In December 2013 Chris Cochrane formed the band Collapsible Shoulder, recruiting Brian Chase on drums, Mike Duclos on bass, and Kevin Bud Jones on second guitar. Before the year was over Kato Hideki replaced Mike on bass, and Kevin shifted to electronics and keyboards. Their album “Somewhere” was released in 2015.

Chris and Kevin started a side project performing as a duo, and collaborating on music for dance and film which led to a collaboration with choreographer Antonio Ramos for shows in Manhattan and Queens NY.

In 2023 Filmmaker Jim Hubbard tapped the duo to score his 48 minute film “Nostalgia” which was commissioned by the NYC AIDS Memorial Foundation and screened with live music at its premiere in November 2024, with the addition of percussionist Jim Pugliese.

Concurrently, choreographer Linda Austin reached out to Chris and Kevin to develop a new dance theater piece which was presented as a work in progress at Judson Memorial Church in 2023. The following year work began in earnest on what became “In Preparation for Disappearances to Come” presented by Linda's company Performance Works Northwest with a live score played by the duo in 4 performances at PICA in Portland, OR February 2025.

Prior to final rehearsals in Portland with Linda's company, Chapel Performance Space at the Good Shepherd Center, Seattle WA offered Chris and Kevin a gig to coincide with their time on the coast. Planned as a starting point, exploration, and examination of themes developed for the score for “In Preparation for Disappearances to Come”, it offered them welcome focus and perspective on their work. Feeling that the recording of the night was a solid representation of where their work together had led them, they decided to take it a step further.

Kevin began to mix, augment, and alter the music in subtle and often in very drastic ways. His manipulation of the music mirrors what can happen to a memory; when stories are retold with new details added, a discovery happens of what remains, what has disappeared, and what keeps evolving.

It is not lost on them, prescient even, that these performances happened during the first weeks of the current Trump administration.

“'In Preparation for Disappearances to Come' came into being first as a way for two old friends to reconnect. In 2021, musician Chris Cochrane and I began to talk about rekindling the long-dormant collaborative relationship that we enjoyed during the 1980s-90s when I still lived in New York. As we talked, the conversation turned to a troubled and gifted human close to us both—Paul Hoskin (1958–2018)—and thus on to contemplating the ways in which influences continue to make themselves felt, even when we begin to forget from whom or from where they originally came.

Now, four years later, we prepare for disappearances large and small: of this performance and the memory of this performance. Of this day, of this era, of the lives in this room. We consider how what we do and what we are now becomes part of the compost that nourishes the doing and being of the future.

In Preparation for Disappearances to Come is dedicated to those we have lost* and will lose,  as well as to our own future disappearance.

Here’s a quote from Virginia Woolf’s The Waves:
'We have come together…to make one thing, not enduring—for what endures?—but seen by many eyes simultaneously'” - Linda Austin

Live in Seattle press release

Cuneiform Records is proud to announce the release of Chris Cochrane’s Collapsible Shoulder Big Band Live 2019 : A Map Of Books, co-produced by the Brian Chase of the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s, and featuring performances by a host of luminaries.

This recording is comprised of two concerts of the band recorded live at Roulette in 2019 and 2020, with a small amount of studio work to shore things up, but the atmosphere and energy of the band playing in the venue is captured. The recording consists primarily of original compositions by Chris, and also cover tunes by Robert Pollard, Fred Frith, This Heat, and a bit of Erik Satie thrown in for good measure.

From 2016-2020 the Collapsible Shoulder Big Band became an annual event made up of an array of musicians based in New York, with other special guests coming through town. “I started doing this as an annual birthday concert, gathering musicians together from many projects and eras and we’d collaborate on these one- time gigs,” Cochrane says. “As the band grew more diverse in membership we began making more elaborate arrangements, and taking advantage of member’s history of improvisation, composition and vocal arrangements.”

The band members are Chris Cochrane, Gordon Beeferman, Brian Chase, Richard Dworkin, Kato Hideki, Stuart Popejoy, Sulynn Hago, Marlon Cherry, Stew Stewart, Gelsey Bell, Syd Straw, Sarah Bernstein, Eszter Balint, Kevin Bud Jones, Jim Pugliese, Hanna Fox, Eddie Gormley, Killian Karlsson, Zeena Parkins, and John Thayer.

Collapsible Shoulder's music is drawn from its member’s years in the international, downtown NYC and Brooklyn music scenes: neo-psychedelic, electro-acoustic, with unpredictable twists and turns.

Cochrane formed Collapsible Shoulder in 2014 and was comprised of Mike Duclos, later Kato Hideki, Brian Chase and Kevin Bud Jones, who remained at the core of this recording. “We originally thought it to be a quartet of two guitars, bass and drums, but through a happenstance injury, one guitarist was unable to play, and so he cobbled together a lot of analog synth components, instead of guitar, which greatly changed the dynamic, and gave us an immediate new sound.”

Chris is a Brooklyn-based musician guitarist improviser noise maker collaborator and composer. Chris has worked with many musicians including Zeena Parkins, John Zorn, Tim Hodgkinson, Billy Martin. Loren Connors, Marc Ribot, Jamaaladine Tacuma, Gabby Fluke-Mogul, Brandon Lopez, Gelsey Bell, Galvin Weston, Stew, Eszter Balint, and many others. Chris formed the band No Safety with Zeena Parkins and was a member of Curlew. He has also composed music for dance, theater and film since arriving full time in NYC, over forty years ago. He plans to continue to collaborate and make music as long as he able to.

Live 2019: A Map of Books press release