1 	Through The Plough The Steam Rises 	6:03
2 	Trails 	6:27
3 	Golden Lanes At Dusk 	2:38
4 	Strands 	7:24
5 	Reckonings 	7:11
6 	Hearth 	2:24

Violin – André Bosman, Laura Cannell

Already the queen of improvised location violin, Laura Cannell has taken her work a stage further with a set of entrancing tracks conjured in response to place and to the elements. Cannell and her husband and longterm collaborator André Bosman recorded the six improvised pieces that make up Reckonings during a series of visits to the round-towered church of St Andrew’s in Raveningham Park, on the edge of the Norfolk Broads. The remote, marshy location is very much Cannell’s territory, with her previous albums rooted in the black East Anglian soil. Her most recent release, 2017’s Hunter, Huntress, Hawk was also recorded in a church called St Andrew’s, but in Suffolk rather than Norfolk, which represents quite a specialised way of doing things. The simple reason for Cannell’s choices of location, however, is that her music would not exist without these places.

Cannell’s violin sound, often using an overbow which sounds chords by wrapping across the strings, is entirely unmistakable. When she plays with Bosman the pair produce a complex, layered and expressive sound that is submerged in mud and marsh one moment, and airborne the next. Bosman uses a curved, medieval rebec bow and a battery-powered amplifier, and both metal and gut strings are involved. The two have never recorded their collaboration before, but have clearly been playing together for years. Their improvisation is assured and highly subtle. They weave around and around one another, creating waves of tension, opposition, release and togetherness, summoning pagan ghosts of Saxons from under the consecrated skin of the place. Their soundscape is entirely distinctive, and could only have been made by these two people, at this time, in this location, but it is suffused with a powerful sense of all those who have come before.

Reckonings is a set of pieces made during short visits to the church, no more than half an hour each time, to improvise and record. They reflect the different seasons in which they were played, from the light pattering of sunlit notes on ‘Golden Lanes At Dusk’ to the troubled, wintery drone of ‘Reckonings’. For an album that lasts just over 30 minutes in total, Reckonings encompasses a remarkable range of music. The intensity of each track reflects the rigorous methods behind their creation; they incorporate the sounds of the building as much as the instruments played in it, from the rattling of heavy oak doors in the wind to the distortion of amplified strings reverberating off lime-washed stone walls.

The techniques Cannell and Bosman use are intriguing and compelling, but their test lies in the music that results. It sounds like nothing else - a maelstrom of emotions whipping around the apparently empty church, building to a high crescendo or dropping into a beautiful stillness. Reckonings sounds as though it has always been playing in this building, inaudible unless we adjust our frequency. Suddenly we are tuned into the protesting stones of St Andrew’s, the turbulent marshes, the bubbling dykes and the blissed-out Norfolk lanes. Reckonings is a work of pure expression, music that owes nothing to precedent and expectation and everything to musical openness and to immersion in the moment. It is becoming hard to imagine flatlands and flinty churches without also thinking of Cannell’s music playing as a soundtrack. Reckonings is the latest instalment in a body of work that grows in excitement and importance year-by-year, season-by-season. ---Tom Bolton, thequietus.com

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1 	Speckled and Dappled 	
2 	Gathering 	
3 	Blackwater 	
4 	Persuasion 	
5 	Awaken Waken 	
6 	Breathe Now 	
7 	Blacksmith 	
8 	Air Splinters Through 	
9 	Under Deep Leaves 	
10 	Nordhalla 	
11 	Lines of Copper Gold

Fiddle, Written By, Recorded By, Producer – Laura Cannell
Mastered By – Mark Beazley

On the dark edges of folk music lingers Laura Cannell, a violinist and recorder player who uses traditional instruments to evoke unearthly, ageless narratives. Her fourth album is a series of improvisations recorded in a church on the crumbling coast of Covehithe in Suffolk, roaring into life under her fiddle’s curved, baroque bow. This technique involves the four strings being played simultaneously and the effect is aggressive, unsettling, but also primordially beautiful, the harmonies of the drones often clashing cruelly before resolving themselves. Many moments are also unapologetically, uncompromisingly difficult. The harsh, stabbing playing in Blacksmith is like a metalworker’s studio in sound, while Air Splinters Through feels freshly torn from a horror soundtrack. It’s not a record for early mornings. But while this music feels ancient, it also feels brutally alive, as if a giant was waking from long slumbers, about to make its way in the world. ---Jude Rogers, theguardian.com

The musical explorations of British fiddler and composer Laura Cannell travel between early music, folk traditions, and earthy avant-garde improvisations. A native of Norfolk, Cannell studied at the London College of Music and University of East Anglia before founding the inventive folk ensemble Horses Brawl with guitarist Adrian Lever and cellist Jonathan Manton in 2003. Following the group's 2005 debut, Manton departed and Horses Brawl remained a duo on subsequent releases like 2007's Dindirin and 2011's Wild Lament. For their fourth LP, 2012's Ruminantia, multi-instrumentalist Andre Bosman replaced Lever, while later that year Cannell embarked on a new collaboration with experimental harpist Rhodri Davies. Setting down her fiddle, she focused on recorder and vocals for the duo's Feathered Swing of the Raven.

Her solo debut, Quick Sparrows Over the Black Earth, was released in 2014 and featured ten live improvisations recorded in single takes in a Norfolk church. A haunting mix of overbowed fiddle compositions and eerie double recorder pieces, several of the album's songs were later remixed on the Black Earth Remixes EP. Her follow-up, Beneath Swooping Talons, arrived a year later via the Front + Follow label, marking a rare release issued outside of her own Brawl Records imprint. Released in 2016, Simultaneous Flight Movement continued her evolution with more deeply nuanced performances that drew from her eclectic influences and ample imagination. In addition to her solo work, a new collaborative project emerged called Oscilanz, which featured Ralph Cumbers (Bass Clef) and drummer Charles Hayward (This Heat, About Group). Cannell's fourth solo outing, Hunter Huntress Hawker, arrived in 2017. ---Timothy Monger, allmusic.com

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1 	Flaxen Fields 	5:21
2 	Untethered 	5:13
3 	Landmark 	2:45
4 	Flaming Torches 	7:59
5 	Organum 	5:16
6 	Transient Threshold 	5:43
7 	Striking The Lost Bells 	3:34

THE SKY UNTUNED was recorded in one take at St Andrew’s Church, Raveningham, Norfolk, UK on 10th December 2018. The seven tracks were composed and developed during a hectic period of commissions, tours and musical adventures including: York Mediale Festival & The National Centre for Early Music, Laura Cannell’s Modern Ritual UK Tour, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Bergen Kunsthall in Norway and The Cut Arts Centre in Suffolk.

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, utilising 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).

“It is not the result of one commission but a performance drawn from the ideas that have travelled in my thoughts wherever I’ve been over the past 18 months. The ones which wouldn’t leave my heart and head, the ones which demanded to be played over and over through internal speakers, the ones which need to be explored and performed as if it’s the first time every time. ---brawlrecords.bandcamp.com

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