Slowly Melting captures Janel Leppin at a point where long-earned mastery meets a renewed sense of risk. Over the past two decades, the Washington, D.C.–based cellist and multi‑instrumentalist has quietly become one of the most distinctive composers and improvisers of her generation, moving fluidly between new music, experimental scenes and song-based projects. Here, she narrows the focus and raises the stakes: this is a solo record in the strictest sense, written, performed and assembled entirely by Leppin, yet it feels expansive, like a landscape rather than a diary.

At the center of the album is her “fuzz‑saturated” cello, an instrument that carries centuries of acoustic tradition but is, in Leppin’s hands, wired into contemporary circuitry. She leans into that duality. Long, singing bowed tones bloom into feedback‑tinged drones; short, percussive attacks become grainy bursts of rhythm; layered lines fold into themselves until they resemble choirs or string sections in slow collapse. Around this core, she builds an ensemble of selves: guitar tracing delicate arpeggios or distorted halos, bass anchoring harmonic movement with a dark, resonant undertow, piano adding harmonic punctuation and percussive sparkle, Prophet‑5 synthesizer pouring in sheets of analogue colour that blur the border between human and machine.

The title, Slowly Melting, hints at the music’s temporal and emotional logic. These pieces rarely rush toward climax. Instead, they inhabit processes of dissolution and transformation: a texture introduced in sharp relief gradually softens at the edges; a clear melodic contour is slowly submerged under thickening harmonies; a drone that begins as a single note widens into a spectrum of overtones before thinning back to silence. Across the record, you hear structures being gently eroded from within, their outlines changing as they’re exposed to sustained pressure. It’s a music of transitions – between states, between timbres, between compositional intention and improvisational discovery.

Leppin has spoken about her continued amazement, especially onstage, at how affecting the sound of the cello can be when filtered thoughtfully through technology. That sense of wonder permeates the album. The electronics never feel like an overlay or a gimmick; they’re integrated as part of the instrument’s extended body. Distortion and fuzz are used not to obliterate nuance but to exaggerate it, amplifying small bow inflections and vibrato into grainy, emotionally charged surfaces. Reverb and delay are sculpted to create real or imaginary rooms around her, so that a single bowed phrase can seem to hang in the air like a question, or multiply into a cluster of ghostly doubles.

Recorded primarily at The Brink in Richmond, Virginia, with “Kaffa House” captured at her own Janel’s Room Studio, the album bears the stamp of spaces that invite focus rather than spectacle. You can hear the immediacy of a musician in close proximity to her microphones, hands moving between instruments with a clear map in mind but with latitude for surprise. The pacing of the record reflects that balance: some tracks feel like carefully plotted arcs, others like captured moments of exploration whose edges have been gently trimmed rather than aggressively edited into shape.

As a solo album, Slowly Melting is both a summation of Leppin’s skills and a statement of intent. It foregrounds the cello – the instrument that has been her primary voice – yet refuses to keep it in a traditional frame. Instead, it asks what happens when that voice is stretched, split, saturated, echoed and set against its own doubles. The answer is a set of pieces that feel at once deeply personal and generously open, inviting listeners to project their own emotional landscapes onto the slow, molten movement of sound.