Monasunne

Monasunne is the duo of composers Lara Agar and Louis d'Heudières. The album Fields Become Sky is the band’s debut. Starting 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 of ritualistic chanting, cavernous spaces and subterranean kicks. From the primordial phonographic vocal folds emerge alternative lullabies in a lost mothertongue.