Monasunne

HEX 011 - 06/06/2024

tarting from their shared experience of growing up in East Anglia in the UK, the duo dug into the history of the region, finding myths and poems written at a time when it was an independent kingdom. The Anglo-Saxon poetry - dealing with questions of death, mortality and spirituality - forms the textual backdrop of the record and is sung in its original Old English. The duo treat the language as a sonic artefact and voice it through ‘the musical contemporary’ autotune, giving the music a wonderfully unsettling temporality. Rather than embalm a buried past, Monasunne re-imagine the historical geographies as a myth. The sonic worlding that results is a journeying across distanced times.

Fields Become Sky was developed over multiple recording and listening sessions from 2020-2023, using a mixture of self-programmed synths, violin textures, field recordings and autotuned vocals. Musically adjacent to a hybrid of Under Byen, Björk and Felicia Atkinson, the album traverses an emotional landscape of ritualistic chanting, cavernous spaces and subterranean kicks. From the primordial phonographic vocal folds emerge alternative lullabies in a lost mothertongue.

Lara Agar is a London-based composer and performer. She writes music for ensembles, dance and film and has released music on October House Records.

Louis d’Heudières is a Hamburg-based sound artist, composer and researcher. His work crosses live performance, installations and writing.

Tracklist

• 03:40 - Wundrian
• 01:54 - Cnidae
• 03:31 - Even Now My Heart Journeys Beyond Its Confines
• 04:06 - Under Heaven
• 05:05 - Changeling
• 03:33 - Ever May You Fade
• 09:23 - Bear Must Haunt the Heath, Dart Be Held in Hand

Media

• 100 x 12” 140g LP with download code
• download (mp3/wav) and online streaming

Credits

Written, mixed and produced by Lara Agar and Louis d’Heudières

Additional Mixing by Wojciech Rusin (Tracks 3 & 7) Mastered by Ariel Schlichter at Keine Zukunft Studio, Berlin Photos by Oliver McKenzie

Space