Blue Veil

Lucy Railton’s new album Blue Veil isolates the moment when a cello’s bow makes contact with the strings and presents it as a miniature Big Bang, a crucible of tension and friction that burns fiercely on a level that’s too small to see. In a fascinating interview with German writer Stephan Kunze, the UK composer and cellist described the experience of playing her instrument as like “standing next to a guitar amp,” and Blue Veil does everything it can to make you feel the vibrations short of grabbing your face and pressing it up against the strings.

Though Railton found a nice old Paris church in which to record these seven pieces, we don’t hear any of the space in the music. Rather, she distills some sort of platonic ideal of cello-ness. You get an acute sense of the instrument as a machine, yet it’s seemingly stripped of its constituent parts: no wood, no wire, no horsehair, just a deadly and wicked thrum. You feel like you’re inside the instrument, or maybe like you’ve shrunk down to ant size and are running along one of the strings as the bow bears down on you. The music sounds like a slumbering beast at times, breathing with each stroke, betraying its human source even when the eerie just-intonation overtones start to sound like theremins or outer-space rumblings.

This is Railton’s first solo cello album, but she’s been a regular presence in the classical avant-garde for a while, organizing a long-running concert series at London’s Café Oto and co-founding the London Contemporary Music Festival in between gigs with the likes of Bat for Lashes and Bonobo, and Bach recordings on ECM. She might be best-known for her work with Kali Malone, who co-produced Blue Veil with Stephen O’Malley. The same trio recorded the awesome pandemic-era drone album Does Spring Hide Its Joy, which seems pulled from the same inky depths as the music on Blue Veil; both records use barely audible sine waves to heighten the low end, contributing to the feeling of the music seeping into your bones that Railton must feel as she plays her mighty instrument.

In a sense, Blue Veil puts you in the driver’s seat, breaking the polite distance between player and listener that usually manifests in the sense of space Railton rejects here. She uses subtle electronic sine waves not as an embellishment but to bring out qualities within the cello itself, namely the physicality of her experience of playing it. There are times when the timbre of the cello sounds hyperreal, almost like a computer preset; Railton displays little dynamic range as she patiently, almost surgically traces the edges of cool minor chords and discordant clusters. If you were to illustrate Blue Veil, it would look like seven streaks of black ink, or maybe seven slashes in a canvas from a very large knife.

It’s austere, formidable music, but by fitting within a tight 40-minute package, it endears itself to listeners who might not know much about drone music—for instance, ambient fans familiar with Railton’s work with Malone, or in the trio PDP III, with Britton Powell and Huerco S., but not quite ready to make the leap to blasting Phill Niblock at deafening volume. If that’s you, here’s your gateway drug. For the rest of us who already love such spartan music, here’s another album to plug straight into your bones.