Friday 13 July 2018, 7.30pm
RECKONINGS Album Launch - Experimental violin duo Laura Cannell & Andre Bosman launch their new album with a live performance.
RECKONINGS - The new album from experimental violin duo Laura Cannell & André Bosman features 6 tracks that were recorded in single takes in a medieval stone church at the edge of the marshes and reed-beds of East Anglia. Echoes of 12th century monophonic songs mingle with re-animated and imagined voices of long sleeping Saxons. The duo’s improvisations bring the secular back into the sacred space. RECKONINGS was recorded through the seasons with wind rattling, sun burning and snow melting.
Laura Cannell and André Bosman have performed together in multiple projects over the past fifteen years, their most recent projects include touring with Cannell’s Modern Ritual Series which has taken them in their solo guises to perform throughout the UK at venues such as Liverpool Philharmonic Hall and London’s LSO St Luke’s. As a duo they have performed at Cafe Oto, Spitalfields Festival, Full of Noises, Supernormal, The Union Chapel, earlier this year they were recorded live in concert and featured on BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction.
Laura brings to the duo her background in medieval, experimental and improvised music with four critically acclaimed solo albums released since 2014 and regular touring throughout the UK and Europe, while André brings his back porch fiddle leanings influenced by his early years growing up in Kentucky, USA. His love of distorted textures, early minimalism, American primitivism, and medieval dirge also feed in to his solo aesthetics as electronic musician Hoofus. www.lcab.co.uk
Jonathan Hering performs his new interpretations of renaissance polyphony. A live set from his forthcoming debut solo album ‘Carmina Chromatico’ which comes out in autumn 2018 on Brawl Records. Performing compositions for up to 8 vocal lines, he uses his bass to counter-tenor range to sing music from the renaissance courts, taking it out of the Historically Informed Performance idiom to sing in his own voice, and eschewing the centuries of performance etiquette it has become entrenched in. Dissonant, chromatic and exquisite harmonies which are normally confined to the formalities of the classical recital give way to one voice, renaissance music for all ears.
Plus Luke Turner Writer & Co-Founder of The Quietus plays some of his favourite tracks.
Laura Cannell is an internationally acclaimed composer and musician whose music straddles the worlds of contemporary and ancient music, drawing on the emotional influences of the landscape. In 2024 she released a monthly EP series on her Brawl Records Label under the heading, ‘A Year of Lore’, and her 10th solo album ‘The Rituals of Hildegard Reimagined’ came out August 2024 to rave reviews.
She is regularly broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and 6Music and was recently featured on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme as well as two Spotlight Scene features on BBC 6Music. Laura has also performed throughout the UK and Europe and collaborated with the likes of writer and comedian Stewart Lee and the cellist Lori Goldston (Earth/Nirvana) with a 2024 duo album released on State51.
Recent performances include The British Library double bill with Gazelle Twin, ALICE - Copenhagen, Artist in Residence at the Norfolk and Norwich Festival, performance & lecture at The Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama. Laura was also a contributing composer/performer to the score of feature film HARVEST which premiered at Venice Biennale, New York and London International Film Festivals in late 2024.
www.lauracannell.com
www.brawlrecords.co.uk
“The raw beauty of her melodies glimmer through prickly thickets of stark and dissonant chordal drones” – THE WIRE
“this music feels ancient, it also feels brutally alive, as if a giant was waking from long slumbers, about to make its way in the world” – THE GUARDIAN
“beguiling, mournful solemnity wreathed in power and sonority. Cannell is one of the country’s most promising musicians.” – RECORD COLLECTOR
“an essential work of modern British folk and avant-garde composition.” – THE QUIETUS
André Bosman is a UK based musician performing improvised electronic music under his stage name Hoofus, and using extended fiddle techniques in a fiddle duo with composer/performer Laura Cannell. With a love of distorted textures, early minimalism, American primitivism, and medieval dirge he explores the aesthetics of liminality and emergence within his music. André has a Masters in Electro-acoustic Music and Sonic Arts from the University of East Anglia and has performed with Phil Niblock, Tony Conrad, Rhodri Davies and recently recorded with Laura Cannell, Ex-Easter Island Head and Charles Hayward. He has played all over the UK at festivals including Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Aldeburgh Music’s Faster than Sound and a UK tour with Saisonscape. His music has been broadcast on BBC Radio 1, 3 and 6Music. Hoofus has been released on Manchester label Front & Follow and is working on a new solo project with them. www.hoofus.com
“Laura Cannell and André Bosman evoked elven choirs from modified bows and fiddles, their long, haunting pieces describing medieval cultures on distant planets.” – THE WIRE MAGAZINE (Live review Supernormal Festival)
Jonathan Hering is a composer, performer and musical director. Based in Liverpool, he has played with numerous groups over the last decade, and currently plays with Ex-Easter Island Head, and The Aleph.
As a performer, Jonathan is a multi-instrumentalist, and has played shows throughout Europe, from Finland to Bulgaria, working alongside artists and composers as diverse as Christian Wolff, Anat Ben David, Trey Spruance and Howard Skempton.
As a composer and musical director, Jonathan has worked with Tate, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, Turner Contemporary, and FACT. Commissions have included Bird Sheet Music, with artist Kerry Morrison for Tate, Rhapsody for Clarinet and Wheelchair Basketball Team, with filmmaker Jack Whiteley for the Bluecoat and DaDaFest, Lachrymose for Turner Contemporary, and Veil of Nightshade for Octopus' Full of Noises Festival.
Luke Turner is a writer and editor based in London. In 2008 he co-founded The Quietus, an online magazine devoted to music, arts and popular culture within the context of contemporary society. Turner is currently curating a series of live events as part of Hull City Of Culture 2017’s commemoration of the radical art collective COUM and as a journalist, he has contributed to The Guardian, Dazed & Confused, Vice, the BBC, NME, Q, Mojo, Monocle, Nowness and the SomeSuch journal, among other publications in the UK and beyond. Aside from his cultural writing, Turner writes regularly on landscape, place, memory and self for the Caught By The River online magazine, including a regular column on Epping Forest. This writing is also forming the basis for a forthcoming book on urban forests, family, ritual, death and sexuality against the context of Western decline and environmental destruction.
