Serendipity is a wonderful thing. Back in 2020 writer Steve Horry wrote a piece for Joyzine on the wonderful CBeebies series YolanDa’s Band Jam, hosted by one of the UK’s leading saxophonists YolanDa Brown. It sounded like so much fun I watched the episode Toot-ally Awesome Recorders which featured recorder player Sarah Jeffery who is ‘Recorder Professor Specialising in Contemporary Music at the Royal College of Music in London’ with an excellent YouTube channel Team Recorder. I have been following her on Instagram since then, and this week she posted that she had taken part in Radio 4’s Artworks hosted by Susan Calman called Rocking the Recorder1. This led me to Laura Cannell and the album LYRELYRELYRE, her 11th solo album.
Unsurprisingly the lyre is at the heart of this project, in this case a six-string example from the 14th century made of Maplewood with gold and garnet stones2, discovered in 1939 inside a ship in a burial mound on dry land in Sutton Hoo; possibly the final resting place of an Anglo-Saxon King. On LYRELYRELYRE Cannell plays a copy of this instrument which, in the PDF liner notes you get with the Bandcamp download, she says “is one of the most iconic archaeological musical finds in history and it reaches far beyond the UK. I feel a strange connection to it as one of the earliest improvising instruments, and a way of expressing this landscape beyond words” as well as her intent to wake it from “its 14-century long slumber”.
As with the opening track ‘Wake the Slumbering Lyre’ you are immediately transported in time and space across a sonic bridge built by Laura Cannell, with her knowledge of ancient music on one side and her contemporary sensibilities on the other. These are not odd bedfellows. As with the music of Llyn Y Cwyn, Brìghde Chaimbeul or Park Jiha, ambient and archaic are not so far apart. Modern recording techniques can add drama and atmosphere to evoke place and historical resonance, as on ‘Beneath the Gorse and Bracken’, ‘A Ship Sunk in Earth’ and ‘Keep the Beacons Burning’, which employ echo effects to pick up the lyre notes and swirl them into a sound equivalent of the murmuration of starlings.
There are also moment of aching beauty. ‘Battle Hymns’ has the haunting use of recorder floating like mist over the raindrop-like ricochets of the lyre; this could be the dawn’s early light before the battle or the long-dead ghosts of those who fell in combat. There is also the brief but beatific ‘Slow Vessels in Still Water’ which utilises nothing but reverb and delay on the recorder to perfectly illustrate the song’s title.
I try my best to embrace luck and follow the white rabbit when possible so was overjoyed that only 4-degrees of separation lead me from CBeebies to an artist as exceptional as Laura Cannell. This organic-electronic/ancient-modern world held me in suspension for the duration of the album. Like Yin and Yang there is a little bit of light in the dark and a little bit of dark in the light, something LYRELYRELYRE exemplifies as well as being full of muted awe, a powerful delicacy and a great sense of history.
Laura Cannell: Website | Facebook | Bandcamp | Instagram | YouTube
Laura also edits Marshlore Magazine
1. Rocking the Recorder is only available on BBC Sounds for a limited time so listen while you can.
2. The lyre fragments can be viewed on the British Museum website.
The project was funded by The Marchus Trust which specialises in projects that cover music and architecture.
If you buy the download from Bandcamp you get PDF liner notes which fully describe the find and the story around the album.
Review by Paul F Cook
Keep up to date with all new content on Joyzine via our
Facebook | Bluesky | Instagram | Threads | Mailing List