[engl] COS might not be the first genre-defying progressive music group you’ve heard of who share both wordless onomatopoeic vocals and a snappy three-letter name (complete with philosophical leanings and alchemic penchants) but on listening to this first-ever custom COS compendium you might have just discovered a potential favourite! Perhaps it’s no coincidence that COS share close spiritual, stylistic and social connections with the aforementioned bands, as one of the few long withstanding single-sylable ensembles to remain utterly idiosyncratic and incomparable in their hyper-focused and impenetrable creative bubble. As a group that effortlessly MIX head-nod prog, synth driven jazz, dislocated disco, arkestral operatics and high-brow conceptual anti-pop grooves, it’s easier to just remember the name COS than to thumb the vast amount of genre dividers in your local record shop in which COS could occupy. With the crème de la crème of Belgian jazz, prog, psych and funk within their ranks (Daniel Schell, Placebo, Marc Hollander, Alain Pierre, Brussels Art Quintet), their combined idea-to-ability ratio litters the COSography with concepts that aficionados, future fans, collaborators and critics still haven’t begun to unravel… With their earliest roots in the compact jazz group Brussels Art Quintet the group spent their sapling years creating art-school prog under the name Classroom, this flourishing collective, cultivated by multi-instrumentalist mainstay Daniel Schell, would soon shed its leaves, dropping band-members and typographics reducing its moniker to simply COS (a multi-purpose, globally recognised word, with links to Alchemy and philosophy, with a hard phonetic delivery to suit the groups heavier rhythmic approach). In it’s new skin COS also shed all forms of orthodox language to find its true exclusive voice. Fronted, in the conventional sense, by the daughter of author and part-time jazz player Jean De Trazegnies, the bands wordless singer changed her name to Pascale SON, to accentuate the French word for “sound”. Drawing comparisons with sound poets like Polish jazz legend Urszula Dudziak or Hungarian Katalin Ladik, but retaining the crystalline femininity (and funk) of Flora Purim, while effectively sharing an imaginary lyric book of non-words with Damo Suzuki, Magma or a future Liz Fraser… To use the word “unique” would, by COS academic standards, be lazy journalism.