Clarice Jensen: For This From That Will Be Filled (LP, Miasmah, March 2018)

It’s no secret that I’m a sucker for some cello-based drone music, and Clarice Jensen has provided four rather dreamy examples of it here. The first track, bc, was composed in collaboration with the late and sorely lamented Jóhann Jóhannsson, and sounds very much like a tribute to William Basinski, so that’s ticking a whole bunch of boxes for me already. Cello Constellations was written for her by composer, theoretician, and inventor Michael Harrison, and does some uncanny things with harmonics and tunings and multi-tracking. On the flip side are the two parts of the title track, which are Jensen’s own compositions: the first is a spiky little number made of staccato and feedback; the second is a slow-burner that is straight up drone for about its first four minutes, before gradually a melody starts to emerge, and somewhere around the ten-minute mark it briefly and miraculously achieves a sort of Lark-Ascending-style lightness. I must admit that, on my first listen, I wondered whether this album might be a little… academic, maybe? But since then it’s really gotten under my skin. Perhaps not essential listening for all, but for connoisseurs of the sub-genre, one to treasure.

I bought this from Boomkat. They call it Modern Classical / Ambient.