Throughout, a folktale, half-remembered:
On the eve of a holiday, a young widow was ruminating in her family’s garden patch, some long distance from her house. She’d stolen away earlier in the day, not wanting to sour the joyful revelry of her relations with her sorrowful mood. Lost in her thoughts, time slipped away, and soon it was dark, then soon close to midnight. Now, on this day of all days, it was foolish to be out and about under the light of the moon, for unnatural creatures and trickster spirits and nameless things roamed the world, so thin was the veil and such was the degree of magic on the air. This being the case, it occurred to the widow to hurry home to the safety of hearth and family. So, she made haste along the hedgerow, hoping to avoid anyone and anything on her way.
For me, folklore has always filled a need. It is a vehicle for potential, for suspension of disbelief. In an inhumane world where wonder is seen as suboptimal and rarely profitable, magic can seem in short supply, choked out by the brutal efficiency of mundane systems and lackluster, algorithmical conveniences. This, it should go without saying, is a bummer. Listening to (or reading) a folktale creates a portal, cracks a door. It functions in a very different way than either fiction or nonfiction. The storyteller puts the listener in a liminal space, an alternative space where what they are hearing could be true, creating elbow room for ancient, unruly things and wild, unknowable things and things that we’ve lost. Or at least, the possibility of those things. Mostly, that possibility is enough to tint the light just so, to draw the world with an ever-so-subtly different line. And mostly, that’s just enough to scrape by.
Laura Cannell gets it. Throughout her prolific career, her music has functioned as something of an oculus through which listeners are presented with seemingly impossible, alternate worlds not so different from our own but vastly different from our present. Worlds that dance on foundations of old stories and syncretic traditions and fairy logic. Theirs is a beauty so profound it pierces the heart; a sadness so immense it ceases to be so, transformed to beauty once again.
Cannell’s latest serialised project, A Year Of Lore, comes to an end this month with the release of her WINTERLORE EP. Put simply, taken as a whole, A Year Of Lore might be her finest work thus far, showcasing each element of her trademark toolkit – overbowed violin, recorder, voice, synths, pipe organ (and more) – at its most compelling. If you feel inclined to quibble with its placement in the Cannell canon, rest assured, it is at the very least, a monumental achievement, and certainly the most holistic representation of Cannell as an artist that I think we’ve heard to date.
Each of the twelve monthly installments of A Year Of Lore is an interrogation of a specific thematic area rich in folkloric tradition – in sequence: the sea, the earth, rivers, mountains, ravens, wolves, skeletal mammoths, ghosts, the harvest, witches, fire, and winter – and variously cobbled together from folktales and songs, experiences of place, histories, new narratives, and improvisations inspired by all of it. Cannell has described the project as an exploration of real and imagined folklore, but I don’t really see the need to make that distinction. It seems to me Cannell is simply doing what folk storytellers have always done. That is, mold source material to suit their needs and insert something of themselves into every story. Fabulation has always been a part of it, too. But that doesn’t make it the same as fiction.
Making her way home, the widow sensed movement in parallel with hers, and heard hard breathing. Looking up to her left, she was shocked to see, atop the hedgerow and framed by moonlight, a small creature not unlike a goat keeping pace with her. Running now, the widow could see her family’s farmhouse in the distance. Soon, the goat-thing fell out of earshot. Thinking herself alone again, she stopped for breath. Again, the sound of breathing – this time to her right. Atop a wall: the cloven-hoofed, horned thing, now upright and the size of a man. Running again, the sound of hooves keeping pace. Leaping into the air, the creature landed heavy on her shoulders as if the whole weight of the world. Now, it was riding her like a jockey as she sprinted hard toward her front door, its breath in her ears, gnarled hands on her shoulders, hooves dug hard into her back, just above her hips. It urged her on, and she ran, faster and faster.
Recently, my partner attended a screening of Christopher Morris’s A Year In A Field, a documentary film about standing stones. Returning, she quoted the following fragment to me: “the quiet, direct action of stillness.” Since then, that line has been ping-ponging around in my head, and I can’t help but think of it when listening to A Year Of Lore. To be sure, nothing is truly still, not even standing stones, but to embody or value stillness is to exist in opposition to, well, nearly everything we’re expected to embrace as a culture – immediacy, convenience, disposability. Anyway, I think Laura Cannell probably values stillness. Her music certainly does. With the exception of some comparatively rambunctious bowing on HARVESTLORE’s ‘Apples Have Fallen’, as A Year Of Lore progresses, the EPs themselves seem to become more glacially inclined, and as they do so, they (perhaps paradoxically) become increasingly transfixing.
Which isn’t to say the earlier EPs in the series are weaker than latter installments. They’re not. It makes sense that RIVERLORE would sound markedly different than GHOSTLORE, but the way the EPs are sequenced feels like a logical progression toward something. Which also makes sense. Early on in the project, Cannell described A Year Of Lore as a soundtrack to a nonexistent film, referencing a young girl that would reappear as the series progressed. So, it’s unsurprising one would get the strong notion of both overarching narrative and structure here.
More and more, I am sure that A Year Of Lore is best consumed in one go, if possible (or in album length chunks at minimum). At about three hours all told, it’s not that unwieldy (it’s certainly no DRIFT Series 1). When listened to in order, there are moments that occur in the transitions between EPs that are almost miraculous. So much so that I have convinced myself they must be intentional. The one-two of the sweetly melancholic vocalisations of ‘The Ghost Who Cared Too Much’ and the plaintive overbowed violin drones of ‘As Summer Passes Into Sleep’ – from GHOSTLORE and HARVESTLORE respectively – is practically heartstopping. Ditto the transition from HARVESTLORE’s emotionally wrecked ‘Eyes Closed’ to the bittersweet violin and synth reverberations of ‘Under The Hunters Moon’. Even if all of that is a happy accident, these patterns and progressions are just pareidolia, it doesn’t negate the profound value to be had in allowing the entirety of A Year Of Lore to envelop you as its concerns shift from the earthy and corporeal to the ethereal, to allow it to slowly fill your room, its stories unfurling patiently like wisps of smoke and cloud.
Running faster than she ever had, in a flash, the widow was at her door, the goat-thing filling her ears with maddening ramblings beyond her understanding. Bent low by the weight of the beast, she found herself unable to open the door. Or to move much at all, really. Its weight, that of mountains, bore down. Mustering all her strength, the widow raised her right hand and performed the sign of the cross, blessing herself in the Catholic tradition. Somehow, the beast’s weight increased. Again, she blessed herself. Again, the beast’s weight increased. With the last of her strength, she raised her hand. A third blessing and there was no goat-thing at all. Still, though its weight was lifted, she remained bent. For all the world, were it not for the crook in her back, it would’ve been as if the goat-thing had never existed. The widow never stood up straight again.
This story was told to the not uncontroversial antiquarian T. Crofton Croker by Peggy Barrett in Cork in the 1820s. Barrett was meant to have relayed the story to Croker in the first person, insisting this incident had happened to her. Though I’ve read it many times, years ago, I resisted rereading it for this piece, choosing instead to retell it from memory. There are details missing. I no longer remember what holiday it was, for instance. Similarly, I am sure many details are my own. But that seems unimportant. Folktales, like the standing stones referenced above, are generally the same in ways that matter, but always different, too. Changed in each telling, by each teller, who in turn, strives to stay true to the heart of the story. With A Year Of Lore, Laura Cannell has reinforced her reputation as a master storyteller in sound, capable of rendering instrumental narratives so true to the spirit of the folkloric themes and traditions that birthed them as to almost be conjurings. What a treasure it is to have these songs in the world! Whenever they play, the veil will seem thin. While they play, there will always be the feeling of magic on the air.
