LUCY RAILTON - Paradise 94

A clarification is in order: although this is indeed the official solo debut of cellist Lucy Railton, her prior artistic c.v. is vast and more than a little heterogeneous, almost intimidating for someone just thirty-two years old.

Co-founder of the London Contemporary Music Festival and creator of the Kammer Klang series at London's prestigious Cafe Oto, she has performed within artistic performance pieces and dance choreographies, as well as in the execution of complex contemporary scores – among others, Xenakis and Feldman.

She has taken part in the Apartment House chamber ensemble and in Thomas Strønen's acoustic collective Time Is A Blind Guide, reconvened as a quintet for a new album on ECM ("Lucus", 2018). A few more names: Bat For Lashes ("The Haunted Man"), young composer Mica Levi (for the soundtrack of "Jackie", 2016) and the guru of Japanese radical avant-garde Taku Sugimoto ("Quintets", 2017).

"Paradise 94" bears the mark of the very same Modern Love (owned by Boomkat.com) that gave us Andy Stott, not coincidentally one of the least orthodox names on the new dub/techno scene, and a label that often welcomes classical elements into its productions. This debut record frames the English artist at her own personal crossroads between seasoned instrumentalist and composer still in the raw, eager to lay firmer foundations for an autonomous musical vision of her own.

A track like "To The End", made together with percussionist Beatrice Dillon, well exemplifies this hybrid, conflicted nature: a digital cut-up, chaotic at first, then subtly crackling with electroacoustic currents, crossed by synth arcs over which the weighty bowing of the cello is inscribed, exploring the microtones beneath a single note.

More "played" and dynamic is "The Critical Rush", which digs into the most abyssal registers of the strings and collides with a dramatic shattering of glass, interrupted once again by booming electronic keyboard sequences. Noise-driven frictions, both high and low, pile up in the gloomy stereophony of "Gaslighter", aided by artificial reverb, while "For JR" forces together vocal samples, sharp fast-moving trails and a placid, Bach-like organ.

Where the first side of the LP is elusive and magmatic, the second is resolute and linear: the single track "Fortified Up" is a hallucinated saturation of acoustic space achieved through the accumulation of rising vertical glissandi on the cello; a disquieting experiment in reducing to its bare essentials the dramatic effect of a single sound, multiplied and sharpened time and again, almost like a mathematical abstraction of the titanic feat accomplished by Stockhausen with his "Helicopter String Quartet".

A profile that barely emerges from the shadow: a photograph that consistently aligns the album's cover with its content, split between excessive creative frenzy and proven know-how in relation to the "contaminated" languages of contemporaneity. From here on, presumably, the vision will sharpen, and Lucy Railton will find a way to make the most of these first spontaneous buds of her talent.

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25/04/2018