that makes the sophisticated rhythmic framework feel not labored but inevitable. This is music that rewards familiarity: on first hearing, the technical achievement is what registers; on subsequent listens, the emotional interior opens. You'd reach for this when you want music that takes you somewhere unfamiliar without making you feel lost — the combination of drive and rootedness that Cohen has made his signature.