“The biggest lesson I learned through Notan was how to distil the story – not to make it less ambitious or dramatic, but really refine what I wanted to say musically within the parameters I set for myself”. London-based cellist Jo Quail speaking to Julian Marszalek in issue 164 from PROG Magazine, describing the details of her complexity on her new album, Notan.
Quail has been around since 2010, releasing seven studio albums between From The Sea, Caldera, Five Incantations, Rosebud, which featured her collaboration with Eraldo Bernoochi and FM Einheit, her breakthrough Exsolve in 2018, For the Benefit of All, and The Cartographer. Now, she’s come out of the tidal-waving aspects of the sea with her eighth album Notan.
The title Notan, according to the article in PROG Magazine, comes from a Japanese concept, simplifying art by using shades of black, white, and grey. From the moment ‘Butterfly Dance’ begins, it draws this distortion that Quail uses her bow on the cello strings to create this nightmarish terror which brings to mind the dooming sounds of Black Sabbath’s Tony Iommi during the Paranoid-era.
You feel the pedals rumbling, the howling aspects of a world gone wrong, and sludge metallic textures Quail brings upon her cello, creating her own take of the doom metal genre. And this time, she’s bringing in the full gear to launch a full-scale assault.
‘Rex’ has this growling, yet unlimited force of nature that sends shivers down your spine in a reverbing effect Quail puts into the middle of this post-apocalyptic wasteland. Very kosmische, very brutal, and very ominous to the composition, unfolding in front of the listener’s eyes as Jo uses the tritone effect for a brief moment in her arrangements.
‘Embrace’ continues in the tradition of the eerie, spookiness of a world gone horribly wrong. Here, Quail has envisioned of an infected 1980s landscape set in a European country that has the city in lock down. You could feel pin dropping momentum’s, the sense of loneliness, the infection spreading throughout an entire nation, and no chance for a cure.
She is bringing it all to the reality checks unfolding in front of the listener’s eyes. And she can take it to a whole other level that just mesmerises you whenever she takes her electronics to the next location which is in the closing track ‘KingFisher’. It has this helicopter approach, looking upon the landscape, viewing Great Britain in all of its glory across the beauty, the structures, and its wonderful countryside that Quail has flown upon the land.
Tense, chill factors, and electronic-orchestrations, Jo’s new album is set with a mesmerising set of unknown worlds that she has unfolded to bring 2025 to a standstill. Yes, it is haunted and, in your face, but that’s what makes it Notan so good is that she wants to give us a big wake-up call for the nightmare that’s about to unfold.
