LAURA CANNELL wants you to fall in love with the recorder

LAURA CANNELL

Antiphony Of The Trees (Brawl)

Recorders are back! Moments after asking to review this album, I was alerted to a programme on Radio 3 about recorders (hosted by Tom Service, if you’d like to listen in). Whether you played this simple wooden instrument as a child or not, Norfolk folk experimentalist Laura Cannell’s Antiphony Of The Trees is an album that truly shows the dexterity and potential of the instrument. Inspired by birds, this is a work in which one can hear their songs and calls, whether in flight, fight, at mating time, or simply reasserting their position on the tree branch at dawn.

In all, the style of the album is haunting, evocative, and strung through with a sense of brooding magic. Here and there, the songs become droning or dirge-like; in other places, they – like birds themselves – take flight, emulating wing beats as the melodies rise into air. The recorder’s range is made clear in the process, and these “avian arias”, inspired by the fen valley in which Cannell lives, transport us there, and beyond the music rooms and school assemblies of memory that are naturally evoked by the instrument.

Beautifully layered, with a strong sense of how fragments may be combined to create a kind of enchantment, Antiphony of the Trees weaves its spell over the listener from beginning to end. Additionally, I suspect that anyone who writes (poetry in particular) will find it incredibly inspiring.

words MAB JONES