Music Review: Zoë Keating, The Edge of All We Know (Original Soundtrack) (020202 Music, 2026)

I’ve written before about how cello is one of my favorite instruments. Among strings, there is nothing else with a range of sound that is almost universally rich with warmth and depth. I mean shit, you can find cello fronting metal bands, propping up string quartets, or going totally bonkers solo in compositions by John Zorn.

And one cellist I have a particular affinity for is Zoë Keating, whose work I first discovered on a 2009 recording, In C Remixed, where various artists put their own spins on the OG minimalist piece In C by Terry Riley. A lot of the tracks were remixes as the title suggested, taking a recording of a performance by Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble and stretching out or mashing up the recording (a notable one by Jad Abumrad mixed in recordings of his own child). But Keating’s contribution, “Zinc,” brought the pulse of Riley’s work to a meditative level and threw in her own instrument to create a track that was reminiscent of Riley but offering forth a unique aesthetic.

I was hooked and soon found more Keating to consume. 2010’s *Into the Trees is perhaps the overall album I get most mesmerized by. And her pairing with Jane Woodman to cover “Sister Europe” by The Psychedelic Furs was so good, I wanted to invent a time machine to go back and make their version the original one put to wax. But there are tracks on 2018’s [Snowmelt](https://zoekeating.bandcamp.com/album/snowmelt-ep)* that just give me the shivers. Cuz there is something vastly cold about Keating’s music, and I mean cold that is majestic and beautiful: a row of trees gone white and puffy, or an icy expanse under a gray sky that blue their lines when they meet. The juxtaposition of the warm sounds of cello with those frigid sensibilities, along with the other electronics and acoustic sounds she includes, are just magnificent.

The last I’d found of Keating’s was a live version of “Possible” from Snowmelt in 2020. So I’m ecstatic to find a new recording, music Keating composed and performed for the documentary, *Black Holes: The Edge of All We Know*. Keating’s music seems fitting to back an exploration into these singularities that are at once terrifyingly powerful yet mysterious and even beautiful (though more in their impact than their actual appearance, as they seem to suck in all light around them). I haven’t seen the documentary, but Keating’s music offers gasps of awe in the title music and the tones of science doing its meticulous thing in “The Vortex Lab.” As with her usual expertise, she offers straight up cello depth along with electronic manipulations therein, not to mention a hint of bullroarer here and there.

But this music isn’t tied solely to the movie. These are gorge tracks that stand magnificently on their own from a composer whose fingering bear an absolutely unique print. She revisits her track “Optimist” from Into the Trees to superconduct it into “Announcement,” and the opening track, “Up the Mountain” introduces the cello strains that she will seed throughout the album while also setting up an atmosphere of wonder and work to be done.

And Keating has had a wonderful voice in the world of music economics and how she has posted spreadsheets to compare her earnings through platforms like Bandcamp vs. streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music (spoiler: the streaming services pay shit). And now she’s part of a new service, Subvert, which seems to be a musician’s co-op. My links to her work above were all Bandcamp, but you might want to check out Subvert as well, as Keating seems to have an eye for ways you can give the musical artists you love their hard-earned due.

image courtesy of the album Bandcamp page