Lara Agar and Louis d’Heudières are both from East Anglia and, although neither live there now, it lives loud in their imaginations. Their first release together as Monasunne is a landscape-driven conjuring of the region’s ancient history. Inspired by the lingering Anglo-Saxon presence in Suffolk, they have produced a writhing, expressive soundscape that is equal parts Laura Cannell and M.R. James.
The two are composers and performers. Agar’s experimental composition includes a piece based on the writings of Rachel Carson, an EP (Solstice), and work for dance and visual arts. D’Heudières, based in Hamburg, is a researcher and composer, with an eclectic track record that includes a sound installation on the history of copper and a piece for a string quartet who have never seen the score before. Their cross-disciplinary CVs make for compelling reading, and high quality music-making. Fields Become Sky is supremely confident and conceptually powerful, but it works because it is by no means a cerebral album. At times unsettlingly visceral, it revels in the capacity of sound to trigger rushes of association, and bring the very dead to life.
Fields Become Sky is about language, which the pair describe as “a sonic artefact”. The historical geography of the East coast is brought to life by reimagining the strange-yet-familiar words of our ancestors. The album is in Old English, a remarkable thing in itself. Opening track ‘Wundrian’ – Anglo-Saxon for ‘wonder’ – has a cello stalking at a stately pace through a watery-sounding landscape of bubbly synths and shimmering bells. It sets the scene for repeated eruptions of the past, as voices lurch from the grave and sing, using words not heard in Suffolk for a millennium. Counter-intuitively, vocals are treated through autotune, which gives them both a contemporary and an ancient quality at the same time. On ‘Cnidae’ Lara and Louis’ singing is like aon overheard, muttered conversation in the ether. On ‘Changeling’, growls and cackles burst from the speakers like a séance in full flow.
The climax of the work is the final track ‘Bears Must Haunt the Hearth, Dart Be Held in Hand’, where we hear Louis singing a stream of Anglo-Saxon like a spirit medium. A mix of distorted strings and synthesiser hum trails away over the distant horizon. Fields Become Sky is a highly imaginative, multi-layered work with a powerful sense of place. Developed over three years, combining field recordings, strings and synths with poetry and myth in our nation’s mother tongue, it is an album of wide open spaces, confined subterranean terror, rich sounds and musical joy.
