not an elegy, by Leila Bordreuil

not an elegy

by Leila Bordreuil

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cellostuff These are amazing sonic landscapes. It's damn hard to sustain the level of intensity that you find in these pieces - bravo.

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Includes an 8 panel insert with images and text. 50% of profits go to Club A Kitchen (opencollective.com/club-a-kitchen).

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	1.	For Tamio 19:50		buy track
	2.	Past Continuous 17:54

about

From Boomkat Editions:

First pinging our radar with her ‘Headflush’ album for Catch Wave back in 2019, Leila Bordreuil has a tactile, extreme approach to the cello, one that focuses on its visceral aspects in a way that mimics the most spirited, fraught and melancholy human emotions. Despite the complex nature of her playing, you can trace Bordreuil's lineage back to Arthur Russell’s defining ‘World Of Echo’ in methodology and spirit - Leila plays with no processing or effect pedals, everything stems from the player, her instrument, and their surroundings.

On ‘For Tamio’ - Leila performs in tribute to her collaborator and saxophonist Tamio Shiraishi, whose late night performances at the Spring Street subway, 10 stops away from Ralph Avenue, greatly inspired her own approach to capturing and playing with resonance in the subway. For just shy of 20 mins, she makes the air burn and buckle with a combustible grasp of loud/quiet dynamics and keening discord that has us seat-edge by the end. The setting is evocative to the extreme - the usually chaotic and bustling subway station now emptied of its usual inhabitants, reclaimed as a performance space in which Leila played late into the night - accompanied by memories and echoes of life, as well as a person living in the subway station who started dancing to her music, an engrossed audience of one.

In contrast, ‘Past Continuous’ on the flipside was recorded in Leila’s building’s hallway, where she attached a brick to the pedal of a broken upright piano and angled her microphones in a way that gave the illusion of a large reverberant room. Adding sinewaves to enhance natural frequencies, the result is a heartbeat sketch that operates at barely perceptible levels of tonality, working in a liminal space with almost hallucinatory, ghostly overtones and a colossal sub that speaks to the anxiety dreams of a megatropolis in stasis.

‘Not An Elegy’ is a grippingly stark work that owes as much to the city’s history of jazz as it does to experimental classical forms. It's an uneasy but deeply life-affirming trip through the dense fog of memory and modern anxiety, coaxed by a player whose hands shape, and whose feelings ooze through the recordings in a way that’s impossible not to be affected by in the deepest sense. It’s a remarkable document of a time, and an artist, right on the cusp.

credits

released March 4, 2021

All songs performed by Leila Bordreuil on acoustic cello with no effects pedals.

“For Tamio” recorded by Bayley Sweitzer at the Ralph Ave A/C subway stop, Brooklyn, NY in August 2020.

“Past Continuous” recorded by Leila Bordreuil at home in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, NY in May and August 2020.

Mixed by Leila Bordreuil
Mastered by Rashad Becker

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about

Leila Bordreuil New York

leilabordreuil.com

discography

Snow Day

Aug 2022
not an elegy

Mar 2021
Headflush

Jul 2019
Hollow

May 2017
DUST

Jul 2021
vol. 1

Apr 2021
Live at Pageant Soloveev

Apr 2020
La Brute

Jan 2017
The Caustic Ballads

Jan 2014

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