Sarah is joined on Air Loom by vocalist Sarah Gabriel and percussionist Stephen Hiscock. As the trio play, their sounds are deftly contorted, fragmented and recombined using her digital inventions. At the heart of the album is the clavisimbalum, a sonorous, fourteenth-century cousin of the harpsichord. Its plucked, soft iron strings ring with a rich, dark reverberance – a sound that hails from Eastern European folk and the Renaissance court.
Angliss adds voices in close harmony, recorder, theremin, percussion and robotic carillon, an instrument she devised and built to play bells at inhuman speeds, creating a haze of delicate, metallic sound.