Requiem on Natoma

In 2000, the Kronos Quartet and Clint Mansell created a soundtrack perfect for a movie about two steep descents into addiction. Requiem for a Dreamwas a CD as chilling as the story it scored, a film centered on a mother striving for prescription bliss and a son whose heroin habit is as ugly as his abscesses. Separated into three seasons, the album carried ominous undertones, strings sounding the death knell for the lives these characters were losing.

Cellist Zoë Keating has composed a requiem for a far less tragic event, but a soundtrack no less moving than Kronos' work. Her debut full-length, One Cello x 16: Natoma, pays homage to an experimental San Francisco performance space she ran with her husband and friends, 926 Natoma. For 10 years, the split-level warehouse was home to performances by everything from bands like Tarentel to field recordings (hosted by housemate Aaron Ximm Thieme) to adventurous electronic music (from her other roommate, John Eichenseer, aka Jhno). Using beanbags and beds for seating, tea lights for ambience, and a sliding scale for an admission charge, 926 Natoma brought together the fringes of the local music scene under one comfortably large industrial roof. That is, until the group was evicted.

"I felt like [Natoma] was a fight against the landlord," says Keating on a recent fall morning, sipping coffee at a SOMA cafe a couple blocks from her old living space. "We represented art and beauty and vitality, and we tried to convince him how great his space was and how much people were appreciating it as a music space." Her CD, recorded in a studio built into the warehouse, was meant to encapsulate the conflict at hand as well as the wars beyond her doorstep. "Every time you'd step outside our house, there would be homeless people and people doing crack, and so it felt like this real human struggle going on that our little eviction crisis was related to ... somehow. The music is all about that — Natoma is turmoil," she says.

Melancholy sentiment seeps into every note of Natoma, a disc of sublime minimalist music — "with a pop sensibility," adds Keating, who has performed on records ranging from DJ Shadow's latest to albums by Tarentel, John Vanderslice, the Court and Spark, and Michael Talbott & the Wolfkings, among others, as well as with cello-rockers Rasputina for four years (she's since left that group). Her self-released album, which hit No. 2 among iTunes' classical downloads and No. 3 in the site's electronica category, reveals Keating putting the cello she's owned since age 12 to various uses. Using live sampling and looping, she delicately layers the record with everything from percussion (knocks on the instrument's surface) to guitarlike rhythms to expressive melodies moving at a glacial pace. (When she performs live, as she will at 21 Grand in Oakland on Nov. 4, she uses foot pedals to control the tracks.) "It's like so many different art things," she explains. "You make a box for yourself and then you explore the contents of the box. I made a box that's cello-sized, and I couldn't go outside of it. I didn't process the sounds in any way."

Keating calls recording Natomaher "refuge from the reality that we might have to leave San Francisco" — and eventually she and her husband did leave, moving to greener warehouses in Portland, Ore., in March. But this isn't the first time her cello has gotten her through adversity. When Keating was a child, her family moved often, and upon resettling in the United States from England, playing helped her get over the culture shock. "The cello was the one thing that was a constant for me through all the moves," says the lanky, charismatic redhead. "It was this perfect world that I would retreat to, and it was just me and the cello, and I worked hard and got results. It was reliable. It was almost like a coping mechanism."

Practicing the cello also helped Keating get past a case of crippling stage fright that she caught in her early 20s. "I started playing the cello in the BART station," she recalls. "I'd play at the Powell Street or Embarcadero stations at rush hour." Running through all the Bach suites she knew, she was able to come to terms with having an audience — and make her rent with a couple days' work. "Eventually I was able to block out the people, because I realized that if anyone did stop it meant they were enjoying the music," she says. "That completely cured my stage fright."

Keating's most inspiring performance space remains the S.F. home she relinquished (which, she notes, still lies empty). "[The Natoma warehouse] was a pretty creative environment to be in," she says nostalgically. "I'm not sure that the record I made would've happened if it wasn't for that space — it was kind of like my classical music training coming up against all these other [musical] worlds. Which is really very San Francisco, in some ways." Although the price of creating a new artist colony pushed Keating north, she retains a loyal admiration for this city. "I think a lot of things are happening in San Francisco," she adds, "because it's right on the edge of technology and art, and there's a lot of friction there."