The Rituals Of Hildegard Reimagined

Exposed and raw, Laura Cannell’s latest album is an offering of contemporary minimalism to a 12th century composer, a thank you to a lost uncle and a way to process an anxiety disorder. The music feels ancient as she breaks down and reconstructs selected music by the 12th Century Polymath Hildegard von Bingen alongside her own compositions. The 12 track album is performed on bass recorders, a 12 string knee harp, delay pedal and sparse layering, conjuring a bridge to connect the centuries. The Rituals of Hildegard Reimagined was improvised and recorded in single takes. Cannell is standing by a 12th century font where animals carved in stone have been defaced, in her head she is playing alongside a woman living and composing at the time the font was built. Laura improvises on memories, on fragments of notation, stretching time, layering the thoughts and imaginings of universal life experiences. Remembering the impact that small gestures can make to another person's life, never knowing when a shared moment may re-emerge or demand to be somehow activated into sound. “The raw beauty of her melodies glimmer through prickly thickets of stark and dissonant chordal drones” THE WIRE “this music feels ancient, it also feels brutally alive, as if a giant was waking from long slumbers, about to make its way in the world” THE GUARDIAN “an essential work of modern British folk and avant-garde composition.” THE QUIETUS “wherever you happen to be listening to Cannell’s music, you are there, surrounded by trees and the music, with all its hidden intentions, emerging from within its branches.”