When experimental cellist Jo Quail was commissioned to create a long-form piece of music to showcase at one of Europe’s best-known underground music festivals, she let her imagination run riot. The Cartographer finds her diving into even proggier waters with an artful blending of wild ideas. Prog catches up with the British musician to find out more and discover her ambitious plans for the future.

Words: Dom Lawson

Mapping out a great future: Jo Quail.

Images: Nick Hodgson

“One of the identifying aspects of prog music is that you have the opportunity to develop within a long-form structure, and that interests me greatly.”

“The night cleaves, revealing shape beyond the road’s unboundaried form, While restless winds of craft and lore coil in transient song, The korax dives the triple seas and hunts the silence of unbroken thought. Inside the gyre time waits with slow stone flame. Draw close to me.”

Well established as prog’s (and indeed Prog’s) favourite cellist, Jo Quail has been producing extraordinary music that gleefully defies categorisation for a number of years now. Both as a perpetually ingenious solo artist and as a textural counterpoint to everyone from neofolk icons Wardruna and Japanese post-rock legends MONO to Swedish death metallers At The Gates, she’s steadily built a reputation as one of modern progressive music’s most singular creatives. That reputation is set to soar when people get their ears around Quail’s latest creation: The Cartographer. A single, 48-minute piece comprising five distinct movements, it was written in response to a commission from Tilburg’s annual Roadburn Festival and was premièred in its exclusive entirety at this year’s event. Fortunately for those without a Roadburn ticket, a studio version of The Cartographer has just been released, and it’s an album that takes Quail ever further into prog territory.