Text by Eleni Maragkou
Sometimes, a simple encounter can leave an indelible mark. One fleeting convergence can linger long after it has passed – a moment of recognition and alignment when the senses are fully attuned, and the world feels simultaneously intimate and expansive, stretching into months, years, decades. Not A Word From Me, the new live performance by cellist and electronic composer Lucy Railton, created in collaboration with video artist Rebecca Salvadori and light designer Charlie Hope, traces one such encounter the three shared over a decade ago. Commissioned by SEMIBREVE Festival in Braga, in collaboration with CTM Festival (Berlin), DE SINGEL International Arts Centre (Antwerp), and FIBER (Amsterdam), that initial encounter ignited a mutual, kindred curiosity about how sound, light, and moving image can operate together to shape perception, provoke emotion, and engage the body. It is this layered dialogue – between cello and electronics, projected image and sculptural light – that forms its backbone.
Creating a permeating environment where sound, gesture, image, and light respond to each other, the piece draws together three distinct yet deeply interconnected artistic practices: Railton’s exploratory cello and electronic compositions, Salvadori’s highly personal video constellations, and Hope’s sculptural light and spatial environments. Each discipline is attuned to the others, responding and refracting in real time: the music shapes the choreography of light, the projections modulate how sound is experienced, and the lighting refracts both sound and image, creating an embodied sensory architecture. Emerging from over a decade of creative encounters across stages and institutions such as PAF Olomouc, Cafe Oto, ICA London, and Le Guess Who?, the collaboration continues to grow through a hybrid language of sound, image, and architecture.
At once visceral and immersive, the performance draws audiences into a sensory terrain where music, video, and light are not separate disciplines but equal, interwoven forces shaping perception. Each moment unfolds through a live synchronicity with Salvadori’s projections and Hope’s sculptural lighting. Salvadori’s signature behind-the-scenes footage collides with monochromatic abstraction; grandeur, pulse, and quiet focus oscillate to recalibrate the audience’s sense of participation and proximity subtly. Rejecting polish in favour of intimacy and friction, Not A Word From Me stages an ‘anti-show’: a stripped space where meaning emerges through possibility, and presence is felt as much in what is withheld as in what is revealed [1].
A loud whisper
The project takes its title from the second track of Railton’s 2023 album, Corner Dancer —a brief, one-minute fragment of eerie scrapes, slashes, and lullaby-like hums. Sparse in words, yet rich in texture, the multidirectional soundscape expands and contracts, its tension and visceral impact embodying the spatial focus and material intensity of Railton’s practice, which can be best described as ‘a loud whisper.’ Not A Word From Me became a kind of template for the show, Railton explains. Muted, hidden vocals against soaring, reversed strings, blasting in and out of sight – our collaboration pivots on similar systems of exposure and submersion, opacity and transparency. From the deeply personal narrative to the abstractly unreal, at the centre of it all is the rotation of sound, objects, and narrative in real time.
That rotation invites a state of constant becoming, where meaning hovers just out of reach. This fluid exchange between the tangible and the elusive creates a tension that Railton seeks to inhabit. It is in the moments of suspension and anticipation – before clarity cuts through the fog, in the silence that hovers before an answer – that Railton feels most alive in her practice. Not A Word From Me is particularly concerned with carving space for what is not typically heard or seen, submerging the listener into visceral and psychoacoustic states. We need time for our senses to open, for perception to shift,’ she says. ‘I think my past collaborations have taught me to be patient for what will unfold, and to trust in the beauty of material even in its messy, unfinished, uncertain form. I’ve never been disappointed by the long wait.
Railton’s practice reflects a lifelong pursuit of borderless sound, one that moves fluidly and expertly between contemporary composition, experimental music, improvisation, and popular performance. This approach now finds new expression in live collaboration. ‘I’m always zooming in on the material – transforming, distorting, amplifying silence, placing melody in the dark,’ she says. Here, she stretches the limits of the cello and vielle through electronics and amplified objects, dissolving the boundaries between acoustic and electronic domains.
Her collaborative approach is informed by decades of experience working with diverse artists, including Soundwalk Collective, Patti Smith, Laurel Halo, and Akram Khan. Collaboration is a practice of listening, she says. With our collaboration, we’re exploring a moving score where objects, sounds, and narrative rotate and cross over each other spontaneously, sound becomes material, and light becomes sound. Railton unearths this hybrid sonic world through this new vessel of materials, where form constantly expands and contracts, and the trio is guided in real-time by the ways their sounds, images, and light collide on stage.
Visceral dialogues
Railton’s soundworlds find a natural dialogue with Salvadori’s video practice, whose films are constellations of personal yet elusive fragments: portraits of moments, people, and environments. For Salvadori, film is a space of experimentation where process and outcome coexist, intertwined with reflections on friendship within London’s music culture and the tradition of portraiture. These elements form the thematic building blocks of an evolving archive of relationships that the video artist continually revisits in new projects.
Salvadori’s first collaboration with Railton took place over a decade ago, in 2014, at the PAF Festival of Film and Animation in the Czech Republic. Since then, Salvadori has created artwork for Railton’s vinyl releases, Paradise 94 and Corner Dancer. I always return to the archive because I find it fascinating to trace the passage of time and observe how the relationships involved in making the work develop and transform,’ Salvadori says. In fact, one of the outtake photographs from that process became part of a section of the show. Salvadori’s collaboration with Hope has also been ongoing and consistent, each project a new exploration of the intricate relationship between film and light. The interplay with light and sound reshapes the role of projection. We wanted the screen to function not just as a surface, but as a reflective material in dialogue with Charlie’s lighting,’ she explains. It’s about inhabiting the moving image rather than passively watching it. Each element has its own space, allowing moments of intimacy and ambiguity to emerge naturally.
In that sense, Not A Word From Me feels like a continuation of an ongoing conversation, rather than the start of something new, Salvadori reflects. Film is a space where process and outcome coexist. Themes of friendship, music, and portraiture continue from earlier work, while also forming the foundation for an evolving archive of relationships. This ongoing dialogue allows each performance to build on past explorations while remaining responsive to the immediacy of the present. There was also the process of deconstructing parts of our practices to recombine and layer them, says Hope. Everything felt part of a larger, ongoing conversation, yet new and unique —a sort of portrait of the present moment in our practices.
Psycho-visual synaesthesia
It’s tempting to think of light design as purely aesthetic, a visual afterthought. Yet the narrow spectrum of light perceptible to the human eye shapes how we experience our surroundings, influencing everything from the way we perceive colour to how we move in and inhabit space. In immersive performance, light is as much about shadow and absence as it is about illumination. Both illumination and darkness recalibrate sensation and perception, foregrounding a more sensuous, affective mode of engagement. Hope’s practice explores light as both sculptural and ephemeral, capable of defining form while simultaneously dissolving it. He is fascinated by how lighting structures can operate visually and somatically in relation to other elements, as well as by the interplay between revealing and withholding. In Not A Word From Me, this approach continues his long-term research into time perception, the relationship between the mechanical and organic, and the creation of interconnected ecosystems where sound, moving image, and light are recombined and layered.
Hope often creates custom systems where light becomes an active presence, reconfiguring the sensory and spatial dynamics of performance. For Not A Word From Me, Hope crafted reflectors that introduce tactility to the light: optical membranes slowly revolving like a metronome in the space, giving a new materiality to the intangible. These sculptural elements interact dynamically with Salvadori’s moving images and Railton’s multidirectional soundscapes, shaping the audience’s perception in real time. His practice, like Railton’s, seeks to work in the threshold where sensory input becomes a kind of emotional or spatial cognition. Railton’s compositions don’t unfold linearly but envelop the listener, activating a heightened bodily awareness of space, vibration, and direction, shaping how sound is felt in space: the way frequencies resonate, move, or seem to inhabit physical volume. In light, Hope senses a similar potential. I wonder if there is a parallel with the way we see – psycho-visually? he wonders. There is an analogy between how the mind perceives and interprets sound beyond its physical properties and the way light and image can manipulate perception, evoke emotion, and disorient our sense of presence or alignment. Both can blur the line between physical and emotional experience, creating altered states of perception.
In The Spell of the Sensuous, David Abram writes that our perception is relational. Our sensory organs are not separate instruments acting in isolation, but form an interconnected assemblage, through which the senses actively participate in a world that is alive and vibrating with presence. The meeting between Lucy Railton, Rebecca Salvadori, and Charlie Hope carries this same trace of elemental attention: an attunement that shapes how they listen, respond, and create together. As writer Hannah Pezzack argues in her essay on Abram’s work [2], it is this world, deeply felt and interconnected, that we must attune to and re-orientate ourselves towards. Not A Word From Me reminds us that to truly inhabit the world in all its expansiveness is to move with its textures, rhythms, and resonances.
Lucy Railton, Rebecca Salvadori and Charlie Hope will perform Not A Word From Me at SEMIBREVE on Saturday, 25th, 2025.
