“Wherever we lay our heads, in cities, villages, marshes or borderlands, in this century or the next, we will have the melding of clay, the walking in marshlands, the equinox and the old stories. This is our personal and collective folklore”
Laura Cannell August 2020
When we last interviewed UK Composer & Performer Laura Cannell in 2018 around the ‘Modern Ritual’ tour, she told us “I didn’t set out to transcribe the landscape but it keeps showing up in everything I do”. Her new collaborative album series ‘These Feral Lands Volume 1’ once more turns towards ancient folklore and landscapes. Joining her on this sonic journey is Writer & Comedian Stewart Lee, Ireland based New Music cellist Kate Ellis, Writer & Broadcaster Jennifer Lucy Allan and Musician & Writer Polly Wright.
These Feral Lands Volume 1 which is released on13th November 2020 on Brawl Records (BRAWL017) 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.
A Corner Stone to the Album – INHABITED: The Last Wild Wolf in Ireland
“In 2019 the composer/curator Alex Groves approached me with a commission to compose a new piece for his SOLO series for the cellist Kate Ellis, one of Ireland’s leading performers of New Music and Artistic Director of Crash Ensemble. I immediately said yes, knowing her reputation. In dreaming up a piece for Kate I had been listening to the deers barking at dusk in the churchyard next to my cottage, stark animal cries with disrupted repetition, I stayed for a while imagining what wild animals were in Kate’s homeland Ireland. I transcribed early recordings of wolves howling, a wild thrashing and lonesome being emerged, INHABITED: The Last WildWolf in Ireland’ was born.”
Laura Cannell
The final pieces of the puzzle came through conversations with friends and collaborators the writer and broadcaster Jennifer Lucy Allan and the musician and writer Polly Wright. Allan is currently engaged with research around the history of Clay and Wright brings her evocative rural imagery of the epic and intimate marshlands and folklore of hers and Cannell’s native East Anglia.
These Feral Lands are about our time, our space and pulling together the ragged threads of our real and imagined landscapes.
These Feral Lands Volume 1 is released on 13 November via Brawl Records and is available to pre-order here: http://www.brawlrecords.co.uk/