SANS

Saturday
Part of Home Festival 2012

“Sublime.” - Max Reinhardt, BBC Radio 3

Over the past few years British multi-instrumentalist, producer, writer and musical explorer Andrew Cronshaw and Tigran Aleksanyan, Armenian master of his country’s exquisitely human-toned duduk, have shown with their dramatic, spacious music that not only are they maestros of the still, quiet places, they also create that wide, calm atmosphere, drawing in and mesmerising the audience, on the big outdoor stages of festivals. Silence writ large.

Cronshaw’s new album The Unbroken Surface of Snow captures that essence. Notes hanging in space, it draws the listener into a quiet, richly coloured world and makes its own time.

Joining Cronshaw and Aleksanyan on the album are a long-time Cronshaw collaborator, British/Australian bass clarinet and soprano sax player and multi-instrumentalist Ian Blake, and the great Finnish singer Sanna Kurki-Suonio (perhaps best known outside Finland as vocalist with the mighty Swedish/Finnish drone-rock band Hedningarna). Following powerful live shows as a quartet in Finland in the summer of 2011, these four have become SANS.

The band’s music flows intuitively and spontaneously between the subtlest minimalism of Finnish runo-song and the rich shapeliness of English, Scottish and Armenian traditional melody with a deep, powerful, glacially massive energy, enriched by the woody grind of Ian Blake’s bass clarinet and his soaring, airy soprano sax and given an intense focus by Sanna Kurki-Suonio’s keening, whispering, passionate vocals and magnetic, bright-eyed stage presence.