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Laura Cannell, “LYRELYRELYRE” (Brawl, 2025)

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This 11th solo album from Laura Cannell was amusingly inspired by an eight-year-old conversation with writer/researcher/foghorn enthusiast Jennifer Lucy Allan, who once wrote the titular pun on a post-it note. No stranger to ancient and forgotten instruments herself, Cannell became interested in the history of the lyre & set about bringing it “back into the (Suffolk) landscape it once lived in and into her fold of feral chamber music.” In that regard, she succeeded on both counts, as she plays a copy of a 7th century lyre unearthed in Sutton Hoo, Suffolk back in 1939 and recontextualizes the instrument in an impressively feral way. 

Unsurprisingly, the lyre is one of the central instruments here, but Cannell’s bass recorder does most of the melodic heavy lifting, as she frequently uses her “gut strung lyre-hearpe” more as a roiling, visceral, and delay-enhanced percussion element rather than a melodic one. That’s just fine by me, as I am always a fan of Cannell’s ghostly recorder evocations, but she also memorably throws a double-reeded crumhorn into the mix in the eerie drones of “High Above the Sea Meadows.” That particular piece impressively & improbably suggests an intense & hallucinatory late-period Coil drone performance at a Renn Faire, but most of the other pieces feel considerably more spontaneous, fiery, and improvised.  

As she did with The Rituals of Hildegard Reimagined, Cannell expertly harnesses the transformation power of delay to turn the expected sounds of the lyre into something that feels considerably more mysterious and unfamiliar. For example, “A Ship Sunk in Earth” is essentially a rolling landscape of overlapping strums, while sections of “Beneath the Gorse and Bracken” sound like Cannell is furiously trying to conjure as many layers of texture and overtones as she can before the decays fade into silence.

I was most impressed by the closing “Twilight Falls Again,” however, as a hazily wistful recorder melody langourously snakes across the rolling, rippling, and  rhythmic waves of her woody strums. The opening ”Wake the Slumbering Lyre” is another highlight on the more melodic end of the spectrum, as Cannell’s smoky, flicking recorder melody lazily flutters, winds, and forms subtly otherworldly harmonies over a spare backdrop of echoing plucks.

Overall, LYRELYRELYRE is quite an interesting and inventive album within the Cannell canon, but it feels a bit too improvisatory, delay-heavy, and experimental to rank with her strongest work. I’d categorize it more as an inspired detour. That caveat aside, I am genuinely impressed with the unexpected direction that Cannell chose, as her resurrection of the lyre is both very “garage rock” and very avant-garde, as it feels like she conjured up these furiously strummed and sometimes outright convulsive pieces in real time with just a delay pedal and a looper. I have no idea if that is what she actually did, but it does sound like there is a minimum of overdubbing and that many motifs follow a looping, cyclical pattern. 

While I am not a recording purist of any kind, that approach certainly brings out the “feral” edge that Cannell was hoping for and that is really the central appeal of LYRELYRELYRE: Laura Cannell absolutely ripping shit up on an ancient lyre copy. There is an additional deeper and more innovative layer lurking beyond that though, as pieces like the closing “Twilight Falls Again” weave a gorgeously rippling and beautifully textured bed of rattling strings that evokes the rolling waves of a wood and gut-string sea, while “Keep the Beacons Burning” evokes the unpredictable movements of a hallucinatory cloud of wood & metal bird marionettes. Neat trick.

Listen here.

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Laura Cannell, “The Rituals of Hildegard Reimagined” (Brawl, 2024)

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This latest album from English violinist/avant-folk visionary Laura Cannell is billed as “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.”  Cannell was first turned onto Benedictine abbess/polymath Hildegard von Bingen back in the late ‘90s when her uncle played her Sequentia’s Canticles of Ecstasy album and the iconoclastic German nun’s compositions have been an alternating source of comfort and inspiration ever since.  In keeping with the “inspiration” theme, The Rituals of Hildegard Reimagined is essentially a great new Laura Cannell album rather than anything resembling a conventional homage.  As Cannell describes it, she broke down and reconstructed selected Hildegard pieces and interspersed them with her own work.  She also set aside both her violin and her usual working methods, as these pieces were improvised and recorded in single takes using a simple palette of bass recorder, 12-string medieval harp (“tuned in unequal temperament”), and a delay pedal.  As it turns out, that is all Cannell needed to cast quite a wonderfully hallucinatory, haunting, and timeless spell.  It’s frankly a shame that Hildegard herself isn’t around to hear it, as this album would be an ideal soundtrack for anyone looking to have otherworldly religious visions.  

Notably, this is not the first major Laura Cannell release to center upon her recorder playing, as that honor belongs to 2022’s Antiphony of the Trees.  On that album, Cannell used a small arsenal of recorders to transform transcribed birdsongs into minimalist chamber music.  Rituals is a radically different album for a whole host of reasons (spontaneity, inspiration, a medieval harp, etc.), but the most striking one for me is how masterfully Cannell makes use of her delay pedal this time around.  On the opening “The Cosmic Spheres of Being Human,” for example, a tumbling and serpentine melody leaves behind a wake of fluttering and flickering afterimages that call to mind something between “hallucinatory snakecharmer” and “chopped and screwed classical impressionism.”  There is also a second layer in which a slow mournful melody drifts through the landscape of dissolving loops, but it occasionally breaks into additional tendrils of looping melody or subtly gnarled feedback as well.

The effect is wonderfully ghostly, exotic, and tenderly ephemeral, as gorgeous melodies continually curl and dissipate like trails of smoke.  It is also the single most beautiful piece on the album to my ears, but it is not exactly an aberration, as several other pieces cast a similar ritualistic and otherworldly spell.  In fact, the only real indication that these pieces were improvised is that they tend to end after a few minutes rather than further expanding or transforming beyond their original theme.  The original themes, however, are often quite sophisticated and vividly realized, so Rituals feels more like a mesmerizing series of moody, dreamlike vignettes than a parade of promising tossed-off ideas.

Generally, the recorder pieces provide most of the album’s most striking highlights, while harp pieces like “Earthly Music” and “Everything is Hidden in You” feel like palate-cleansing interludes that herald the next stages of Rituals’ phantasmagoric journey.  There are some notable exceptions, however, as “A Feather on the Breath” calls to mind a duet between a darkly delicate koto melody and the viscerally snarling, convulsive, and distorted tones of a demonic flautist.  

In keeping with that theme of unexpected violence and dissonance, the title piece is another eerie highlight, as a mournful melody lazily winds and smears through a pulsing and squirming storm of sharper, more blurting tones.  The vibe is probably best described as “Colin Stetson summons a flock of demonic birds with a supernaturally cursed flute.”  Elsewhere, the closing “A Lost Nightingale” provides yet another blearily haunted and sacred-sounding tableau, as a slow-moving and snaking melody unpredictably pulses and shapeshifts in a haze of breathy unease.  

There are several other entrancing pieces strewn throughout the album as well, but the sustained spell of the album as a whole is greater than any individual passage, as Rituals is organic and hallucinatory in a way that goes beyond merely feeling ancient and timeless and lands somewhere closer to “this sounds like a dispatch from an entirely different plane of being.”  Given that I was already a fan of both Cannell and Hildegard von Bingen beforehand, it was probably inevitable that I would enjoy this album, but I was nevertheless taken aback at how beautifully Cannell was able to stretch into transcendent new terrain without even picking up her main instrument.  Admittedly, there has been no shortage of excellent Laura Cannell releases in recent years (2022’s monthly “Sounds” series, this year’s “Lore” series, etc.), but this album stands as an especially cool and inspired outlier in an already strong and continually evolving body of work.         

Listen here.