Laura Cannell - Simultaneous Flight Movement (2016)

Laura's third solo release which follows her critically acclaimed Beneath Swooping Talons (F&F2015) and Quick Sparrows Over the Black Earth (BRAWL2014). Simultaneous Flight Movement features fourteen tracks and was recorded live in one take inside Southwold Lighthouse in Suffolk, UK. A collection of semi-composed semi-improvised pieces from the edge of England which seek to dissolve borders, move away from formal structure and to re-imagine a sonic landscape unrestricted by time or origin. With a background in medieval, baroque, traditional and experimental music, Laura explores the spaces between ancient and experimental through improvisation to create new music that is rooted in but not tethered to the past. Fragments of fragments move the air inside the hollow tower, sending and receiving messages like an upside-down wishing well. With the seldom used rich and evocative polyphonic overbow technique and double recorders styled on early stone carvings, Laura creates a minimalist chamber music, where one player makes all the harmonies, encouraging harmonics and difference tones to emerge. She draws inspiration from the emotional influence of the landscape including wild animal calls or fragments of liturgical music in order to build music that avoids historicism and instead inhabits an imagined territory, combining contemporary and archaic elements. Medieval cantigas intertwine with the music of long disintegrated renaissance courts, and real-time compositions produce parallel chord movements which seem to originate from the same, ahistorical place. Inside the lighthouse the white conical walls shaped the music which unfurled skywards and away over The North Sea. 'The hollow tower contemplates The North Sea. Welcoming, Warning, Blazing to the East'.