The Flood, Digital Download

The Flood is the first ever full-length album of cutting-edge new music in Babylonian and Sumerian, accompanied by reconstructed ancient instruments. 

The album was born out of Stef Conner, Andy Lowings, Mark Harmer, and the Gold Lyre of Ur Project's shared passion for the rich, fascinating corpus of Mesopotamian literature and awe-inspiring beauty of ancient lyres, as well as their belief that new music is a means to forge empathetic connections between the modern world and the deep past.

When they came together to make the album, none of the group had a firm idea of what to expect – they just met in a little medieval church near Andy’s house, with a collection of reconstructed ancient lyres, a box of random resonant objects, some Mesopotamian poems and a stack of recording equipment, and started to improvise! By the time the album was recorded, everyone involved was surprised and somewhat awed by what they had created.

The incredible Mesopotamian poems and beautiful Gold Lyre of Ur have inspired some of the strangest, rawest, most gripping, and otherworldly songs you will ever hear, as well as some amusing and often downright bizarre excursions into the ancient Mesopotamian world... which reveal that in many ways, people in the remotest of ancient civilisations were actually a lot like us!

Reviews

“songs of romance, eros, lullaby calm, insults, come-ons and darkness… probably unlike anything you’ve heard before…” – Douglas Main, Newsweek

"The lyre-and-voice combinations made up an extraordinary sound, unlike almost anything, although not without vocal references of the likes of P. J. Harvey or Diamanda Galas. Conner was theatrical in her shaping of the lines, but not operatically so: the vocabulary included subtle streaks of English folk-song, but reaching out from a foundation of almost-dead Mesopotamian tongues, fed back through ears that have been listening to the stranger sides of rock. Rarely can a performance loaded with such informational background baggage be, in practice, so entertaining, academic, informal and spontaneously charged." – All About Jazz

"...a haunting vocal from the hugely talented Stef Conner. Each song, narrative driven, was delivered with such animated conviction – tender, passionate and with a beautifully judged ornamentation." – Steve Crowther, York Press

"It no longer matters whether it's new music or early music – it's something beyond all that... There's an immediate soul connection: something that everybody wants to find, but so few can even imagine. I've been waiting for years to hear singing like that." – Benjamin Bagby

 "These songs are examples of how art and science can come together to create something incredible." – Annalee Newitz, lo9.com

"...haunting, beautiful, and a rare treat; ...one of the most interesting musical projects I have run into all year." Billy Kangas, patheos.com

‘...No narcotic could be as potent as music, especially that of Stef Conner and her Lyre Ensemble (....) The British [musician] improvises melodies that flow like molten lava, and which, in an unguarded instant, make you think of jazz, but no. No! What you hear goes far beyond any contemporary setting, which is a wonder in itself...’ – Otto Marin Martinez, Obvious Magazine