IZUMI KIMURA, CORA VENUS LUNNY, ANTHONY KELLY - Folding - CD

The wonderfully nuanced music of Izumi Kimura and Cora Venus Lunny folds with immersive field recordings by sound artist Anthony Kelly to form a sonically rich response to the coastal townlands of Dún Laoghaire, County Dublin, Ireland.Storm Emma drifts above and below ground (an effect achieved by Kelly burying hydrophones under the snow), drawing the listener into sounds of tumbling snowflakes and winds overhead as Kimura’s piano and Lunny’s viola respond with sequences of raw & fragile beauty eventually leading to moments of fierce intensity. Elsewhere on this record there is poetry and light to be found; passages of darkness are balanced out by tenderly rendered moments of pronounced brightness as all three musical elements fuse together.

These new studio renderings offer vibrant, deeper explorations of ideas generated during the artist’s time on Kimura’s DLR Musician in Residence scheme, discovering connections between environmental and musical sounds through improvisation and composition. Song birds, snowstorms, bees, thunder and rain, a zephyr gently moving dried leaves, and other sounds feature prominently, reflecting the rich sonic environment of Dún Laoghaire. These new versions retain much of the rawness and absorbing qualities that audiences heard in live performances. With strong roots in improvised music, field recording and sound art, these collaborators play to their collective strengths in tracks such as Storm Emma and Dry Leaves.

While these collective compositions draw into the lived-experience and eco-acoustics of Dún Laoghaire, they also aim to evoke universally shared experiences. The listener is taken on a sonic journey of discovery, all the time building to a climactic end point, the notes suddenly fall away to a heightened experience of everyday sounds, as a clear new landscape opens out ahead.