Monasunne

Eastern Anglia, a region of England comprising the present-day counties of Norfolk and Suffolk, was home to one of the most powerful Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of the early Middle Ages, between the sixth and eighth centuries AD. Violinist and composer Lara Agar has long been based in London, while sound artist, composer and musicologist Louis d’Heudières, born in France, now lives in Hamburg, but both spent their childhoods in that rural land nestled along the North Sea. In creating the Monasunne project, of which this “Fields Become Sky” is the first recording, they wanted to reconnect with the ancestral culture of the Germanic peoples who sowed the seeds of modern English identity in the territories previously dominated by the Roman Empire. To do so, the two joined forces to shake the dust of centuries from Old English poetic texts, rich in reflections on spirituality, the transience of life and death, and to sing them over a completely unique musical landscape: as if situated in an alternative eon, the sounds of their compositions seem at first to come from remote millennia, and a moment later to spring from futuristic machines.

If these combinations were not enough to give a measure of the originality of “Fields Become Sky”, a further coup de theatre awaits the listener in the very first track. After aphasic synthesizers and stuttering violins, two-thirds of the way through “Wundrian” we witness the coagulation of a swarm of dissonant strings and digital basses, over which an alien autotuned song hovers. This reveals one of Agar and d'Heudières' striking insights: taking one of the most overused devices in pop music of the last twenty-five years and turning it into an instrument of disorientation, with which to suggest mediumistic invocations from unknown eras.

From here on, the parade of surprises does not stop. “Cnidae” launches out-of-tune harpsichords onto tingles of metal rattles and slippery keyboards, while Laurie Anderson-style recitatives are disturbed by vocal cut-ups inspired by Felicia Atkinson's ASMR practices.  As soon as the combined male and female voices rise above the subterranean heartbeat of “Even Now My Heart Journeys Beyond Its Confines”, the combination of Nordic phonemes and ritualistic pace evokes the glacial ferocity of siblings Olof and Karin Dreijer (aka The Knife) in the most abstract moments of “Shaking The Habitual”. Yet a more solemn posture, robotic counterpoints and glitch interference remind us that the nature of the music contained here is different. In the alienating lied of “Under Heaven”, the violin, once it has struggled to free itself from computerised quicksand, even manages to intone recognisable melodic phrases, but “Changeling” once again eliminates all points of reference: sliding dangerously on slippery microtonal slopes, the dehumanised soliloquies of the epoch-making first two tracks of “Kid A” are transformed into free-jazz solos, then a mournful synthetic organ finds itself alone, surveying the lunar surface. It is then up to “Ever May You Fade” to stage a duet between strings and rustling disturbances, in the midst of which the voice attempts to sing a lullaby, playing with its own distorted shadow and against gelatinous music boxes.

This brings us to the final astral journey, lasting more than nine minutes, of “Bear Must Haunt the Heath, Dart Be Held In Hand”. An introduction entrusted to a frightening reverse whirlpool sucks us inexorably towards a past that seems even more distant than that from which the lyrics of the album originate: as a Celtic dawn of strings emerges, we realise that we have gone back much further than the Anglo-Saxons, much further back than the Romans; and when a shamanic chant distorted by electronics is added, we are transported even further back in time, to dream of Neolithic nights in the starlight, perhaps in the presence of the megaliths of Stonehenge. It all fades away first into a long symphony of drones, then into the rusty background noise of drifting synthesizers. What references can a listener trained in rock and psychedelia cling to in this primordial regression? Perhaps Ligeti, popularised in the hippie era by the famous closing sequence of Kubrick's Odyssey, or the more hermetic scores of Rachel's.

In recent times, perhaps only Roly Porter's “Kistvaen” has attempted a similar undertaking. But where the Bristol-based former dubstep pioneer incorporates sepulchral prehistoric lamentations into colossal dark-ambient infrastructures, Agar and d'Heudières achieve, with an admirable sense of synthesis (just over thirty minutes in total), a form of timeless art-song, where the Middle Ages and science fiction meet in an impossible twist. And intoxicate us, listen after listen, with sacred incredulity.

11/12/2025