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 performer from East Anglia. Her music straddles the worlds of contemporary and ancient music, it is semi-composed, semi-improvised and draws on the emotional influences of the landscape whilst exploring the spaces between early and experimental music. She has released seven solo albums to critical acclaim, mainly performing on Overbowed Violin and Double Recorders. Recent EPs have also seen her recording on church organs and with vocals.
Following a couple of years (from 2020) of collaborative releases, remote projects, and sound installations Laura returns to her solo work and throughout 2024 has embarked on a project under the heading of “A Year of Lore”, writing, recording and producing an EP of new music every month exploring real and imagined Lore such as Sealore, Earthlore, Riverlore and Mountainlore. Alongside this project which includes signed limited edition CDs, Laura was recently co-commissioned by The Marian Consort and The Cheltenham Festival to compose and 8 part vocal composition called Plantlore: For the Plants that Bind Us. In May 2024 Laura was an Artist in Residence at the Norfolk and Norwich Festival which included performing solo in Norwich Cathedral, a New Line-up of her Modern Ritual curated night and more.
Laura has released seven solo albums, toured throughout the UK & Europe, and is regularly broadcast on the BBC. Performances include Deep Minimalism at Queen Elizabeth Hall, solo at King’s Place, touring & recording with cellist Lori Goldston (Nirvana, Earth), These Feral Lands Album (with writer/comedian Stewart Lee) and solo at The Barbican. Commissions have included: Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, Historic Royal Palaces sound installations both solo and with Mira Calix. She is regularly broadcast on the BBC, including live in concert and making playlists for Late Junction Mixtape, BBC 6Music and the World Service. She has also recorded a Maida Vale Session with harpist Rhodri Davies. Laura’s music has been used for film & television internationally and on the catwalks at Paris and London Fashion Weeks.
In 2020 she appeared on the BBC Radio 4 Documentary Life, Death and The Foghorn with Jennifer Lucy Allan, and curated and toured her Modern Ritual Series throughout the UK 2017 - 2018. She has performed solo extensively in Europe and has been featured in The Irish Times with Kate Ellis, The FT, The Guardian, The Quietus, and The Wire Magazine (Aug 2022). Other highlights include performing at Flow Festival (Helsinki), Fano Free Folk Festival in Denmark, Le Guess Who? In Holland, Unsound in Poland and many others.
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.
