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BRAWL 048CD
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$13.50
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 8/30/2024
Exposed and raw, Laura Cannell's latest album is an offering of contemporary minimalism to a 12th century composer, a thank you to a lost uncle and a way to process an anxiety disorder. The music feels ancient as she breaks down and reconstructs selected music by the 12th Century Polymath Hildegard von Bingen alongside her own compositions. The 12-track album is performed on bass recorders, a 12-string knee harp, delay pedal and sparse layering, conjuring a bridge to connect the centuries. The Rituals of Hildegard Reimagined was improvised and recorded in single takes. Cannell is standing by a 12th century font where animals carved in stone have been defaced, in her head she is playing alongside a woman living and composing at the time the font was built. Laura improvises on memories, on fragments of notation, stretching time, layering the thoughts and imaginings of universal life experiences. Remembering the impact that small gestures can make to another person's life, never knowing when a shared moment may re-emerge or demand to be somehow activated into sound.
"The raw beauty of her melodies glimmer through prickly thickets of stark and dissonant chordal drones." --The Wire
"An essential work of modern British folk and avant-garde composition." --The Quietus
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BRAWL 014CD
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Laura Cannell's fifth album The Sky Untuned was recorded in one take at St Andrew's Church, Raveningham, Norfolk, UK in December 2018. The seven tracks were composed and developed during a hectic period of commissions, tours and musical adventures. The Sky Untuned takes as it's starting point the theory of the music of the spheres, in which the universe is constantly making sound that humans cannot hear. The music is teased out of the land and sky and performed using Cannell's signature minimalist chamber sounds, utilizing extended instrumental techniques of overbowed violin (with deconstructed bass viol bow wrapped around the violin to produce drone and melody), scordatura violin tunings, and double recorders (inspired by medieval stone carvings). RIYL: Colin Stetson, Sarah Neufield, Sarah Davachi, Hen Ogledd, Eiko Ishibashi, Senyawa, Ipek Gorgun, Ben Vince, Heather Leigh, Daniel O'Sullivan, Alexander Tucker, Eric Chenaux, Cucina Povera, Guttersnipe, Richard Dawson, Richard Skelton, Rhodri Davies.
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BRAWL 008CD
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2014 release. Laura Cannell's inimitable style shines through as she steals fragments and melodies from the 5th-14th centuries on Quick Sparrows Over The Black Earth. She embraces the lightness and dark, the dawn and dusk ("Dagian & Duske") that exist in the spaces between medieval, traditional and contemporary music. Recorded in a series of single takes in a small medieval church in rural Norfolk, the ten tracks feature atmospheric improvisations around tunes played on fiddle with a deconstructed bow (taken apart and wrapped around the violin) and double barreled recorders (two played at once and based on medieval paintings and sculptures). Inspiration for the textures and tones explored in the rasping fiddle and dissonant double recorders comes from the surrounding Norfolk marshes and broads as well as from traditional and medieval styles.
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BRAWL 010CD
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Simultaneous Flight Movement is Laura Cannell's third solo release, following her critically acclaimed Beneath Swooping Talons (FANF 036CD, 2015) and Quick Sparrows Over the Black Earth (2014). Simultaneous Flight Movement was recorded live in one take inside Southwold Lighthouse in Suffolk, UK. A collection of semi-composed, semi-improvised pieces from the edge of England which attempts to move away from formal structure and to re-imagine a sonic landscape unrestricted by time or origin. With a background in medieval, baroque, traditional and experimental music, Laura explores the spaces between ancient and experimental music through improvisation to create new music that is rooted in but not tethered to the past. With the seldom used, rich and evocative polyphonic overbow technique and double recorders styled on early stone carvings, Laura creates a minimalist chamber music, where one player makes all the harmonies, encouraging harmonics and different tones to emerge. Medieval cantigas intertwine with the music of long disintegrated renaissance courts, and real-time compositions produce parallel chord movements which seem to originate from the same, ahistorical place.
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FANDF 036CD
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Following her critically-acclaimed 2014 debut album Quick Sparrows Over the Black Earth, Laura Cannell presents Beneath Swooping Talons. With deconstructed bow and the extraordinary sound of double recorder, the album grew out of unearthed fragments that became improvised pieces recorded immediately in single takes. Tapping the potent rural landscape and long-dormant musical modes, this album encompasses both wild animal calls and long-forgotten liturgical chords, which, drawn through Cannell's music, seem to originate from the same ahistorical place. With a background in traditional, early, and experimental music, Cannell creates a solitary, minimalist chamber music, with one player making all the harmonies. Based in rural East Anglia, Laura Cannell draws on the emotional influences of the landscape and the sometimes dissonant chords of early and medieval music. Since founding and touring with duo Horses Brawl in 2005, Cannell has established her practice as a solo musician with recorder and fiddle as her primary instruments. Her first album, Quick Sparrows Over the Black Earth, found an audience eager for more, and she followed the release with a wide UK touring schedule that included Royal Festival Hall, Supernormal Festival, Tusk Festival, The Cube Bristol, Café Oto, cathedrals, churches, and National Trust castles, as well as interviews and airplay on BBC Radio 6 Music, NTS Radio, and more. Cannell writes, "We build our own traditions, music which feels like a home for our souls. A place we can be entirely ourselves, where we don't have to think, just be and channel pure music without human interception, only in the physical need to express it with the instruments." Her other projects include an experimental fiddle duo with André Bosman (aka electronic musician Hoofus), Oscilanz with Ralph Cumbers (aka electronic artist and trombonist Bass Clef/Some Truths), and work with renowned drummer Charles Hayward (This Heat, About Group).
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