Drone 💫

 

While it’s been active for nearly fifteen years, recently Ideologic Organ - the renowned imprint run and curated by Stephen O'Malley - has steadily picked up pace and its level of ambition, offering a platform and home for the work of a diverse range of historical artists like Ákos Rózmann and Ustad Zia Mohiuddin Dagar, as well as some of the most exciting and ambitious voices working in experimental music today, including The Necks, Lukas De Clerck, Oren Ambarchi, Jessika Kenney & Eyvind Kang, Kali Malone, Nina Garcia, Nate Wooley, and numerous others. So far in 2025, they’ve already had a great run, and now they’re back with one of their most exciting albums of the year so far: “Blue Veil”, the first release to document the solo cello work of musician and composer Lucy Railton. A stunningly beautiful and creatively rigorous immersion within a complex, deeply meditative realm of harmonics and glacial structure, it’s easily among the most striking ambitious releases we’ve yet to encounter in Railton’s stellar and highly celebrated career. Issued in two glorious editions - a black vinyl edition, limited to 700 copies, and a CD housed in a 6-panel digisleeve, complete with Obi strip - across the work’s duration Railton breaths a fierce sense of life into the fields of acoustic minimalism, just-intonation, and drone.  

Lucy Railton “Blue Veil” (LP / CD)
	First emerging onto the London experimental music scene during the 2000s - founding the noted new music series, Kammer Klang, at Cafe Oto, as well as co-founding the London Contemporary Music Festival - the British cellist and composers, Lucy Railton, was trained at the New England Conservatory in Boston and the Royal Academy of Music. Since relocating to Berlin, and having collaborated with numerous artists across a range of musical idioms, Railton is arguably most well known as a solo artist, in addition to her work with Kali Malone, Catherine Lamb, Beatrice Dillon, and Russell Haswell. Over the course of the 40-minute duration of the piece, Railton’s highly focused and subtly virtuosic playing draws a deep sense of humanity and emotion from the shifting densities of texture and tone, emphasising the physical qualities of intervallic and chordal sounds. While most easily cast within the realm of drone because of its use of sustained tones and highly focused sonic palette, “Blue Veil” features too much structure - shifting between tones like a glacially paced organ dirge - for such a reductive definition. Like many of her immediate peers, as well as minimalists like La Monte Youngor composers like James Tenney before her, Railton deafly harnesses the use of just intonation harmony to draw hidden dimensions - beating patterns, otoacoustic emissions, combination tones, etc. - from the harmonic interactions. This active mode of “listening-with”, playfully and semi-metaphorically referred to by Railton as “sing-along music”, encourages reflexive participation in the music’s movement.