Marsh Lore was created by Laura Cannell and Polly Wright in 2019. Both rural suffolk dwellers they discovered a common ground of a love of the marshes, folklore and East Anglian ways of life both now and in the past.

Their first project together was the creation of an album of unaccompanied vocal music which was improvised from fragments of traditional customs and sayings from 18th century Norfolk. It was part of an outdoor sound installation at the Waveney Valley Sculpture trail and was released on 2nd August 2019 on the Brawl Records label.

This album Sing As The Crow Flies was reviewed in the music press receiving broadcasts on BBC Radio 3, reviewed in the contemporary and experimental music magazine The Wire and was named Folk Album of the Month in The Guardian with an amazing 4* review.

Laura Cannell Biography
Straddling the worlds of experimental, chamber, folk, early & medieval music, Laura’s semi-composed, semi-improvised compositions draw on the emotional influences of the landscape and explore the spaces between early and experimental music that is rooted in but not tethered to the past. Cannell is an artist whose original and singular vision sets her apart from her contemporaries, whilst her music exists as a culturally vital exploration of the link between medieval, traditional and modern musical idioms. 

Laura has released five solo albums since 2014, successfully carving out a unique path with her work, receiving critical acclaim from the contemporary music press and regularly being included in numerous Album of the Year lists (including The Guardian, MOJO, BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction, The Wire and The Quietus). Recent projects include creating music for film (EMI & more), broadcast work for BBC Radio 3, “Reckonings” (2018) a duo album with Andre Bosman, tours with the cellist Lori Goldston (Earth, Nirvana) & collaborations with This Heat drummer Charles Hayward & Mira Calix, as well as commissions for Hampton Court Palace, The Immix Ensemble at Tate Liverpool, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra & The Zuckerman Museum of Contemporary Art (US). As well as numerous live performances in the UK & Europe.

Polly and Laura decided to create a space for all of their projects both collaborative and individual along with submissions from other like-minded artists. There are several exciting live, written and recorded projects in the pipeline.

Polly Wright Biography
Polly Wright is a Musician whose work bleeds into Performance, Installation, Film, and Written Word. Her work is largely informed by the ghosts of Nostalgia and Loss, lives never lived, the marshland landscape, photographs found in dusty boxes in charity shops, The Pleasure buildings of the British Seaside, Literature and Hauntology. Using voice, pianos and organs, music boxes, slide guitar, various orchestral instruments and fragments from long forgotten records, she has created music for theatre, installation, poetry and dance and performed headline sold out shows at The National Portrait Gallery, Hoxton Music Hall and Saint Leonard’s Church in Shoreditch.

She has composed music for poet Luke Wright, sung on the catwalk for Designer Orla Kiely at London Fashion Week, performed for Secret Cinema’s Grand Eagle Hotel for Laura Marling, written Country and Western music for Artist Stuart Pearson Wright and composed and performed in Director Shelly Love’s short ‘Betwixt and Between’ for Sadler’s Wells. Her current projects in development involve an intimate dance piece set in a derelict hotel room, a torchlit performance in an eel catcher’s cottage on the marshes, ongoing collaborative work with Laura Cannell, a film piece with Designer Lu Flux, and development of programmes of songs and oddities with pianist -composer William Fergusson, armed with a 1970’s Lounge Organ, the Songs of Schubert and the dreadful memories of working in a betting shop.