In her interview with Louise Gray in The Wire 462, composer and musician Laura Cannell discusses how her practice comes from an instinctual place. Elaborating on the idea that nothing is fixed in her work, she says, “I might be standing by the door, hear something and then mimic it. Equally, I might mostly avoid everything that’s there. I’m trying to find a space around the notes around the sound.

“I think that comes from not wanting to say what’s on the page,” she continues. “If you’re reading a score, I want to see what else there is, what’s going on between those two notes written there. I am always trying to find these spaces, because I don’t want to be told what to do by the score. This comes from playing a lot of historical music and being aware of historically informed performance, even though I absolutely love it.”

Although Cannell has a prolific solo practice – she records and performs with many various historical and contemporary instruments – her work has also often been collaborative. In this annotated playlist, the multi-instrumentalist and Brawl records label founder selects a chronology of tracks from her vast output.

Horses Brawl
“Brannells”
From DINDIRIN
(Brawl, 2007)

Horses Brawl was my main band from 2003–12 recomposing folk and early music, releasing four albums and touring the UK together, appearing at Early Music Festivals, Arts Festivals, Arts Centres and on BBC Radio 3.

Horses Brawl
“Loyaute”
From DINDIRIN
(Brawl, 2007)

Taken from the second Horses Brawl album, “Loyaute” is deconstructed and recomposed from medieval French poet and composer Guillaume de Machaut songs. Joined by the then Professor of Early Music at Trinity College of Music, London, recorder and viol player, Director of the ensemble Musica Antiqua of London and fellow East Anglian, Philip Thorby.

Laura Cannell & Rhodri Davies
“Even A Moment”
From Feathered Swing Of The Raven
(Brawl, 2012)

Improvisation recorded live in the Jerwood Kiln Room at Snape Maltings, Suffolk during a composer residency. This was my first ever improvised recording, encouraged by one of the most legendary improvisors of our time on double bowed concert harp, he gave me a printout of some fragments of writing by Sappho and hit record. I owe a lot to Rhodri for smashing down the door to improvisation and experimentation.

Laura Cannell
“Dagian Duske”
From Quick Sparrows Over The Black Earth
(Brawl, 2014)

First solo album, recorded in Raveningham Church, Norfolk, UK. Improvised around fragments of early medieval music from 5th–14th centuries. I accidentally left the notes and scores that I had spent six months making, but when I arrived at the church I decided to record the album anyway, and it became my first solo album – a major change in how I recorded and used improvisation.

Laura Cannell
“Song Of Repentance”
From Quick Sparrows Over The Black Earth
(Brawl, 2014)

Based on a fifth century Armenian Psalm:

“I stand inside the isolated church
The cold winter daylight pouring through clear leaded windows
The wind shifts against the stone walls
It bangs on the ancient oak door
Like the clang of a distant wherry over the marshes”

Laura Cannell
“All The Land Ablaze”
From Beneath Swooping Talons
(Front & Follow, 2015)

“With deconstructed bow and the extraordinary sound of a double recorder, Beneath Swooping Talons has grown out of unearthed fragments that became improvised pieces, then immediately recorded in single takes. Tapping the potent rural landscape and long dormant musical modes, this album encompasses both wild animal calls and long forgotten liturgical chords, which drawn through Laura’s music seem to originate from the same, ahistorical place".

Laura Cannell
“Flaxen Fields”
Form The Sky Untuned
(Brawl, 2019)

The Sky Untuned takes as its starting point the theory of the music of the spheres, in which the universe is constantly making sound that humans cannot hear.

Stewart Lee/Laura Cannell/Kate Ellis
“Wrekin”
From These Feral Lands Vol 1
(Brawl, 2020)

Created in the 2020 lockdowns, I invited Stewart to send me something. We were all going a bit crazy from not performing or working with people and he had recently discovered things about his past which linked him strongly to the areas around the Wrekin Mountain and to the Norfolk/Suffolk borders. So we explored our feral lands and just wrote what felt right, it was a brilliant process for us and working on this kept us going when things were emotionally difficult.

Laura Cannell & Kate Ellis
“Riverbank”
From February Sounds – These Feral Lands: A Year Documented In Sound And Art
(Brawl, 2021)

Part our year long monthly EP release series that followed the 2021 album. Kate Ellis and I composed, improvised and recorded music as a sonic diary and released an EP on the last Friday of every month in 2021. This is from February and is one of my favourites. There are 48 tracks and around four hours of music in the series.

Laura Cannell
“For The Gatherers”
From Antiphony Of The Trees
(Brawl, 2022)

From my seventh solo album and for the first time focussing solely on the recorder, taking inspiration from the sound of birdsong which cuts through the crisp air of the fen valley where I live. Armed with bass, tenor, alto and double recorders, layered fragments are transcribed and re-interpreted from birdsong into a minimalist solo chamber music.

Laura Cannell
“Locked In My Bones”
From Unlocking Rituals
(Brawl, 2022)

Recorded live in single takes inside a large rural East Anglian village church, from a set of four improvisations made on chilly Monday mornings.

Hunteress
“Solitary Mountains”
From Destruction Horizon
(Brawl, forthcoming)

“Solitary Mountains” is the opening track from new album Destruction Horizon. It follows the debut release The Unshackling which came out in 2020 on Boomkat Editions Documenting Sound Series. Hunteress is my parallel world and digs deeper into ideas of folklore, plantlore and the ancient East Anglian Iceni tribe, and experimentation into making music without fiddle and recorder.

Read more about Laura Cannell's many projects and her relationship to medieval and early music in The Wire 462. Wire subscribers can access the article via the digital archive.