Lori Goldston’s new album was recorded in one single continuous take with her cello, an amp and a distortion pedal as she watched a static shot of a canyon, the light slowly shifting across the landscape. Open Space lands the rigorously de-trained cellist on the New York jazz and experimental stalwart Relative Pitch.
From her recent collaborations with Laura Cannell and Greg Kelley – on the classically-minded The Deer are Small and the Rabbits are Big which she and the violinist captured quickly in Norfolk and for the visceral strains and gossamer improvisations of All Points Leaning In – to her dive into the resonances of a shattered piano as part of a quartet on Miasms and the choppy tumult of High and Low, which featured several duets with the drummer Dan Sasaki as she paid tribute to her late friend the illustrator GeneviĆØve CastrĆ©Ć©, this record still finds Goldston at her most untrammelled. She says that she hopes to provide her listeners with enough ‘room to breathe and dream’.
While examples of amplified and treated cello might stretch from metal, gothic and industrial contexts to those of classical music, jazz and experimental or outrĆ© pop – as musicians from Abdul Wadud and Hank Roberts to Arthur Russell and Mabe Fratti for instance have sought to make their instrument more prominent in the mix or else strived to cut more furrowed and disorienting kinds of grooves – still the obvious touchstones for Open Space come from drone pioneers like La Monte Young and his rock surrogates in the vein of the Velvet Underground, or more especially from the shoegaze and noise rock artists of the late eighties and early nineties whose sound was epitomised by My Bloody Valentine on Loveless. A longtime Seattleite, the cellist Goldston was linked to the alternative rock scene during that period as she famously toured with Nirvana and appeared on their MTV Unplugged in New York live set.
Sounding as much as anything like an overdriven guitar, amid all of the feedback and distortion there is still a strong melodic aspect to Open Space which might at various moments remind listeners of anyone from Loren Connors to Grouper. This is an album you can play fucking loud, so to speak, and still find yourself surreptitiously drifting only to end up somewhere totally and utterly serene.
Sometimes on Open Space the cello of Lori Goldston sounds like it is cutting into metal or stone with the rugged heft of an angle grinder, while at other moments her instrument seems as if suspended in air. It can lie pleasantly dormant, as though steeping the listener in a warm bath, then almost imperceptibly flare up to bristle and burn. There’s an aching throb on the precipice between the tracks ‘Still Standing Round’ and ‘The Way Down’ while ‘Cloudless’ with its rumbling, cleaving low tones and rippling or ribboned overtones finally spills out into the wash of ‘Wave from Heaven’.
‘Rocky Lavender Cliffs’ is restless and roiling before the album closer and title track ‘Open Space’ seems to dwell within more sustained tones, Goldston now holding the energy and atmosphere in her thrall, on what lies somewhere between a divining and a dirge while reminding me a little bit of Joy Division.
The fact that this seventy-five-minute continuous take is divvied up into ten tracks – and that the divisions between tracks often seem to fall on sustained tones and textures – gives each piece a feeling of both energy and catharsis, as though Goldston and her cello were revving up again. The album cover for Open Space features rusty curlicues of wrought iron over two grotty and scummy surfaces whose colours suggest, like much of Goldston’s work, the linkage and separation between land and the sea.
