Julia Kent – Temporal

The Leaf Label

After all these years, Julia Kent clearly understands the innate melancholy of the cello and how the listener’s impression of the instrument’s nature still resonates with us today. Her obvious love for the cello and its place in the musical firmament shines through in everything she does, and somehow manages to imbue each project with its own character.

After the dissonance of 2015’s Asperities and 2018’s meditative collaboration with Jean D.L, Temporal consists of pieces written to accompany dance and theatre productions and therein is the explanation for this album’s sense of spare elegance. Once again utilising the cello with the addition of some electronics and other sounds, Julia has constructed a heartfelt and rather emotional suite of songs using an instrument that does tug at the heartstrings in a way that no other can.

That slow sweep of gently bowed strings is a bruised backdrop to other more vibrant playing that sets the different moods that the cello produces against one another. This opening track is an undertaking that evokes the sense of seeing a ship off on a long journey. A few people huddled at the dockside in the half-light of a spectral morning as the waves gradually lure the ship away, and the sentries stand and wait until all that is left is a speck in the distance amid the dawning of a new day. That bitter-sweet sense of adventure laced with an inner ache pervades “Last Hour Story”, an insistent but subtle beat keeps the track grounded somehow; but as the loss increases, so the deep notes become sombre and ruminative. Over the course of this track (that takes up a third of the album), we never lose sight of that sweet sense of possibility.

The use of other sounds to augment the cello works really well here and prevents the album lapsing into abject introspection. The scattering electronic sounds on “Imbalance” distract the cello with their restlessness, and the impulse here for motion is greater. There is more momentum to the drama and the natural rhythm speeds up with a view to some sort of denouement. “Conditional Futures” is less obvious; a textured palette of sounds and movements like a slow passage through a hidden garden, hedges overgrown and strewn with dew-bedecked webs. It has that kind of intense detail that you probably wouldn’t expect. There are what sound like moments of piano here and there, and they really do change the feel of the pieces. The sparse electronic notes are subtly distorted on “Floating Cities”, while those on “Crepusculo” are far more plangent, rooting the cello to its half-seen dream state.

I couldn’t help thinking of flamenco on “Sheared”, the motion somehow a slow shadowy take on the sinuous Spanish dance, with what could either be the very muted castanets or somebody let loose on a typewriter. The soaring, searching cello strokes entwine with the submerged sound of bells and the whole effect is very hard to explain, yet somehow seems perfectly natural when left in Julia’s hands. The way the album swings from an inertia filled sweetness of melancholy to something more vibrant and spectral is as much down to the subtle extra ingredients as it is down to Julia’s playing.

It sounds a little like a xylophone on ‘Through The Window”, but genuinely that little addition of tinkling star-like sparkles is just enough to put you there under the pure moonlit sky, frost forming on the glass as outside the universe opens up to you. By the time the subtle lullaby of “Crepusculo” closes the album out, you realise just how emotive and far reaching the story-telling capabilities of Julia Kent are. Temporal is an album in which you can indulge, and just lay back and see where its elegant unfolding may lead you.

-Mr Olivetti-