Laura Cannell & Polly Wright - Sing As the Crow Flies review | Jude Rogers's folk album of the month

The Guardian 80

(Brawl Records)
The duo’s album is based on a 19th-century book of Norfolk customs and ballads, decorated with powerful improvised vocals

On the fringes of tradition sits Laura Cannell, the Norfolk musician best known for her baroque violin playing and the eerie drones of her recorders. Her music usually revisits old spaces, ancient churches and marshlands, but her new album goes one step further: exploring the lost voices of women in folktales from her part of the world. Working with fellow East Anglia singer and performer Polly Wright, on this album for the first time, quite appropriately, Cannell sings.

Cannell and Wright take as their source material a terrifying sounding 19th-century book: The Norfolk Garland: A Collection of the Superstitious Beliefs and Practices, Proverbs, Curious Customs, Ballads and Songs of the People of Norfolk. Words from it are laced loosely around the women’s vocal improvisations. Initially, they sound tentatively uttered. One for the Rook One for the Crow takes an old seed-growing proverb – one will wither and one will grow – and whispers its words like soft winds in and out of the air. As the women call and respond though, their communion develops in intensity, their voices whipping and warping in and out of tune. This impetus continues throughout these nine beautiful, penetrating tracks, with names such as Marsh Village Psalms, All I Have I Give to Thee and Revoicing Hraefns People. (Hraefns being the Old English word for “ravens”, and the old name of Cannell’s home village, Raveningham.)