Julia Kent
After years spent touring and recording with other artists and groups, most notably cello-rock pioneers Rasputina and Antony and the Johnsons, Canadian-born, Canadian-born, New York City-based Julia Kent found her own voice with her solo records. She uses multi-tracked cello, found sounds, and electronics to create solo music that has been described as "cinematic and impressionistic," "organic yet powerful," and "deeply personal and committed." She has released two full-length solo records: Delay (2007) and Green and Grey (2011), as well as an EP, Last Day in July (2010). Her music has been heard in film soundtracks and as accompaniment to theatre and dance performances, and she has toured throughout Europe and North America, including appearances at Primavera Sound in Barcelona, the Donau Festival in Austria, and the MIMI Festival in Marseille.
Her album Green and Grey was made in New York City and inspired by the intersections between the natural world and the human world. It continues Julia Kent's solo career as a maker of highly personal music. Using looped and layered cello, electronics, and recordings of natural sounds, she explores in this new instrumental record the melding of the technological and the organic, the patterns and repetitions that exist in nature and are mirrored in human creations, and the complexity and fragility of our relationships with one another and with the natural world. Without collaborators--other than the insect, weather, and wind sounds that create a sort of exoskeleton for the music--she has created an intensely personal landscape that references the way nature, however subverted and endangered by our modern world, still retains its power.
