Bela Emerson

Experimental electric cellist Bela Emerson conducts her recordings according to free improvisation combined with live processing. Loops play a big part in her music, and layers are built up and modulated, but this is no mere loop pedal album, Emerson's music mutates and morphs in a highly non-linear fashion, and Hespera certainly doesn't sound like something that was composed on the spot. While there are elegant drone miniatures like opener 'Brandywine Shoal', the album also yields more radical works: the extreme trilling of 'Maraschino' arrives from out of nowhere, following on from clickety-clack electroacoustics. Meanwhile, 'Phosphorous' is more reliant on almost industrial jittering rhythmic figures, and '5htp' presents Emerson as a one-woman ensemble, all of which comes together to present Emerson as a skilled and eclectically minded performer.