Laura Cannell and Polly Wright, musicians, composers and creators with deep roots in the traditions of East Anglia, will talk about the inspiration behind their new album Sing as the Crow Flies. Frustrated by the lack of women’s voices represented in the rural landscape writings of East Anglia and further afield, the duo decided to add their own voices and experiences of living and working in rural surroundings in the 21st century, to the male dominated discourse of rural life in the past, creating a folk work that, as Jude Rogers writing in the Guardian says “reconsiders our relationships to tradition in the 21st century, and how people fit into it and long to fold themselves into it.”
Laura Cannell’s semi-composed, semi-improvised compositions draw on the emotional influences of the landscape and explore the spaces between early and experimental music that is rooted in but not tethered to the past. Straddling the worlds of experimental, chamber, folk, early & medieval music, Cannell is an artist whose original and singular vision sets her apart from her contemporaries, whilst her music exists as a culturally vital exploration of the link between medieval, traditional and modern musical idioms.
Laura has released five solo albums since 2014, successfully carving out a unique path with her work, receiving critical acclaim from the contemporary music press and regularly being included in numerous Album of the Year lists (including The Guardian, MOJO, BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction, The Wire and The Quietus). Recent projects include creating music for film (EMI & more), broadcast work for BBC Radio 3, “Reckonings” (2018) a duo album with Andre Bosman, tours with the cellist Lori Goldston (Earth, Nirvana) & collaborations with This Heat drummer Charles Hayward & Mira Calix, as well as commissions for Hampton Court Palace, The Immix Ensemble at Tate Liverpool, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra & The Zuckerman Museum of Contemporary Art (US). As well as numerous live performances in the UK & Europe.
www.lauracannell.co.uk
Polly Wright is a Musician whose work bleeds into Performance, Installation, Film, and Written Word. Using voice, pianos and organs, music boxes, slide guitar, various orchestral instruments and fragments from long forgotten records, she has created music for theatre, installation, poetry and dance and performed headline sold out shows at The National Portrait Gallery, Hoxton Music Hall and Saint Leonard’s Church in Shoreditch. She has composed music for poet Luke Wright, sung on the catwalk for Designer Orla Kiely at London Fashion Week, performed for Secret Cinema’s Grand Eagle Hotel for Laura Marling, written Country and Western music for Artist Stuart Pearson Wright and composed and performed in Director Shelly Love’s short ‘Betwixt and Between’ for Sadler’s Wells.