Gabriella Smith & Gabriel Cabezas - Lost Coast
Gabriella Smith & Gabriel Cabezas - Lost Coast
On June 25th, Gabriella Smith and Gabriel Cabezas release Lost Coast, seven tracks of original music composed by Smith for intricate layers of cello and voice, inspired by her reflections on climate change, which she has seen devastate her home state of California. “I felt like my home was being destroyed — I needed some way to express grief for everything we have already lost and anger that so little is being done to address it,” says Smith. “Honestly, I am really pissed about it.”
Lost Coast deals with the grief, loss, rage, fear, and hopelessness experienced as a result of climate change, as well as the joy, beauty, and wonder the composer has felt in the world’s last wild places.
Cellist Gabriel Cabezas has been working with Smith since the two were roommates together as undergraduates at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. “We listened to and talked about music all the time,” says Cabezas. “We have been talking about making this record for about a decade, but I’m so glad we made it now — the process was so collaborative — real ideas thrown at the wall in different configurations to see what works. This is definitely not how I work with most composers. The performance was a very big part of the compositional process.”
The album opens with Bard of a Wasteland, featuring the composer in a new role as vocalist. While this song was one of the last written for the album, it came to reframe the rest of the work. “I knew Lost Coast had somehow come to be about climate change, even though that’s not what I originally intended, and I wanted some track to show that,” says Smith. “So Bard of a Wasteland, with lyrics, evolved into a kind of prelude or exposition, and I really started thinking of the rest of the album as an expression of that raw emotion.”
After Bard of a Wasteland, the album features the epic, three-part, title work Lost Coast. Originally conceived as a concerto for cello and orchestra, this modified take on the piece uses only layers of Cabezas’s cello, Smith’s unaffected vocals, and found percussion. Despite the minimal instrumentation, the work’s meticulous production creates an impression of forces not only as powerful as a full symphony orchestra but also completely original. The work was initially inspired by a solo backpacking trip Smith took through California’s Lost Coast, a portion of the coastline so riddled with cliffs, the famed Highway 1 has to be diverted inland for a hundred miles. As Smith hiked, she had to keep a tide log handy, as the hiking trail was repeatedly washed away as high tide retook the area.
Swept is the emotional climax of the album. Though the track sounds electronic, it was entirely pieced together from Cabezas’s torn and torqued acoustic cello playing. This is a raw expression of frustration in all its extreme beauty. Tarn pulls us back from the brink, to the cello-percussive song-like character that opened the record, and Rise sends us off into the world with determination and something like hope.
Released on June 25, 2021