Oliver Coates is a young, gifted cellist who graduated from the Royal Academy of Music with the highest degree result in the institution's history. He has been artist in residence at London's Southbank Centre since 2009 and has played with top orchestras but, as his first solo album amply demonstrates, he is not inclined to keep within the familiar boundaries of a safe classical repertoire.
The contrasting moods of the album's eight tracks have more in common with contemporary electronica but it would be foolish to attempt to pigeonhole it as a just another collection of experimental ambience.
Indeed, Coates rejects the term experimental as this implies something unfinished. The pieces here are so meticulously complete that you can well understand why he resents the suggestion that they are merely works in progress. There is a thoroughly modern quality but, then again, as Coates dryly remarked in a Time Out interview "All music is modern if you play it now".
Recorded outside the confines of a studio in churches, tombs or disused oil rigs, it incorporates field recordings from railway stations at night and is a record that forsakes any orthodox notions of time and space.
It begins withThe Room Is The Resonator, a slow atmospheric piece by David Fennessy where, over the course of twelve minutes, Coates muted cello resonate over the fragile drone of a harmonium and echoic reverb effects which leaves the listener wondering if repeated percussive sounds are footsteps or someone knocking at the door.
This track is followed by two contrasting works by Max de Wardener, Cello & Autoharps and Cello & Whirlies. The first has long melodies and a regular, slightly ominous, pulse while the second has a more open free-ranging structure like the soundtrack to an elaborate playground game.
A lightly plucked version of Squarepusher's short and playful Tommib Help Buss softens us before the most challenging piece on the album : a brilliantly played live recording of Kottos by the late avant-garde Greek composer Iannis Xenakis. Named after a mythical giant with a hundred arms, Xenakis wanted to allude to the fury and virtuosity of this creature and this explains the heavy grinding and frequently discordant harmonies of the astonishing piece.
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There are calmer refrains on Ralmondas Runsas by Laurence Crane written in 2002 which uses a polyphonic curved bow, yet the sustained chords again have a menacing quality
The Clouds Flew Round With The Clouds is a haunting piece by Larry Goves in which Coates accompanies a treated piano sample from a recording of Chopin's Nocturne in B Major which slowly decays in the manner of William Basinski's Disintegration Loops.
The closing track is a cover of Roy Harper's Another Day with multi-tracked cello parts. This the only track to feature distinct vocals. Recorded somewhere off the coast of Norway, Chrysanthemum Bear takes her cues not from Harper's own rendition but from Elizabeth Fraser's ethereal version with This Mortal Coil.
The title of the album is a line from Norman MacCaig's nautical poem of 1987 'Fore and Aft' . In this poem, the islands are always distant, like a perpetual mirage; something seen but always beyond reach: "Between them we sail / Towards the blessed islands/where all voices are sweet/and no door is shut".
In Coates' informative sleeve notes, he writes of "music as plenipotentiary for emotion" where the beauty comes from the total abstraction of existing in the moment; something you feel but can never touch.
What is so thrilling about this record is that it covers a broad range of styles to give the sense of an artist free of any narrow confines ("no door is shut"). Coates open mindedness is contagious and forces the listener to discard any preconceptions of what cello music should sound like.
Oliver Coates' website
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