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)