Cello Blue
David Darling, the "Lord of Largo," returns with another album of slow-motion melodies and cello textures. Although he's recorded many albums in the interim, this is really a follow-up to 1993's8-String Religion. That CD, unlike his more austere recordings for ECM, was a highly produced affair, with electronically processed cello, overdubbed with piano, a touch of synthesizer, and some environmental sounds.Cello Bluefollows suit as Darling creates a richly sonorous world, full of melancholy and yearning, an interior rumination that opens up into a world of cloud-strewn skies and refracted sunshine.  Layering pizzicato cello against languid bowed lines with droplets of piano, Darling creates enveloping soundscapes only occasionally shortchanged by pedestrian synthesizer programming. However, one listen to the serene lullaby of Darling's title track or the delicate pastoral expanse of "Morning," and it's evident that Darling, along withTim Storyand a few others, forms the foundation of ambient chamber music.--John Diliberto