This latest album from English violinist/avant-folk visionary Laura Cannell is billed as “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.” Cannell was first turned onto Benedictine abbess/polymath Hildegard von Bingen back in the late ‘90s when her uncle played her Sequentia’s Canticles of Ecstasy album and the iconoclastic German nun’s compositions have been an alternating source of comfort and inspiration ever since. In keeping with the "inspiration" theme, The Rituals of Hildegard Reimagined is essentially a great new Laura Cannell album rather than anything resembling a conventional homage. As Cannell describes it, she broke down and reconstructed selected Hildegard pieces and interspersed them with her own work. She also set aside both her violin and her usual working methods, as these pieces were improvised and recorded in single takes using a simple palette of bass recorder, 12-string medieval harp (“tuned in unequal temperament”), and a delay pedal. As it turns out, that is all Cannell needed to cast quite a wonderfully hallucinatory, haunting, and timeless spell. It’s frankly a shame that Hildegard herself isn’t around to hear it, as this album would be an ideal soundtrack for anyone looking to have otherworldly religious visions.
Notably, this is not the first major Laura Cannell release to center upon her recorder playing, as that honor belongs to 2022’s Antiphony of the Trees. On that album, Cannell used a small arsenal of recorders to transform transcribed birdsongs into minimalist chamber music. Rituals is a radically different album for a whole host of reasons (spontaneity, inspiration, a medieval harp, etc.), but the most striking one for me is how masterfully Cannell makes use of her delay pedal this time around. On the opening “The Cosmic Spheres of Being Human,” for example, a tumbling and serpentine melody leaves behind a wake of fluttering and flickering afterimages that call to mind something between “hallucinatory snakecharmer” and “chopped and screwed classical impressionism.” There is also a second layer in which a slow mournful melody drifts through the landscape of dissolving loops, but it occasionally breaks into additional tendrils of looping melody or subtly gnarled feedback as well.
The effect is wonderfully ghostly, exotic, and tenderly ephemeral, as gorgeous melodies continually curl and dissipate like trails of smoke. It is also the single most beautiful piece on the album to my ears, but it is not exactly an aberration, as several other pieces cast a similar ritualistic and otherworldly spell. In fact, the only real indication that these pieces were improvised is that they tend to end after a few minutes rather than further expanding or transforming beyond their original theme. The original themes, however, are often quite sophisticated and vividly realized, so Rituals feels more like a mesmerizing series of moody, dreamlike vignettes than a parade of promising tossed-off ideas.
Generally, the recorder pieces provide most of the album’s most striking highlights, while harp pieces like “Earthly Music” and “Everything is Hidden in You” feel like palate-cleansing interludes that herald the next stages of Rituals’ phantasmagoric journey. There are some notable exceptions, however, as “A Feather on the Breath” calls to mind a duet between a darkly delicate koto melody and the viscerally snarling, convulsive, and distorted tones of a demonic flautist.
In keeping with that theme of unexpected violence and dissonance, the title piece is another eerie highlight, as a mournful melody lazily winds and smears through a pulsing and squirming storm of sharper, more blurting tones. The vibe is probably best described as “Colin Stetson summons a flock of demonic birds with a supernaturally cursed flute.” Elsewhere, the closing “A Lost Nightingale” provides yet another blearily haunted and sacred-sounding tableau, as a slow-moving and snaking melody unpredictably pulses and shapeshifts in a haze of breathy unease.
There are several other entrancing pieces strewn throughout the album as well, but the sustained spell of the album as a whole is greater than any individual passage, as Rituals is organic and hallucinatory in a way that goes beyond merely feeling ancient and timeless and lands somewhere closer to “this sounds like a dispatch from an entirely different plane of being.” Given that I was already a fan of both Cannell and Hildegard von Bingen beforehand, it was probably inevitable that I would enjoy this album, but I was nevertheless taken aback at how beautifully Cannell was able to stretch into transcendent new terrain without even picking up her main instrument. Admittedly, there has been no shortage of excellent Laura Cannell releases in recent years (2022’s monthly "Sounds" series, this year’s “Lore” series, etc.), but this album stands as an especially cool and inspired outlier in an already strong and continually evolving body of work.
