Jo Quail has another busy year already on the go. She is currently on tour in Europe and has a special show at ArcTanGent Festival slated for August 2026.
We caught up to talk to Jo about one of our records of 2025, Notan.
Notan. Where did the inspiration for the title come from and what drove you to that title?
Notan is an album that I was not planning to make, ever. It began as a series of improvisations in my friend’s garden and then I couldn’t do anything with them! Sometimes this happens where you get very, very wedded to the busk that you’ve done. There were far too many layers, too much noise, but there was something in each piece that I really, really liked. But I couldn’t see how to move and forward at the time. So what I did instead was I orchestrated the ideas out. and that became Ianus, which is a full symphony orchestra album that I’m recording in October this year. That will be out sometime next year.
Then I decided, I think I felt slightly more empowered having done that. And so I looked at Ianus and thought, right, what can I do with these pieces to bring them back to the cello so that at least I can present a different version of them in a concert setting. So I began to work on four of the pieces. So Ianus and Notan share four pieces with two separate ones each.
So I began to work on this and these four pieces, one of which was Rex, because it’s been there for a long time, these became Notan.
There are many reasons that I chose the name Notan. First of all, it’s loosely a Japanese artistic concept whereby an image is like reduced to the blacks, greyscale and white. So simplification. But it’s by no means therefore less powerful. And so, to me, Notan, is a simplification of Ianus because there’s one person playing it instead of sixty, but the pieces have their own identity, and so Notan seems fitting for that purpose.
Also, because it has this there’s a lot of opposites. So if you take the literal idea of black and white, there’s actually a lot of opposites in the album. So we have, for example, Rex, which took 15 years to settle down. And in fact, I am still messing about with sound for it. And then on the other side of the fence is First Rain, which took about half an hour to write. So we have 15 years versus half an hour.
Has it been a struggle with Rex, do you think? Or do you feel like it’s a payoff?
Good question. It’s both, if I’m allowed to have both answers to that, because it definitely was a struggle. In 2010, it was a struggle to write it, because it was my first track on my first album. That doesn’t mean that I never therefore wrote it first, but it was certainly it came out of the canon at that time. So everything was a struggle at that time because I didn’t know what it was doing. I still don’t, but I don’t care as much now! It’s been long enough that it doesn’t matter. That’s part of the process. But it has this fragility to it. I knew that I had an idea, maybe even subconsciously, of what I wanted, what I hoped the piece would be conveying, but it was fragile and broken, you know?
And the period of time then that it was no longer played or touched, it was, I don’t know, maybe seven years, eight years, and then 2020 came. I pulled it up again and that was that baptism of some description. I put a little video out on social media talking about it. I just had it running, that quartet running round around and then I suddenly just played it, and again, that was an opposite.
So we had this clean quartet and then the thing that I put under it was the biggest at the time, the biggest overdrive that I had, for no reason other than…I think I just sometimes you have to break something in order to push through again. And that was sort of, I suppose, with hindsight, maybe what I was doing. Then when I felt brave enough to start playing it live again, and it was very warmly received. That gave me a lot of confidence as well, and that probably actually shaped how I approached the cello version of Butterfly and maybe KingFisher. There was an acceptance of this juxtaposed kind of vibe. It feels like there’s a certainty; a gentle certainty.
To hear you talk about that journey gives the piece more weight, in my opinion. When you’re talking about the light and the dark, pieces like A Leaf, And Then A Key feels like there’s not much in the way of extra sounds. It feels very much like a raw, acoustic, cello piece.
You’re quite right. There’s nothing else in there. And in fact, what is left in there is all of the naturally organic sounds that somebody makes when they play the cello, so the hit on the strings, the breathing, a little bit of creaking. I worked with Jaime Gomez Arellano who mixed and mastered this record for me. His credits read like an encyclopaedia; I’ve all the time in the world for him. He’s brilliant. And so the only addition to my cello was a very careful revamp that he created in order to sit the acoustic cello in the similar environment to the electric pieces, whereby much of that was my reverbs that I’m using.
From a practical point of view, A Leaf, And Then A Key is the DNA of everything across Notan and Ianus. You’ll hear it when Ianus comes out. A Leaf, And Then A Key has been sitting around with me for a few years. Probably 2021. I find writing solo acoustic cello pieces take quite a long time because you you’re not leaning on anything that’s fancy in terms of effects. You have to tell the story with just what you what you are able to play with two hands on four strings and nothing else.
It still has to have journey and shape. With A Leaf, And Then A Key, I wondered if it was a little bit compartmentalised as a piece. I think it has a flow, but the funniest thing in the world is when I recorded it, it’s not that easy to play. When I recorded it, I recorded it really fast. When I listened back to the album, I said, bloody hell, because when I’m going to play it live, I’m not going to play it that fast because it’s screaming about everywhere. There’s a couple of technical corners you have to get into in order to do them right, you know? So I think when I was recording it, I must have had this sort of like temporary anxiety that came over me and wanted to just get through it as quickly as I could.
That’s indicative of an album being a snapshot, isn’t it?
It is.
Photo: Mike Ainscoe
You have Butterfly Dance and KingFisher at either ends of the album. They’re both huge pieces. It shows the white and black juxtaposition very well. Is that going to be an easy one to do live, do you think?
Butterfly was really, really quick to put together. Practically speaking, in terms of what one does with loops and stuff, it’s very straightforward. So I can run most of it on a two bar cycle and then the big theme is on a 64 bar cycle. Then I have enough space to play the duet over it. So much of the work that I’ve been doing is making sure that, so I build all my own sounds, as you know, I just used the GT 1000 Boss pedal. So I’ve been learning. It never stops; the huge learning curve. I’ve been making these sounds, which are for live performances, to make sure that it has the same drive and weight and depth to it that you hear in a non-PA environment.
So when you’ve got headphones on, you’re working at home or in ear monitors, there is enormous clarity of sound. When things go out for a PA, however brilliant the PA and the room is, the sounds behave differently and I know this well enough now having done so many years. So I’ve been making sure that that first E flat to C packs the power and the heft that I want it to have, largely using about 40 million compressors! That’s what I’ve been doing. I’m having a lot of fun.
Do you listen to a lot of heavier music? I’m talking metal. Do you go in for that? You’ve worked with a lot of people within that community and within that spectrum. Do you, do you take anything from those artists that you put into your own work?
Yeah, I mean, I think we have like a peddler’s pack, you know. I mean, I take something, I take inspiration from everything that I listen to, so it could be extremely heavy stuff. I mean, don’t forget heaviness. Of course is not limited to volume or on a stage and production values, I mean, I listen I listen to a lot of music live because that’s where I am normally either backstage or float about somewhere. So much of is interesting.
I never thought about this, but much of my experience of listening to very, very heavy music is either through a set of monitors on stage like God Is An Astronaut or recording or waiting to go on or having just been on with like Mono or something like that. And so I’m very used to hearing heavy music in an live environment.
Jo Quail: Website