Ruminantia

From their beginnings as an enjoyable, slightly quirky, folk-inflected early music band, Horses Brawl have developed into a very different outfit indeed. Founding member Laura Cannell now plays with new guitarist and harmonium player Andre Bosman. They still use Renaissance and medieval tunes as a starting point, but the world their music inhabits is much darker, suffused with a bleak beauty, and built of a relentless, almost obsessive examination and re-examination of fragments – particles of shattered dances, love songs and songs of praise.

Via a deliberately restricted palette of sonorities, rhythms, pitch and range, and subversively non-standard techniques, with fiddle scrapings, knocks and rattles and a bowed guitar, the listener is led into a state of menaced trance. The pervasive drones render many of the cadences points of unrest, while sounds of breathing, or mutterings – like the noise of insects or a rustle of feathers – envelop and corrupt the innocence of the original melodies. ‘Brid one Brere’, reputedly the oldest known English love song, can stand as an example. The tune is sketched out, its texture is thickened by parallel open fifths, before it collapses into a haunted, scrubbing ostinato, with harmonium and violin frantic, almost despairing, until the piece simply disappears. Even ‘Isabella Dansa Alta’, the most overtly dance-like track of all, has the air of a fever-dream. There is little comfort in this music, but it’s a powerful, absorbing, and oddly cleansing experience.