Simultaneous Flight Movement

One musician, a violin, a recorder and a lighthouse are hardly the typical ingredients of an album. Laura Cannell's Simultaneous Flight Movement is certainly not typical but it's definitely an album worth hearing. The instrumentalist and composer has crafted a trance-like, semi-improvisatory tapestry of sound, recorded in one single take, ‘on the edge of England,’ in a lighthouse at Southwold, Suffolk. If that sounds ascetic, it is, but it's still beautiful. And everything about this record is evocative, from the spiralling sound-wash created by the singular acoustic, to the piece names (‘The Sudwulf’, ‘Interrelation of Diverse Emotions’, ‘Call to Alms’). Both the fiddle and recorder tracks use self-designed techniques, from a ‘deconstructed bow’ that allows Cannell to produce a polyphonic effect, to playing on a double recorder.

Cannell's background is in early music as well as folk, and Simultaneous Flight Movement feels appropriately ancient. Both recorder and violin tracks have short, sawing musical figures that, helped by the natural reverb, together become long, searching, drone-like melodic lines that morph and re-form. Cannell's bold compositions are mesmerising; it's brave, original music-making.