Wears The Trousers Magazine January 15, 2010 Ora Cogan The Quarry [Borne! Recordings / Isolated Now Waves; February 1] The dramatic cover shot, snapped in the stairwell of a hotel in Castelló, Spain, captures a lot of the mystery that runs thick throughout Ora Cogan’s latest album. Something of a departure from the Vancouver native’s clear, sparse, traditional style, The Quarry is big on atmosphere, submerging Ora’s already heady vocals in a deep well of reverb to give them an even more haunting quality. Recorded and co-produced with Jesse Taylor of Twin Crystals, Ora plays every instrument, including electric guitar, violin, dulcimer, drones and drums (except on two songs, where Kenton Loewen of The Crackling steps in). Divided into two ’sides’ (vinyl collectors can drop the quote marks) of six songs each, the album includes covers of Sam Cooke’s ‘Troubled Mind’ and traditional number ‘Down To The River’ plus two instrumentals, ‘Lily’ and ‘Nite Prison’ (named after the studio where the album was recorded). Tracklist: 01 Daughter 02 Troubled Mind 03 Shine 04 Blood Debt 05 The Quarry 06 In The Dark 07 Down To The River 08 Nite Prison 09 Glass Tower 10 Mean As The Sun 11 Gather 12 Lily The haunting sounds of the haunted Ora Cogan  By Francois Marchand, Vancouver Sun January 27, 2010 VANCOUVER -- If there is a certain otherworldly quality to Ora Cogan’s latest effort, The Quarry, it is owed to more than just her soft, wailing voice and delicately haunting instrumentation. It may just be that a real supernatural presence made itself known during the recording of the album, which took place inside an old warehouse in an undisclosed part of Vancouver, where Cogan found herself exploring strange moods and even stranger vibes. “It was the middle of the summer,” Cogan says, “but because we were staying up all night recording and sleeping all day, I felt like it was dark all the time. “We always heard really weird stuff and possibly people trying to break in. It was a really haunted atmosphere.” While certain things seemed to go “bump” in the night, other things “clicked,” and much like the recording process it was born out of, The Quarry is a surreal experience. Guitars echo strangely as if lost in the distance or dancing between the trees of an old forest. Cogan’s voice comes floating in through the gloom as if shrouded in mist. Here and there, psychedelic noises twang and fade like drops of water falling into an old well. As songs vanish into silence, you can almost feel a strange presence was there all along, hidden in the dark, listening in from a different plane of reality. Does The Quarry feel this way for Cogan? “For me it does, but it’s such a subjective thing. I think it definitely has a pretty heavy feeling to it, but other people might think it’s light and sweet. I’m always surprised at the different reactions I get.” Born and raised on Saltspring Island, Cogan found her calling at a young age, when she stumbled upon classic folk records and touring singer-songwriters who would stop by to play at the local café. Her own melodies hover somewhere between experimental noise and traditional guitar folk, with a soft medieval tinge added via dulcimers and violins. In many ways, Cogan seems drawn to speak to the other side, to a different world beyond the borders of our own. “Or it’s drawn to me — I don’t know,” she says, chuckling. “The title The Quarry comes from a midnight excursion in an old rock quarry. It was definitely one of the more haunted experiences I’ve had. I’ve always had a tendency to be in strange places at strange times. It’s my luck and my inclination, maybe. I’m always looking for adventures in beautiful places and hidden corners.” Quite fittingly, some of these adventures have included a recent tour across Europe (her label is based in Spain), where Cogan played concerts in the middle of the forest and on old train cars. “No haunted castles yet,” she says with a laugh, “but I’d really like that.” Upcoming performances will include South By Southwest in Austin, Tex., as well as a return to Spain and Portugal before heading further north to play in Sweden and Norway. But first, and most importantly, Cogan will bring her CD release launch to the Rickshaw Theatre, which should prove to be an interesting match for Cogan’s latest batch of songs. “I chose the Rickshaw because it’s such a beautiful — and kind of haunted — space,” she says. “It’s just this massive old theatre that was left alone for so long and now it’s revived. It’s also a fun acoustic space to work with. Often on tour, I try to connect with places and people that are really unique and try to evoke some kind of magic.” The Quarry certainly doesn’t feel like an ordinary folk record. Cogan has managed to put her musical finger onto something strange and surreal, both young and old, alive and dead. In a way, its true meaning always seems to hover just out of earshot, to be glimpsed at out of the corner of our eye but never quite truly grasped. “I try to leave a lot up to the subconscious. It’s definitely about the atmosphere. When I’m playing shows I like to pretend that I’m singing out of an old phonograph.” HEAVE MEDIA - December 12 2009 Girls Are Rad: Ora Cogan Ora Cogan continues to make Vancouver look good with The Quarry By: Leah Urbom And, folks, if you’ll look to your left, we have Ora Cogan, another transplant in the Vancouver scene. The daughter of a folk singer and a photo-journalist who left Israel following the Yom Kippur War, Cogan grew up in British Columbia surrounded by music and art and began writing her own songs at 12, advancing on to teach herself guitar, violin, piano, and dulcimer. Drawing on the American musical styles of the time and more traditional Middle Eastern influences, Cogan soon crafted a distinctive style to suit her youth and, at 17, went to Israel to live with her grandmother. But she soon left for Athens and other European cities, where she spent a year writing and performing songs on the streets and in pubs that would land on her first album, Sparrow (2005). After returning to Vancouver, Cogan co-founded two radically different groups: Her Jazz Noise Collective, an experimental, trans-inclusive music network for women that encourages females to play more noise and experimental music, and Cornerstone, an a capella gospel quartet (not to be confused with the metal group of the same name—isn’t there always a metal group with the same name?). She is still affiliated with Her Jazz Noise Collective, which puts on semi-annual “Women’s Studies” that feature female artists, many of them debuts, and welcomes Cogan as part of the performance series. Next up came Tatter (2007), a melodic nod toward traditional folk, which Cogan recorded and toured Canada behind with the down-home, finger-pickin’ help of The Be Good Tanyas. Tatter also featured a cover of  “Motherless Child,” which was recently included on the compilation Beautiful Star: The Songs of Odetta. Expanding the Tatter tour to all of North America, Cogan also toured with Tanya Tagaq and Vashti Bunyan (stopping to play a few festivals in Canada and the Pacific Northwest along the way) before recording 2008’s Harbouring on Borne Recordings and touring Europe. Cogan’s upcoming release is entitled The Quarry and steps slightly away from the traditional sound she’s focused on in her past releases to incorporate more experimentation and some lo-fi fuzz