Sealore – Laura Cannell

“East Anglian composer and performer Laura Cannell is astonishingly prolific. Her most recent album Midwinter Processionals came out in December 2023 and barely a month later comes ner next project. Issued on her own Brawl Records label, LORE is a series of 12 EPs, released in monthly instalments from 26 January 2024. The first, Sealore, takes inspiration from a long submerged stretch of land between the East Coast of England and mainland

Europe, known as Doggerland. Before around 6500 BCE, when sea levels rose to cover it, Doggerland would have been a frozen landscape populated by Mesolithic hunter- gatherers. In 1931 a harpoon carved from a red deer antler was found by Norfolk fishermen off the coast of Cromer; Sealore is Cannell’s attempt to imagine the girl who might have made it. Cannell’s signature instruments – an overbowed violin and an array of recorders – combine in four tracks to create the otherworldly sound for which she is celebrated, and which allows her music the quality of collapsing time in folds, like a concertina. The first and standout track “The Earth Under The Sea” features rich, overlapping strings, echoing curlicues anchored to a warm four-note ostinato in the bass. “Down And Down We Go” by contrast is all plaited double recorders that echo each other to create the illusion of vast, empty space. In “Wood Silt Water” those recorders become almost menacingly percussive, while the textures in “Locked In Glaciers” recall at times the cascading strings of Arvo Pärt, and at other times are so strident as to sound like bagpipes. I’m not sure exactly how or where the young hunter protagonist is represented in all this, but maybe that’s missing the point. Cannell’s primal sounds make the distant past seem curiously present, as though it might be around us all the time if only we could tune into it.”

Reviewed by Lucy Thraves The Wire

Welcome to A Year of Lore, TODAY is the release of SEALORE by Laura Cannell no. 1 of 12 Limited Edition signed & numbered CD (100) + DL. SEALORE takes the listener under the sea to the disappeared world of Doggerland. A place which was once covered in a thick layer of ice where people would hunt and forage in the centuries before the ice gradually melted to become the North Sea.

The 4 tracks on SEALORE soundtrack an imagined film, a family, with a daughter, a wild girl who whittles her practice harpoons out of wood and then deer antlers.
The girl, visits us throughout the LORE series, flitting between the two worlds, the ancient land beneath the sea and the world we now live in, the sounds she heard in her stone age childhood are voiced by the layered wood, air, and tensioned strings of violins, cello and recorders all written and performed by Laura.

The music in SEALORE was created with Cannell’s signature yet unplaceable sounds, also flitting between two worlds, her transient music often evokes both the ancient and the contemporary. In the ‘Lore’ series, her signature instruments of overbowed violin and an array of recorders from soprano to great bass are complimented with the addition of octave violin and ‘cello, tapping into deeper resonances. The stories of people and places seem to find their way in to Cannell’s music, so she leans further in to draw them out of the earth, the sea and the landscape and to give a voice to the uncanny and the unseen.

It’s been a busy time in the land of talking, in December I was featured on a couple of excellent BBC Radio shows and I had the pleasure of giving a live talk/podcast recording for The Norfolk Folklore Society in Norwich, and joining the wonderful actor/writers Tim Downie and Just Chubb for their Folklands podcast – Witch Country Part 2.

All the links are below so you can listen at your leisure.

BBC Radio 3 – This Classical Life with Jess Gillam – LISTEN HERE

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BBC 6Music – New Music Fix – Scene Spotlight on Brawl Records – LISTEN HERE

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Folklands Podcast – WITCH COUNTRY Part 2 – LISTEN HERE
Tim Downie and Justin Chubb with guest Laura Cannell

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Norfolk Folklore Society Podcast – Live from The Louis Marchesi in Norwich – LISTEN HERE