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Julia Kent, "Asperities"
Like her last record (2013's Character) and much of her solo material, Asperities is Kent, her cello, and a tasteful amount of processing and effects. While her list of collaborators are a veritable who’s-who of modern experimental music, her solo work is just as strong, but stripped down and intimate enough to place all the emphasis on her and her instrument. These restrained arrangements, however, serve to bring out the finest and most nuanced details in her playing and strong sense of composition.
Unsurprisingly, the deep, at times friction-laden sound of bowed cello strings feature heavily throughout the nine pieces that make up Asperities.Opener "Hellebore" exemplifies this, with its mostly untreated passages being slowly layered atop one another.The sound and dynamics are clearly that of a traditional cello, but eventually the swells become a massive, cavernous wall of tense music that fails to relent until its conclusion."Heavy Eyes" is another song in which the traditional sounds of Kent's instrument remain at he forefront, with the other elements making for subtle, but effective accents.
Compositions such as "Flag of No Country" and "Invitation to the Voyage" feature Kent opting for plucked, rather than bowed playing, and have a less tonal, more overall rhythmic feel.Both of these pieces, however, feature her blending in the more sustained tones (both via her playing style and through effects) as a backdrop to the mix, resulting in rich works that carry the same intensity as a much larger ensemble would struggle to meet.On a song like "Lac Des Arcs," both her playing and the arrangements take on a more somber, bleak sensibility, which contrasts the more boisterous, aggressive pieces on the album extremely well."Empty States" is similar, with an overall murky mix to the song, which starts from slow, heavy creaking noises and expands into a more intense, fleshed out piece with a tasteful amount of distortion at the end.
I found most memorable were the pieces where she expanded upon just focusing on the cello and into other instrumentation and heavier sonic treatments.The early moments of "Terrain" embody this perfectly, where a jerky synthetic rhythm underscores deep, churning layers of cello to create an amazing, tangible sense of tension that builds and grows even once the rhythms are removed.The concluding "Tramontana" also features a bit more in the way of processing and effects, with bits of delay and reversed playing fleshing the song out before concluding on an aggressively dissonant note, both in her playing and her processing of the sound.
Julia Kent's solo work has always emphasized the sound of her singular cello playing above most other instrumentation, and Asperities is no different.Because of that, anyone who is not a fan of the instrument (and it being the primary focus of an album) may not find this record as engaging.However, her sense of composition and virtuoso playing ability results in an always changing and evolving piece of music, and the record ends up being a much more diverse endeavor than it may seem.Kent captures a plethora of moods and emotions here, in a way that few artists who focus so heavily on a single instrument can.
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