Without having collaborated as often as they may have liked, the violinist and recorder player Laura Cannell and the cellist Lori Goldston long seem to have shared a purview which takes in liminal drones and other brackish melodies, stretching from East Anglian marshlands and farmlands or more recently Doggerland with its submerged patchwork of saltmarshes and mudflats, beaches and lagoons to the Salish Sea or the bluffs and beaches of seaport Seattle.
Whether one happens upon Cannell as she figures the antiphonal call and response of birdsong through chordal drones and oscillating tones or reimagines the works of the twelfth-century composer and mystic Hildegard von Bingen, or strikes out in the direction of Goldston in a bid to chase the choppy tumult of High and Low or trace the visceral strains and gossamer improvisations of her Greg Kelley tandem All Points Leaning In, both artists are keenly rooted in a sense of place while resolutely tugging at the borders of genre bounds and their own iterative practices as musicians.
In the summer of 2022 the medievalist and experimental musician who has carved out her own niche on both recorders and her signature overbow violin and the rigorously detrained cellist finally managed to scrape together enough time to unite in Norfolk, which is Cannell’s home base. The resulting album The Deer Are Small And The Rabbits Are Big was captured swiftly, over the span of a few days, within the fourteenth-century undercroft of St Olaveās Priory in Great Yarmouth and astride the empty aisles of St Andrewās Church in Raveningham, one of Cannell’s favourite haunts.
The pair worked together on Cannell’s remix projectĀ Echolocation last year, while Goldston contributed as Cannell curated twelve tracks for the seasonal landscape installation Raveningham Sound Walk. But this new record is their fullest collaboration to date, and it succeeds to staggering effect from the first moments of the opening track ‘Vaulted Echoes’, where Cannell’s fiddle arcs downwards and flits like a spectre around Goldston’s cello, before finding its own passage as the hierarchy of the instruments changes shape. Goldston in particular plays with rhythmic freedom as Cannell begins to mould the melody of the piece, her rubato here sometimes redolent of Bach’s first cello suite.
The title of the album comes from Goldston’s surprise over the wildlife which cuts a dash through the marshes and meadows of Raveningham, especially during the twilight hours when she saw muntjac deer – an invasive species now common across the southeast after escaping from the Woburn Abbey estate in Bedfordshire in the 1920s – and enormous hares through the dim glow of their windscreen. The counterpoint between Cannell’s fiddle and Goldston’s cello on The Deer Are Small And The Rabbits Are Big is a stately kind of counterpoint, as though the musicians are not fussily or intimately concerned with each other’s plans but drawn irrevocably into the same orbit.
On the third piece ‘Devil White Flowers’ the cello sounds like a plucked bass as Cannell sings over the top with a wish-you-well, apparently taken from an eighteenth-century collection of East Anglian proverbs and folk sayings which the duo used as a graphic score or prompt. ‘They Roamed The Summer Tundra’ opens with the stridency of a bugle call before settling after a couple of minutes into something more aching and languorous, while ‘The Underground Passage To The Castle’, another longer entanglement, carries the same sort of roving quality but with a rapt gaze and a bulwark of stone at either side and underfoot.
Goldston perhaps remains best known for her work with the grunge icons Nirvana with her pizzicato stylings unshackling some of the more formal connotations of her instrument, while Cannell whose music fits just as easily alongside some of the key tomes of dream pop or drone minimalism carefully sheds the wool jacket of folk,Ā but this might be one of the most classical sets either artist has produced, which isn’t to say that it is somehow austere or difficult. The Deer Are Small And The Rabbits Are Big is eminently listenable and often riveting, arriving now at the crest of summer but sure to prove especially rewarding as we ease from here through some of life’s colder months.
