Laura Cannell

The Visible Light of Other Worlds – Album by Laura Cannell

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THE VISIBLE LIGHT OF OTHER WORLDS is the 12th solo album from the UK based Composer, Performer and Improviser Laura Cannell. Recently hailed as “The Radical Neo-medieval Musician Laura Cannell” by The Guardian. Her latest album evokes a strange new world between renaissance consort music, neo-classical & ambient music.

This is the sound of fog in a canyon light years from earth, the tempestuous flames of the sun’s surface, the imagined movement of sand in fields of dark dunes, the hurricane spirals of uninhabitable worlds. It is the residue and archived energy of long gone forests, the restless oceans and curving rift valleys of unknown lands in the untouchable reaches of the universe.

Laura Cannell’s 12th album is for an imagined soundtrack to the landscape of worlds we will never touch. 

In The Visible Light of Other Worlds Laura leans into the deep melancholic sound of her octave violin – strung with deep broad strings, giving her music a slightly otherworldly ‘not quite a cello’ sound. Alongside the octave violin she brings in bass recorder and overbowed violin, layering instruments and evoking a strange ensemble somewhere between renaissance consorts and string quartets. Every part is played by Laura.

Over the past ten years Laura Cannell’s music has become synonymous with recognisable landscapes, emotional sonic depictions of place, fragments of medieval music, folklore and of a kind of abstract storytelling. This album is about connecting with something other worldly and tapping into purely imagined lands. The 11 tracks were written and recorded in an intimate home studio setting – inspired by space and planetary images from NASA. The album is a deep inner world responding and sending signals to the furthest reaches. 

“The Visible Light of Other Worlds – Album liner notes – Laura Cannell August 2025

“It never stays the same. We never stay the same. When I look into the dark skies sometimes I hear music from distant landscapes that I will never see. It is music that I haven’t yet written, but somehow exists within. How is the earth’s edge only 62 vertical miles from here? Every time there is a clear sky we see other worlds, I can hear them as I look past the edges. I can sense a soundscape for imagined lands, an invisible film”. 

THE VISIBLE LIGHT OF OTHER WORLDS by Laura Cannell

LYRELYRELYRE New Album by Laura Cannell

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PRE-ORDER LYRELYRELYRE
by LAURA CANNELL
on CD or DOWNLOAD HERE

LYRELYRELYRE out on 30th MAY 2025

LYRELYRELYRE is the 11th solo album from Laura Cannell, the UK based Composer, Performer and Improviser. Cannell calls upon an ancient Lyre that was buried in the epic landscape of the Suffolk Coastline to sound once more. She wakes it from its 14 century long slumber and coaxes it’s shrouded sounds onto her new offering. 

Cannell delves deep into the history of the lyre, finding a way to bring this ancient instrument back into the landscape it once lived in and into her fold of feral chamber music. The Lyre lives again alongside haunting bass recorders and double reeded battle cries of the crumhorn.


Around fourteen hundred years ago, fragments of a six string lyre made from maplewood, gold and garnet stones was hidden in a ship and buried on dry land. There it remained until 1939 when it was unearthed from the burial mound above the sea meadows. The Sutton Hoo Lyre is one of the most iconic ancient instruments ever found, is thought to be the property and resting place of an Anglo-Saxon King. 

LYRELYRELYRE is a journey into buried memories and unequal temperaments. It conjures the long dormant spirits and sounds of the people who played this instrument in mead halls and by fires in pre-christian England. A true ancestral sound, we can hear the timbre and textures of an instrument buried with royalty. It was used as an accompaniment to life, a way to pass on news of joy and anguish, a sound which represented and conjured human sorrows and deepest desires. 

“This album is an offering to a history we were supposed to remember, but somewhere between the centuries it was lost deep in our collective folk memory, we forgot… The ship burial was supposed to be a beacon in the landscape. We were meant to remember who was there, but instead it slipped away as we farmed the land and cut trenches through the earth for our wars. All the time oblivious to a thread which was in front of us, a relic of pagan times, a true sound and link to the past. There has been much made of the other buried treasures, the Sutton Hoo helmet, the golden treasures, the shield and the ship but the lyre has a visceral connection. A physicality and a sound, a language and a feeling that enables us to truly feel connected to our predecessors when we strike the strings”.
(Laura Cannell March 2025)

Laura Cannell Norfolk 2025