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BRAWL 059CD
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$14.50
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 6/6/2025
Lyrelyrelyre is the 11th solo album from Laura Cannell, the UK based composer, performer, and improviser. Cannell calls upon an ancient Lyre that was buried in the epic landscape of the Suffolk Coastline to sound once more. She wakes it from its 14-century long slumber and coaxes. It's shrouded sounds onto her new offering. Cannell delves deep into the history of the lyre, finding a way to bring this ancient instrument back into the landscape it once lived in and into her fold of feral chamber music. This nine-track album follows on from Cannell's 2024 release The Rituals of Hildegard Reimagined making the 12th century seem positively modern in terms of music and lifestyle. Gorse flower dreams. Playing on a copy of the 7th century Sutton Hoo Lyre she takes inspiration from its fragmented remains and the evocative landscape hidden for centuries in plain sight. The staccato of a gut strung lyre-hearpe, The hunting and battle cries of crumhorns and the sense of space evoked on bass recorder present and album with ever present sea mist. Shrouded sounds are emitted as Cannell delves deep into the history of the lyre, finding a way to bring this ancient instrument Into her musical fold and questioning, how many other instruments are buried beneath our feet?
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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 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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BRAWL 015CD
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Debut vocal album by composer/performers Laura Cannell and Polly Wright. Re-voicing the voices of the lost, forgotten, and hidden people who have lived, worked and loved through the centuries, through the seasons, through the air and in the Marshlands. Sing as the Crow Flies is a set of nine vocal tracks re-voicing the rural landscape, surrounding reed beds and marshes on the Norfolk/Suffolk border. Growing up on either side of the River Yare, with a common love of the area, Laura Cannell and Polly Wright are musicians, composers, and creators with deep roots in the marshes and traditions of this rural area. Frustrated by the lack of women's voices represented in the rural landscape writings of East Anglia and further afield, the duo decided to add their own voices and experiences of living and working in rural surroundings in the 21st century to the male dominated discourse of rural life in the past. The music is created through different means -- heterophonic improvisation, Hildegard von Bingen-inspired call-and-responses, and taking words from the 18th century tome Norfolk Garland, A Collection of the Superstitious Beliefs and Practices, Proverbs, Curious Customs, Ballads and Songs, of the People of Norfolk. Together with their own writings and wordless inventions, Sing as the Crow Flies was created as a site-specific sound installation for the 2019 Waveney Valley Sculpture Trail on the Norfolk/Suffolk border, UK. The installation sits around the trunk of a 30-year-old walnut tree in a cherry orchard where five telephone handsets hang from the tree ready to be picked up by passers-by...
"There are voices at the end of this line. They are inside Raveningham Church just over 1000 metres as the crow flies from where you stand. Inside the stone walls of the 11th century church two women are moving, singing, separately and together. Every harmonic conversation is improvised, they are moving between the stone and wood, in light and shadow, calling and responding in and out of focus. Footsteps, birds and air can be heard. These new voices are part of the rural landscape, they are using their surroundings as inspiration along with their personal musical traditions & folklore. They are finding a common tongue, their native tongue of the marshlands, two people living, working and creating here in the 21st century. Tapping into vein-like branches, links and marshes. Private voices are woken, then laid again to rest."
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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 013CD
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Debut solo album by Liverpool-based composer and performer Jonathan Hering. An album of DIY renaissance and new music where one voice sings all the parts. Carmina Chromatico features twelve polyphonic vocal tracks all sung by Hering using his bass to counter-tenor range and presenting renaissance and contemporary compositions for up to 8 vocal lines. The album spans six hundred years featuring music from the renaissance avant-garde to his own long-form composition "Lachrymose." With his DIY sensibilities Jonathan sings every part in his own voice. Inspired in part by counter-tenor Klaus Nomi's spine chilling rendition of Henry Purcell's "The Cold Song," Hering has selected music which sweeps and wallows, clashing chromatic suspensions evoking dark and light and dissonant wavering chords connecting him to composers up to 600 years his senior, but with the voice as the key device in common. Hering creates an intimate vocal album embracing his love of dissonant, chromatic and exquisite harmonies, performances of which are normally confined to the formalities of the classical recital. Carmina Chromatico gives way to one voice creating renaissance music for all ears.
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BRAWL 012CD
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Reckonings is the debut album from experimental violinists Laura Cannell and André Bosman. 12th century melodies mingle with the drone of long sleeping Saxons, evoking medieval cultures on distant planets. Spontaneous composition and excursions to a medieval church capture their playing with no planning or shaping of the music beforehand, keeping the music vital and direct. Never in the building for more than half-an-hour, Reckonings is made up of visits through the seasons with wind rattling, sun burning, and snow melting.
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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 006CD
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2012 release. On Feathered Swing Of The Raven, Laura Cannell and Rhodri Davies create a rich and minimalist sound, combining chords and drones on recorders and harps oscillating with different tones and harmonics. It is inspired by fragments of English renaissance music and Laura's native Norfolk landscape. The two performers only met twice before they felt that there could be a common ground to explore and the result has produced an exciting new collaborative duo. Feathered Swing Of The Raven is a collection of improvisations and semi-composed pieces that are strongly rooted in the depths of an early music sound world. Renaissance harmonies and harmonic dissonances are explored with breath and bow, bringing to life fragments of melodies and ghosts of an ancient sound world.
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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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