Dreamy and wistful melancholia from a chamber axis, accessible to all.

Release Date: 1st March 2024

Label: Self-released

Format: CD / digital

Probably a name new to most, unless you are a crate digger completist of commendable proportions, but it isn’t inconceivable you have heard her playing. Part of the St. Etienne live and studio strings ensemble, the Oxford based cellist is also a member of the eclectic Brickwork Lizards, who brew up an extravagant mix of Arabic with gypsy jazz and hip-hop. This, her latest project, is a string and piano quartet, featuring, also, Jane Griffiths, Vanessa McNaught and Ashton Gray. Gray is the pianist, with McNaught on viola, and Griffiths, intriguingly, attributed to fiddle, rather than the violin, which the initial mood of the album might suggest. (But something I certainly have no issue with.) This is a re-launch, sort of, with a soft early release last May, this time with a bit more razzmatazz.

The album opens up with Sweet Tomorrow, with sombre drawn out strings immediately setting up a tone of maudlin majesty. Lyne’s cello feels at the forefront, not that McNaught and Griffiths aren’t adding bittersweet textures of their own. Long Road then pipes up with some sparklier piano, tinkling evocatively ahead the strings slotting in. The mood is becoming more hopeful, immediately, if still retaining a degree of wistfulness. On this stark end of Feb morning, it has just the qualities to bring forth hopes for the future. Solent Dreaming then begins with a pastoral folk melody. That, geography aside, it wouldn’t be amiss on albums by Duncan Chisholm or, thinking cello in specific, by Su-a Lee. As it limbers up, waltzing between tempos, none too energetic, I am taken completely in. This is top notch.

Piano returns for That One Moment, which has an Italianate feel. the cello weaving sinuous lines that glide beneath the paired strings that float above. Describing the song, Lyne says “it’s a very exposed piece to perform, where one false move can make it all fall apart“, and it has that sense of teetering on a high wire, a metaphor for “the vulnerability of life and relationships, and how everything can change in an instant”. In the hands of the quartet it hold together just fine, Lou, I should add. Then, having reflected on her mother (Long Road) and late father (Solent Dreaming), the flavour of family returns for Elsie’s Song. Elsie is her daughter, the opening notes, that become the recurring theme, courtesy of Elsie, who found the combination of notes herself. More so, as she “wrote” the notes down, asking then her Ma how they sounded. Almost a jazzy progression, with a flavour of Bruce Hornsby, it augurs well for Elsie’s future, her mother adding a string formation that bathes the notes in a warm glow.

Goya refers not to the Spanish artist but to an Urdu word that can translate as ‘seemingly’ or ‘as if’, here conferring the way imagination can fly with an idea, be it story or melody. A slow intro, a real once upon a time mood, if you like, which then sends the music soaring, with an assertive piano motif that sees it wander over the rooftops, gazing down. Or that’s what it seems to say to me, never one at a loss to be carried away. Day Off shows what happen when Lyne, too, let herself getting carried away, coming to her over a long train journey with her children. At a time of her life when she was processing a lot of grief, it has a remarkable melody, the percussion of the tracks just about apparent in the piano pattern that runs along, under the mournful string melody. Even topper notch, if there be such a thing, with Saudade Tacita to round things off. A gentle dance with a graceful sway to it, I’m familiar with the word from Antonio Carlos Jobim’s Chega De Saudade, not realising the Portuguese word is actually akin to ‘longing’. Tacita means ‘unspoken’ and this track captures that essence perfectly, and ends the album with a melancholic flourish. Lovely.

Here’s a taster, Solent Dreaming:

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