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CD
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BRAWL 017CD
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UK composer and performer Laura Cannell is joined in this new collaboration by writer and comedian Stewart Lee, Ireland based new music cellist Kate Ellis, writer and broadcaster Jennifer Lucy Allan, and musician and writer Polly Wright. These Feral Lands Volume 1 melds together words and music inspired by feral animal sounds, ancient stories, and personal folklore. The ten tracks were built upon a set of unreleased violin improvisations by Cannell titled "Buzzard A-H". They were recorded at the beginning of 2020 while watching and being watched by a buzzard sitting on a pole in the farmyard opposite her house. "The Buzzard" recordings may not always be audible but they are always there, like the "Buzzard" itself. Cannell invited Stewart Lee to create and record stories inspired by the landscape, leaving him free to bring his own meaning and the results are some of the most personal material he has written. Recent discoveries about parts of his family geography had come to light, in the area close to where Cannell is from on the Norfolk/Suffolk borders, and also in the Welsh borderlands. The tracks come together like an old BBC Radio Ballad, part spoken, part sung, the writers perform their own pieces which were intimately recorded from their own homes and which draw on ancient folklore and landscapes. The music is mainly performed on strings by two contemporary musicians Cannell and Ellis, violin, overbowed violin, cello and double-bass, and ending with a clunking wheezing harmonium played by Polly Wright (which she bought for one pound). From the guttural toothless storytelling of a madman warning that the demon dog of East Anglia is still out there in "Black Shuck", to the hopeful song "Alone In The Wolf Thickets" which is searching for peace while acknowledging our losses in these feral times. The whole album is the coming together of different strands in a semi-improvised new collaboration by a set of individuals who are making work for our time, and for those who follow after us, continuing the tradition of passing stories and music forward. All parts were recorded individually in the performers' homes during the early summer of 2020. Mixed and produced by Laura Cannell from her shed/studio in Suffolk, UK.
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