Cestra recently released her debut album, Portal and we asked her to tell us about each track. Check out her commentary on the album below.

AlpHa

AlpHa is an introduction, it marks the beginning of the journey through Portal. I wanted to create a song that was like a prayer, written mostly over a single note drone. My songs are generally pretty explosive and varied in terms of vocal dynamics, but I wanted this one to remain simple and utilise the lowest part of my voice, several times I reach the lowest note in my range which is a D3.

The story of the lyrics is a memory of the greatest love and being lost in the naivety of believing that nothing can compare to it, ‘no sun burns bright enough’. This a sentiment that returns time and time again in stories, movies, novels and songs, the lovelorn feel like the loss of their greatest love means the end of themselves.

To quote Emily Bronte as Catherine in Wuthering Heights - “If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger.” The entirety of the album Portal is exploring whether or not that’s true. What happens if your greatest love is annihilated, but your world doesn’t end?

Monument

Monument is my favourite song on the album. It was finished over the course of a couple of years and it’s completion spanned a journey from one place to the next. I write everything in Logic, create a decent demo and then Pete Miles (my producer) and I develop it in the studio.This song started with the synth loop you can hear at the beginning, which was created by an amazing producer Christopher Kaye who goes by Void Vertex (www.lotsofnoise.technology) and everything followed on from that.

This album creation was my most enjoyable studio experience to date. In the past I’ve been pretty controlling and probably not much fun to work with! This time I let go completely and it was the best thing I’ve ever done, Pete is an incredible producer and I just followed the threads he was pulling. He sampled a bunch of crazy stuff in the final outro (my favourite bit of this song) me playing drums, me saying stuff in dumb voices, stuff he captured when I didn’t know the mic was on!

Lyrically this song is about something beautiful collapsing into destruction and returning to it’s component parts, in this case a relationship. The outro is the oracle telling the story of how it’s gonna go, the sum of our parts make everything, wreck everything, heal everything and save everything. What we build, we ultimately destroy, but within that we also have the capability to heal it all and build something new. Take the pieces and start again.

Aeon

When I was writing the songs that became this album I decided to completely abandon any thought of making them playable live and just wrote what I wanted to write. There are several songs which go hard with the strings and this is one of them! I had an amazing trio of string players on the album, my good friends Will Harvey (the head of Parallax Orchestra) and Maddie Cutter on violin/viola and cello respectively and Alex Verster on double bass. It was my first time working with Alex and he was incredible, such a precise player.

Aeon is named for the animated series Aeon Flux, which is all about a female assassin in a dystopian future. She’s in an extreme love-hate relationship with a character called Trevor Goodchild, he switches between trying to protect her and trying to kill her. This song is about emotional S&M, unintentional pain caused by unexamined people in relationships. If you don’t fully know yourself and haven’t been to the depths of your being, it’s likely that your relationships will fall apart, no matter how desperately you try to hold it together. It’s about the realisation of your part in the downfall and what parts you have control over.

Deep Space

This song was one of the first I wrote for the album and it’s full industrial. To the point that the whole song sounds like a machine, some kind of monster truck powering across a desert dystopia. We took it in a more ‘real instrument’ sounding direction and it just lost it’s power so we dragged it back into the mechnical realm!

I really like the juxtaposition of the soul-style 3-part chorus harmonies and nasty sounding instrumentation, it’s super silly and really fun. This song really amuses me, it’s super tongue in cheek and kind of ridiculous and I love it.

Lyrically it’s about vanquishing your internal demons, which seems like a really serious thing, but can also be really hilarious. When you realise how much of your pain is self-created it can make you laugh out loud. The ridiculousness of the grandiose narratives you create about your life and your story is unparalleled, no one can make my life more dramatic than I can. The meme equivalent is that kid pressing the boot on his own head, we do it to ourselves.

Meridian

This was the final song I wrote for the album. I demoed it as a string-heavy, more organic track and Pete was like ‘nah, let’s deconstruct this’. It’s experimental in a few ways, it’s the only track with 5/4 sections, we built the beats using unusual sounds like clocks ticking and we went in hard with a pitch-shifted vocal in a couple of places.

It’s the halfway point in sentiment between the first track and the last. This is half finding enlightenment in letting go of everything and half wanting to get lost in someone else to ‘temper the pain’. It’s like being caught between two worlds and the lyric structure feels like a discussion between those two sides.

Ultimately they decide that in order to be one, to be whole, they must disintegrate all this. The song falls apart at this point, the music vanishes, and we’re left with just vocals which ultimately degrade into nothing.

Blood Rites

This is the most musically ambitious song on the record. The strings and drums are huge, intense and only fully playable with an orchestra and two drummers! Over the course of the album I learned how to arrange strings, but I was given help on this track, which was the first one I wrote. A musical master set me on the path with his help on the strings and drums for this and then he left me to it.

Across the album we used a combo of live drums (by an amazing drummer called Tim Langsford) and GGD sampled drums. Blood Rites is all GGD, the drum parts were already written and we just made them sound better.

Lyrically this song is the anomaly, it’s not about the relationship, but in hindsight it fits perfectly. Where Deep Space is about the pain we cause ourselves, Blood Rites is acknowledging the truth of the pain caused by others. It’s about facing the phantoms of childhood and embracing the truth of everything that happened. It takes the mentality of a warrior to do this and I see this song as a battle song, the music was made to sound medieval, heavy and serious. It’s a journey through the war of catharsis into freedom.

Twin Heart Beat

This song is another early one in the writing process and it’s changed as the journey changed. This song came alive in the edit, when we worked out what needed to be left out it became what it needed to be. Originally there were strings through the whole thing, but we cut them from a few places to let the song breathe and allow the strings that remained to hit harder.

When it came to writing the strings I was fine until the final bars of the song and then I got stuck, I didn’t know how to finish it. Another musician finished the end of the arrangement for me and that makes this track feel very much like a dance between the two of us.

Lyrically the point where his arrangement takes over is where the meaning of the song changes, up until then the song is simply about love and sexuality. At that point it becomes about healing and the true love that exists in freedom.

Elision

I had to fight a bit for this song! The seeds of it had been around for years and I knew I loved it. I finished it in the studio when we were recording, it finally came together when I was working in the live room. But Pete wasn’t vibing with it, he didn’t get it as a song, he thought it didn’t stand up to the others.

I knew I needed it to be on there, it’s pretty integral to the whole thing for me. We recorded it anyway, because it was simple enough, strings, drums and synth/bass production. One day I left Pete to mix some drums on it and I came back to him finally ‘getting’ it. He agreed it needed to be on there.

Lyrically it’s my favourite. It tells the story of a man who is a master of words and speech, but is silenced by what he sees in his core. His existence is survival and he is trapped, with the hand of Pandora around his neck. Pandora, the goddess in Greek mythology, represents the first woman. She was beautiful and a gift, but responsible for releasing the ills of humanity into the world.

She represents the beauty and terror perceived in womanhood, the Madonna/Whore complex. But in the myth, Zeus is the one who creates her for destruction, she has no agency of her own. She is a tool of man. In understanding that, he realises he is the creator and upholder of this myth and in that realisation he finds the doorway.

Aurelian

This is the only song I’ve ever recorded live and in one take. It’s a simple piano and voice song and it basically wrote itself. I knew it needed to be recorded live, the vocal and the piano needed to be in complete sync. So, at Pete’s urging, I began practicing it every day in the studio. He has a beautiful Steinway piano in the live room. After a few weeks he set me up with the mics and I began the process. I think he stayed for a few takes and then left me to it. I don’t know how many I did, I just knew I’d know when I’d done ‘the one’.

It was important that I was feeling the song the whole way through. At some point I recorded the one on the record and I knew. You can hear me sigh at the end of the track, that was the realisation I’d finally got it! This is the final song about the love story of the album. Lyrically it’s the story of healing. Can you put back together that which has been destroyed. There’s no final answer, other than repair is possible and it is an art.

Reunion

Reunion is the ending. I went to the extremes of what I wanted to achieve musically on this song. It would be possible to play this live with an entire choir and orchestral string section! The choir is all me and the strings were layered by Will, Maddie and Alex and ended up absolutely monumental. It’s a song of 3 acts, the choral intro, the journey in the middle and the epic finale with a dissolution into nothing. The choir part in the first act becomes the string arrangement in the third, I just translated the parts from voice to strings.

Right before the drop into Act 3 you can hear Alex take a breath before he dug into the bass part at that point, I loved it so we kept that in. It’s like humanity’s last breath before it’s all over. I arranged the strings, but I asked my good friend (and incredible composer) Simon Dobson to shape and craft the soft outro of the piece. He took what I’d done and made it work beautifully. By the time we recorded that part I was crying, Pete was crying and Will was crying, so we knew we’d made something good!

The story of reunion is about the frustration of knowing the truth, ’the light’, but not being able to experience it. At this point the journey of the album has been intense, painful and beautiful and the protagonist wants to be free of being a ‘fragile ship thrown upon the waves’ of life. She wants to be free of suffering

She revisits her destructive beginnings, her desire to destroy everything and she finally understands that the only destruction she needs to experience is the destruction of her story. In that moment the heavens open and she can see the light.