New Music Friday #3: Laura Cannell captures trees falling in the woods
the sun has come.
Yes! The sun! Has come! Queue everyone texting each other, “I feel a lot better now”. I got a lot of those texts, anyone else?
I really love writing this. I’ll try and keep it going, but life is about to get real spicy.
I don’t really know what this ‘is’ yet. I started this blog because I listened to Sona’s track and thought, “someone needs to write about this”, then realised, hey, I could? I often start a million projects to find out which ones I actually like. I’d like to do this blog a bit longer, write something else, then return to it someday (are you allowed to do that?).
I’m trying to forget what I’m ‘allowed to do’. I often find what you’re allowed to do exists in the confines of conformity, which eventually becomes absolutely-nothing-at-all once you reach the bottom of the tornado, so I’m trying not to feed it so much. Lucy Dacus said fuck around and find out. That’s the chaotic energy artists should have.
If you read this because you’re an Another Sky fan, you’re in luck. New things are coming. I’ve found it hard to sleep, I’m so excited. It feels like the excitement on Christmas Eve when you’re five, except every night, and my body mistakes excitement for anxiety so I’ve had literal happy fevers. That’s a nice song name…
I wrote down another great song name this week which sounds like a Lana Del Rey parody:
Did anyone eat the woolly mammoth meatball?
(The answer is no).
Some special releases this week. I ran into Chris Hyson recently in Sainsbury’s. His music was very formative for me; it reminds me of walking around late at night in 2016, blasting ‘Monsters’ on the roads of New Cross during fast-paced excursions between friends’ houses. He’s released so much since, check it out, and he released an album last week!
I can’t remember how I discovered Laura Cannell, I think it might have been 6 music? She’s one of my favourite experimental musicians right now. The Comet is Coming…how did these guys release a whole album in September last year and I didn’t know?! I sung in a choir with Genevieve in December and she’s just released a really poignant song.
So, without further a-due:
Laura Cannell - No Sound Is Lost
EP: medieval / improvised / neo-classical
The ability to convey emotion through one simple motif is incredibly hard, and Laura Cannell is the master. Feelings bleed through these pieces as if through gaps in pendulum waves. ‘Swarm Intelligence’ makes you imagine insects forming them. Lots of artistic focus is turning to nature, or rather the battle between technology and nature (‘Simulation swarm’ by Big Thief comes to mind), but Laura’s process has always been rooted in the archaic. The result is a meditative and unique experience - one that makes you stop whatever you're doing and look out the window, pouring imagery into your brain of the lost folktales of women in Norwich, as if they were trees falling in the woods. Yes, “no sound is lost” indeed.
The Comet Is Coming - Hyper-Dimensional Expansion Beam
Album: jazz / improvised / electronic
The Comet Is Coming started as a duo, until the shadowy figure of the saxophonist, Shabaka Hutchings, emerged at the side of the stage. A week after that explosive energy, Shabaka rang Dan Leavers and Max Hallett and said, “let’s record”. It’s all improvised, and that’s the magic of it. This album is their third and was recorded in four days during lockdown. It strikes me that the sax is the voice, as sax’s often are. The synths and drums march on, refined and constant, as the sax wails freely on top of them, indicating a band confident in their strength of creating a solid, rhythmic base for the voice of the band to explore from. This record has fun, more than anything, and I can imagine it on the sweaty, atomising dance-floors I seem to never end up on. These kind of records make me want to.
Genevieve Dawson - My Mother’s Rage
Track: indie / alternative / folk
“The child that lost her softness”, Genevieve sings, direct, with a split second of lightning-strike clarity. Speaking about the ubiquitous heartbreak of growing up, this song is one of those no-bullshit ones that cuts to the bone. It’s songs like these that make me forever fight for mellow and angry music. We make music to confront our memories, contorting like shadows in the back of our minds as we desperately search for respite from jobs where we pretend we don’t still feel them. “I know what you did to her and all the women who came before her”, she sings as the harmonies gently drift with a sisyphean piano. It’s such a soft arrangement sitting above angry, methodical drums, distorting through a decapitator, perhaps. On the harmonies, Genevieve says, “the backing vocals were recorded with a group of friends in Woolwich Foot Tunnel at midnight. It felt like a strange ritual, meeting late at night, and descending into this space below the Thames to sing and scream together.”
Album: jazz / alternative / electronic
There is so much artistry in the instrumentation, so many rhythms to latch onto, and the sound of that gorgeous, gorgeous piano is still evident. Production is the linchpin of Chris Hyson’s work, and this is his first album as a solo artist, having produced many artists since that first Paradise EP came out. Chris knows the importance of collaboration, featuring long-time friends such as singers Frida Touray, Alison Sudol and Soren Bryce as well as instrumentalists Josh Arcoleo and Joe Webb. “The fact I’ve known Joe, Alex and Lloyd for so long allowed us to have no guards up whilst making music together,” Chris says on the record. The album is a sonic exploration with no ulterior motive other than the joy of making music. Can I hear the space echo in there? Cymbals sound like water. Inspirations cited are Bjork, James Blake and Radiohead. It also reminds me of the lilted rhythms of Frederic Robinson or the ambient swells of Geotic.