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