(Photo: Jose M. Spínola)
Like a mammoth ship passing in the night, Lucy Railton’s Blue Veil begins.
The cellist’s minimalist soundscape, released April 18, is as organic as it is mechanical, evoking the lumbering spirit of something much larger than ourselves.
It is difficult not to quickly lose oneself in the timbre of Railton’s cello, which slowly guides the listener toward the colossus.
Beneath a persistent drone, Blue Veil is a study in resonance, gradually degrading “precision-tuned tones” into dissonance, as described in the album’s liner notes.
Recorded at Église du Saint-Esprit in Paris and released under Ideologic Organ—a label led by Stephen O’Malley and Peter Rehberg—the album continues the label’s tradition of presenting avant-garde works.
Railton’s debut solo performance, anchored in the instrument’s ability to sustain long, plodding tones, conjures landscapes of incomprehensible vastness.
“I’m coming back to myself,” Railton told the author Stephan Kunze, earlier this month. “The piece Blue Veil is guided not only by my compositional ideas, which are about melody, harmony and structure, but also by the physical outcome, the way it’s felt.”
The result is an engrossing work that is as soothing as it is disconcerting.
