Cellist and composer Julia Kent has been on my mind and in my ears for years. Beginning in 2013 with Character, then 2015’s Asperities. I pre-ordered her latest, Temporal, on Bandcamp and was so excited for the full release I blindly hit “Buy” when I received an email alert from her Bandcamp page about a new release even though it turned out to be a notice that Asperities was re-issued on vinyl!
Temporal is an aching beauty of a record. From Julia:
Temporal is a meditation on the transitory and fragile nature of existence.
It is also the calm after the storm of Asperities moving like a slow churn, twisting and turning and wrapping cello around electronics and processed voices.
The electronic manipulations are subtler, with Julia sampling voices from a theatre production and processing them into unrecognisable textures: ghosts of the source material. “I included the processed voices to acknowledge the genesis of the music and also because I wanted to incorporate vocals in a way that turned voice into texture, and blurred the lines between sonic elements.”
If you listen in close, especially in the dark and quiet, you may find that you lose yourself in the mix, becoming blurred with the sonic elements. Of course I encourage this kind of listening and Julia Kent has a knack for making it easy.
Listen here and buy there:
