The Earth with her Crowns

Laura Cannell is an improvising musician who plays violin, often overbowing, a technique that allows her to sound all four strings at once. She also plays double recorders… and hums. Cannell enjoys a restricted pallet and the enjoyment of this album comes from her exploration of this self-imposed sonic restriction. The title-track repeats a simple phrase then, just when you have the measure of this, it shifts off-key somewhat; a note is added here, another subtracted and the changing patterns intrigue. Where next?

The Earth with her Crowns was commissioned by The Wapping Project, an arts organisation that formerly occupied Wapping Hydraulic Power Station, a late 19th-century industrial complex that provided power, first using steam, then electricity, to run machinery – lifts for instance – across London. Cannell improvised in the Boiler House, the Coal Store and the Filter House, in conversation with these spaces, responding to their powerful resonances. In ‘Black Sleep of Night’ the building seems to breathe as if living, countered by the industrial percussion of iron staircases being rhythmically struck. The power of this is undercut by the frailty of Cannell's recorder, a sign of the human presence in this great machine.