These Feral Lands Vol 1

The music is typical Laura Cannell: open, chordal (lots of over-bowed violin), improvised. It’s the presence of Stewart Lee on These Feral Lands that distinguishes this collaboration. Known as an acerbic comedian and a savage political commentator, Lee has another side, a deep interest in vernacular culture (he likes morris dancing) and folk music (he’s devoted to Shirley Collins). The ten tracks are built on improvisations that Cannell recorded as she watched a buzzard, which was watching her, with music inspired by animal sounds – she transcribed the howling of wolves – and stories and legends.

In ‘Wrekin’ Lee speaks of Gwendol Wrekin ap Shenkin ap Mynyddmawr, the giant who went to obliterate the town of Shrewsbury, against which he has a grudge, with a huge spadeful of earth; instead he drops it, creating that startling hill known as The Wrekin. ‘Wellington Hearts’ is a sequence of accounts of historical events in that town: William Withering learning the medicinal properties of foxgloves from a wise woman, Old Mother Hutton, and becoming famous for this ‘discovery’; a priest’s wife denounced for adultery and punished in a charivari or ‘rough music’ ritual. In ‘Black Shuck’ Lee, sounding akin to Captain Beefheart, growls and snarls about the demon dog that, to this day, terrorises East Anglia (where he has roots). The stories and the music, with Kate Ellis’ resonant cello and Polly Wright’s harmonium, are appropriately fragmentary and mysterious, not so much unfinished as eroded.