#andre bosman

 As a solo musician, Cannell’s melodic flights frequently invoke the avian world, but on Reckonings her wings are clipped, her playing grounded by the weight of Bosman’s low, sawing scrapes. Noise, drone, and improvisation aren’t new elements in Cannell’s playing, but they are central to Reckonings in a way they haven’t been before. Fragments of melodies emerge only briefly before being swallowed up by a mass of tones and overtones; chords and tone clusters build into fog banks and are dissipated by sudden gusts of silence. Dense, dissonant, and deeply evocative, the best pieces on Reckonings sound as weighty and memory saturated as the walls of the old buildings in which they were recorded. On “Strands”, for example, Cannell and Bosman gradually weave a rich tapestry of overtones that darkens the space around them before taking on a life of its own, turning the room into a third instrument that answers the instrumental storm with keening cries. It’s a stunning, even psychedelic moment.  

Like the ruined churches and marsh lands it conjures up, the pieces on Reckonings are beautiful but a bit samey unless you’re attuned to the finer details, and it’s hard not to wish for more of the textural and rhythmic variety found on the too-brief “Golden Lanes at Dusk” or the pulsing “Reckonings”. That said, no one else is making music quite like Cannell, and while Reckonings asks more of its listeners than her earlier releases, it also rewards them with one of the most immersive and evocative releases of her career.