Julia Kent - Asperities (2015)

2015 release, the fourth album by the Vancouver-born and New York-based acclaimed cellist. Julia Kent rose to prominence with Rasputina and Antony & The Johnsons. Her extensive résumé includes recent work with Swans, Aidan Baker, Rachel Grimes, Rutger Zuydervelt, Barbara Morgenstern, Library Tapes and Khan of Finland. As the title suggests, this is a record born of conflict: internal, personal and global. Universal themes. The build of pressure and the threat of violent release. Modern guilt. Modern fears. Kent draws from a rich well of emotion, the pieces deceptively rendered, each feeling like a miniature dramatic epic in its own right-sculpted and self-contained. Her work on recent film scores is very much in evidence. While cinematic in scope, there is no trite Hollywood ending here. There is tension and darkness, the edges cracked and frayed. Asperities was recorded, produced and mixed in its entirety by the artist in her New York studio. Looped cello, electronics and found sounds create a world where the technological and the organic merge in perfect symbiosis, the layers of sound peeling back to reveal a beating, bloody human heart at its center. Throughout the plaintive strains of opener "Hellebore," the prowling grace of "The Leopard," the elegant restraint of "Heavy Eyes" and the immersive closer "Tramontana," Kent's cello evokes romance and loss, a yearning for simplicity. This is the soundtrack to the transitory nature of life and the inevitability of death.