The SANS Sessions

The SANS Sessions is a series of performances by SANS, each different and with a theme, in a variety of intimate London venues, the longest section being four nights at Cecil Sharp House.

Uniting the powerful, ancient Karelian runo-songs that became Finland’s Kalevala with the lingering duduk laments of Armenia and ghosts of British folk-song melody, SANS makes an atmospherically wide-screen new music surging between glacial stillness and passionate power.

The band’s very original music draws together its members' long experience in Finnish, Armenian and British traditional musics. The magnificent singing of Finland’s Sanna Kurki-Suonio, the heart-pausing sound of Armenian Tigran Aleksanyan’s duduk, the deep woodiness of Ian Blake’s bass clarinet, the dark, glassy chiming of Andrew Cronshaw’s electric zither and unique Madagascan/Finnish marovantele, and the breathy, shivering harmonics of a pair of man-high Slovak fujaras all unite in a rich soundscape

SANS's material is evolved in performance; while every performance results in new material and approaches, these intimate SANS Sessions shows will bring in wild ideas that the band perhaps wouldn't try on one of its bigger shows, and add instruments - such as Hungarian citera, Chinese hulusi, Madagascan marovany and a harp made from a Scottish red deer antler - that aren't currently in the SANS touring armoury. And some shows will have surprise guests collaborating with the band.

All SANS shows are recorded on digital multitrack, and this new material will become the basis for the next album.

Since formation in 2011, as result of all four working on Andrew Cronshaw’s 9th album ‘The Unbroken Surface Of Snow’, SANS has played very successful shows in Britain, Finland, Norway, Croatia, Belgium and Australia. The CD 'SANS Live', recorded on the 2013 Flanders tour, released in April 2014, reached the World Music Charts Europe top 20.

Each performance will be different, so it’s worth coming to more than one. The performances start at 8pm. The themes for the shows are:

Mon 13 June, 8pm : The SANS Sessions: 1 – “‘Never, never’, spoke the sea-waves”

Tues 14 June, 8pm :The SANS Sessions: 2 – “And the leaves they do grow green”

Fri 17 June, 8pm : The SANS Sessions: 4 – “The bird of burnished copper”

Sat 18 June 8pm : The SANS Sessions: 5 – “From a city dead by fire I wander”