Musician and composer Lucy Railton has shared details of the first release to document her solo cello works, Blue Veil, a deeply intimate, meditative set of compositions recorded at Église du Saint-Esprit in Paris. This new album is set for release on Ideologic Organ on 18th April 2025 and invites listeners into the realm of precision-tuned states of resonance, states made manifest through Railton’s careful traversal of her cello’s most subtle acoustic characteristics as they harmonically interlock with the mind’s embodied modalities of attention and imagination…
“Over the past two decades, Railton has been at the forefront of contemporary music, operating at the intersection of Classical and contemporary music, electronic composition, improvisation and popular music performance. As a performer and collaborator, she has contributed to major works with artists including Soundwalk Collective and Patti Smith, Akram Khan, Philippe Parreno, Kali Malone and Stephen O’Malley, Peter Zinovieff, Simon Fisher Turner and the Derek Jarman Estate, Harmonic Space, Phill Niblock, Laurel Halo, Beatrice Dillon and many others.
Her first solo cello work, Blue Veil arises out of, is sustained in and finally dissolves back into Railton’s momentary presence with her intimate connection to the cello – a way of hearing that allows for a deeper engagement with harmonic resonance, one that opens a space for immediate encounters of mind and sound.
Railton’s exploratory practice of harmonic perception emerges from a focus on the physical qualities of intervallic and chordal sounds, their textural qualities, degrees of friction, and inner pulsations. Composing in the moment guided by resonances within the cello’s body, her own, and their shared vibrational space, Railton moves through Blue Veil by giving sounds what they ask for: sounds of pure texture manifesting as a move through temporal transparency, sounds of rough texture marking regions of dimensionally dense space.
Railton’s creative and highly refined use of just intonation harmony deforms sound’s inner movements in ways that suggest a mode of listening that actively supplies imagery of sounds implied or completely absent rather than merely savouring those fully present. This active mode of “listening-with”, playfully and semi-metaphorically referred to by Railton as “sing-along music”, allows listening to reflexively participate in the music’s movement as it gradually passes through richly saturated domains of harmonic imagination. And just as the precision-tuned tones of Blue Veil lose their individuality when fusing multifaceted uniformity, listening’s structures of reference and recognition dissolve into nameless waves of intensity, continuously unfolding themselves upon and merging with the listener.
Blue Veil is the result of a deep exploration of the inner worlds of tuning, an undertaking in turn informed by and emerging out of Railton’s realisations of the music of Catherine Lamb and Ellen Arkbro, her collaborative work with Kali Malone and Stephen O’Malley as well as her interpretive practice in performing the work of Maryanne Amacher, Morton Feldman and others.”
THE ORGAN 