To create Laura Cannell’s new album ECHOLOCATION: Resonate From Here, she wrote music for the project and sent it to six women, who live and breathe music, in the UK, Ireland and the USA to respond. Laura said, “Part of the concept behind Echolocation: Resonate from Here, is the need to support women in music. I wanted to reach out, celebrate and create something with people who are truly inspiring musicians.”
In an interview with Folk Radio, Laura once told us:
As a musician, I always knew that I wanted to be a performer, but I felt conflicted about always performing compositions by other people – mainly male long-dead composers. Although I love so much baroque and Renaissance-composed repertoire, I felt that I needed to somehow find out what was in the spaces, what isn’t being said. What exists off the page and outside the confines of a finished composition.
Each body of work she releases advances that proposition, and this new collaboration flows with a language of positivity and experimentation…the results are both refreshing and inspiring.
Maybe best known for her improvisational playing of the overbow violin and recorder, Cannell’s music ranges from early music and folk tradition to avant-garde and beyond. Her music is described as drawing on the emotional influences of the landscape, and exploring the spaces between ancient and experimental music to create a sound that is rooted in, but not tethered to, the past.
Looking back at her recent releases, she seems to be relentlessly busy. In 2020/21, she collaborated with the writer/comedian Stewart Lee and cellist Kate Ellis (Crash Ensemble) on her 12 EP series and album ‘These Feral Lands‘. Last year she also composed for Amazon Audible’s immersive audiobook ‘The Woman in Black’, leading an orchestra at Lattitude Festival and performances at Snape Maltings.
This year, she has already released a 3-track EP – No Sound Was Lost, which was improvised & recorded inside an empty 40ft shipping container in the Norfolk Countryside. Destruction Horizon followed this, the second release under her Hunteress alias, which found her digging deep into ideas of folklore, history, plantlore, and her own freeform semi-improvised songwriting to create ‘Synthpop Moonlit Torch-songs’.
She has a collaborative album with American cellist and composer Lori Goldston (Earth/Nirvana) due later this year (The Deer Are Small And The Rabbits Are Big)…they have known each other for several years and have also previously performed together. Lori also appears on Echolocation.
While Echolocation has no fixed genre – the artists are described as the core, and the thread is Cannell’s music, whether in its original form or changed state – it brings the strength of many traditions from contemporary-classical, traditional folk, electronic and medieval, moving between dreamlike states to open landscapes to electronic dance music at a party which has gone on til early dawn.
Those artists joining Laura hail from the UK, USA and Ireland – Gazelle Twin, Kathryn Tickell, Lori Goldston, Nik Colk Void (Factory Floor/Carter/Tutti/Void), Rakhi Singh (Manchester Collective/Vessel) and Kate Ellis (Crash Ensemble & currently touring with Bono).
About Echolocation:
“This project was made possible with the support of the Arts Council England, I was able to offer time and space for each of us to make something new.” Laura Cannell
From a converted Victorian Dovecote at Snape Maltings in Suffolk to studios in Seattle, Ireland and the outer reaches of England, the call began. Echoing through the air, a lone voice by the river Alde expanded and grew until it reached six musicians and inspired a response. A call to create something that resonates from wherever they might be, emotionally and geographically.
“Growing up, I couldn’t see myself reflected anywhere in the music that I played or wanted to play. Now I know that it always begins here; wherever we are, we have to follow what we have inside, make that our starting point, listen for it to resonate and set it free. I wanted to use this moment to celebrate and work with inspirational women in music. Artists who show that there is no set path and give fully of their creative selves.
Between the reedbeds of Suffolk, to the windswept open horizons of Northumberland, from Dublin City, through English counties to Wales and then to Seattle, I lit a beacon and waited for a response. I yearned to connect. To call out from here and and see what would come back. To know that I am not alone, that my sound will resonate in bright daylight and under midnight skies, and that it will be heard and will spark something in another person. We live in emotional landscapes – We are emotional landscapes.” L. Cannell
What returned to Cannell was a glimpse into the minds of six artists, six locations, six women who live and breathe music no matter what else is going on in their lives. Six women who inspire her and thousands of others too. Echolocation began in The Dovecote Studio at Snape Maltings in Suffolk, UK, a formerly ruined Victorian dovecote on the edge of wide coastal marshes and the home to Benjamin Britten’s world-renowned concert hall. Cannell began by composing this music during her residency at Festival of New ( September 2022) at Britten Pears Arts and created six new tracks, which she sent to six musicians. Only one of her tracks appears on the album in its unaltered state, ‘Sonar Forests’; the rest have been absorbed into the response tracks as remixes, collaborations, re-compositions and re-workings, but the thread is always there.
The Origins and Responses were written, performed and recorded by Laura Cannell – Violin, Overbow Violin, Double Recorders & Bass Recorder; Kate Ellis – Cello; Rakhi Singh – Violin, Voice & Electronics; Nik Colk Void – Electronics; Kathryn Tickell OBE- Northumbrian Pipes/Fiddle, Gazelle Twin – Electronics/Voice and Lori Goldston – Cello
A series of music videos to accompany the album release. André Bosman and Laura Cannell made the videos. Watch Our Perceived Distance with Kathryn Tickell below: