As we near the end of another week, it’s time to present another highlight from last month’s Supernormal festival in Oxfordshire, and this time it’s the turn of Sarah Angliss.
The electroacoustic musician presented her latest album, Air Loom, at the festival. She played in the Barn area of the festival and was backed by vocalist Sarah Gabriel and percussionist Stephen Hiscock for the performance which you can watch above courtesy of IMPATV.
"Centre stage is the clavisimbalum, a sonorous, fourteenth-century cousin of the harpsichord," Angliss has said of the performance. "Its plucked, soft iron strings ring with a rich, dark reverberance – a sound that hails from Eastern European folk and the Renaissance court.
"To this we’ll be adding voices in close harmony, recorder, theremin, percussion and robotic carillon, an instrument I’ve devised and built to play bells at inhuman speeds, creating a haze of delicate, metallic sound. As we play, sounds are deftly contorted, fragmented and recombined using bespoke electronic and digital techniques. My own variant of the loop pedal stretches every strand of sound subtly as it plays, transforming the most consonant music into something more angular as it makes beguiling musical collisions."
Writing about the set, tQ’s reviewer at the festival, Eden Tizard, said that the trio on stage conjured "a sound of broad depth, where instruments traditional, homemade, and electronic coexist, practices that reach both far back and look forward at what may be yet to come". You can read that review in full here.
Read our recent interview with Sarah Angliss here and watch out for another Supernormal highlight on these pages next week.
