Lucy Railton presents Portali di Eternità, a new work for cello and multichannel electronics, commissioned by INNER_SPACES and Linecheck. The piece emerges as an extension of Les Portails, created in 2024 for the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM), and now unfolds in a broader, more immersive form, conceived specifically for the acoustic and spiritual space of San Fedele.

Railton, an Anglo-German cellist and composer, is renowned for her ability to gracefully cross the boundaries between classical music, improvisation, and electronic experimentation. In Portali di Eternità, her exploration becomes even more intimate: sound becomes a vehicle for inner introspection, perceptual openings, and dissolutions of the self. The work is inspired by Olivier Messiaen, the French composer and organist whose spiritual influence permeates the entire performance. Railton dedicates certain passages to his devotional music, culminating in a reinterpretation of Louange à l’Éternité de Jésus, originally written for Ondes Martenot.

But Portali di Eternità is not merely a tribute: it is a personal journey, a sonic exploration moving between threshold and transcendence, between corporeality and dissolution. The sound of the cello, electronically processed, expands into space, evoking invisible portals to other dimensions, where time stretches and perception becomes vision.

Railton conceives music not only as an art form, but as an act of spiritual connection. In Portali di Eternità, sound is living matter, capable of opening breaches in ordinary experience and leading the listener into a state of sensory “ignition.” It is an invitation to feel sound rather than simply listen to it: to let oneself be permeated by it, as by a spiritual breath.

The composition unfolds in successive states, like stages of an inner pilgrimage. Electronic textures intertwine with the breath of the cello, creating a soundscape oscillating between the concrete and the ineffable. Each passage is a threshold, a “portal” opening onto an elsewhere: a place where language dissolves and only vibration, resonance, and presence remain.

Railton does not seek narration, but evocation. Her work situates itself within a tradition that stretches from Giacinto Scelsi to Éliane Radigue, yet with a voice of her own, profoundly contemporary. In this sense, Portals of Eternity is also a reflection on the role of the artist as medium: one who, through sound, makes the invisible visible.

The evening then opens to another dimension with the live performance of Malibu, a French artist who has crafted a unique sonic language made of ethereal environments, suspended melodies, and deep reverberations. Her latest album, from which the live set is drawn, is an emotional and cinematic journey, where the voice merges with ambient textures and liquid harmonies.

Malibu moves between dream pop, ambient, and sound art, with a sensitivity recalling Grouper’s introspection and Julianna Barwick’s delicacy. Her performance at INNER_SPACES promises to be an immersive experience, where time expands and listening becomes contemplation.

In ideal dialogue with Railton’s work, Malibu’s live set closes the evening like a lucid dream: a sonic landscape in which to lose oneself, carried away by waves of light and sound. It is a double event that celebrates music as threshold, as portal to mystery.