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Few musicians have scaled the progressive rock battlements with such elegance as Jo Quail. From multiple collaborations with post-rock and extreme metal bands – MONO to Enslaved and beyond – to her own steady flow of extraordinary, genre-melting releases, the cellist is acknowledged as an essential player in the creative underground.
Part of Quail’s charm is that her music is pointedly alive: a never-ending work-in-progress that she returns to in performance, feeding off the tunes, tones and spontaneous ideas that appear to magically coalesce in her songs.
This is particularly prominent on Notan, which features a brand-new version of Rex, a song originally found on her solo debut From The Sea. In its earlier form, Rex was dazzling but uncertain. Here, it’s expanded and transformed.
It uses its 10 minutes to highlight the intense compositional confidence and freedom she now enjoys as alien drones, scattershot noise and a chorus of brooding cello lines collide in hazy splendour, occasionally recalling the vexed classical experiments of Scott Walker’s later works along the way.
The rest of Notan is similarly uninterested in the post-rock status quo. The opening Butterfly Dance is genuinely shocking, with its scabrous riffs, disintegrating static and deep, underlying sense of unease.
In contrast, A Leaf, And Then A Key, a riveting solo piece largely bereft of embellishment, is enigmatic and haunting. Deft cello work swirls and shape-shifts on the epic Embrace, which ebbs and flows like the breath of the planet’s lungs, dancing around the edge of heaviness with sporadic drones, gorgeous synth interjections and distant tonal echoes conspiring to overwhelm and hypnotise.
As with her commissioned work, The Cartographer, Quail’s music frequently makes accidental and hazy reference to prog’s dark, esoteric corners, with hints of freewheelers like Art Zoyd and Univers Zero hovering in the sonic background.
Both the new Rex and Embrace fit that description – but the sophistication of the arrangements has advanced so much since her debut that comparisons to other artists now seem redundant.
The quiet, calming, piano-led First Rain may bear a passing resemblance to the likes of Nils Frahm and Max Richter, but in the context of all this febrile invention, it’s a uniquely disarming moment.
It leads into KingFisher, the most accessible of these pieces. Quail’s cello, multilayered and sumptuous, weaves a compelling, emotional tale of love, light and hope, as percussion and electronics crash along its musical shores. There’s still no one else quite like her.
