Justyna Jablonska’s ‘Unforeseen’ is a record that seems to keep widening as it unfolds. What begins in personal memory quickly opens into something broader, drawing on the experiences of Polish, Ukrainian and Roma migrants while weaving together cello, electronics, spoken word, field recordings and improvisation into a deeply textured study of movement, belonging and change.
At the centre of the album is her refusal to treat composition and spontaneity as opposites. The title-track establishes that language immediately, opening with deep baritone cello tones that feel both restrained and emotionally charged. From there, ‘Unforeseen’ repeatedly shifts its perspective.
‘If You Can Hear This’ is one of the album’s more striking collisions, folding strings into a breakbeat until the acoustic and electronic elements become difficult to separate. ‘9 Daughters’ moves in another direction, allowing vocals to take on an almost ancestral quality, while ‘Levi & Nadia’ explores rhythm and atmosphere with a more percussive character.
Her unique sense of narrative keeps the different textures connected, particularly through recurring ideas of memory and inheritance. Her mother’s lullabies form one of the album’s most personal threads, eventually resurfacing in closing track ‘Skye Boat Song’, where the record seems to return to its earliest emotional source.
Elsewhere, ‘Bloki’ draws directly on the concrete apartment blocks associated with life across Poland and Eastern Europe, while ‘Procession’ brings the album’s themes sharply into focus through family voice notes. These are moments that give ‘Unforeseen’ an almost documentary quality without making it feel academic or detached.
Her own background in contemporary classical music is clear, but so is her desire to move beyond the restrictions she once associated with performing other people’s work. Here, the cello is treated as something capable of absorbing rhythm, noise, memory and improvisation as it goes.
Ambitious without feeling self-conscious, ‘Unforeseen’ is a vivid portrait of an artist expanding her own language. It’s reflective, experimental and deeply immersive, finding meaning in the way people adapt when life moves somewhere they didn’t expect.