Andrew Cronshaw

About

English musician, zither-player and multi-instrumentalist, heavily influenced by traditional Finnish, Scots Gaelic and North Iberian musics. He has several productive and successful live-performing alliances, all ongoing, including with long-time collaborator Ian Blake, with Armenian duduk player Tigran Aleksanyan, and with Canada-based Chinese pipa and gu-cheng virtuoso Liu Fang and Vietnamese dan bau master Pham Duc Thanh. He and the musicians on his 9th solo album, "The Unbroken Surface of Snow" (Cloud Valley, 2011) – Armenian duduk master Tigran Aleksanyan, multi-instrumentalist Ian Blake and Finnish singer Sanna Kurki-Suonio – became the band SANS, releasing "SANS LIve" in 2014, and, with the line-up expanded by the addition of Sanna's daughter Erika Hammarberg as co-vocalist, in 2018 released the album "Kulku" (Cloud Valley, 2018). His 10th solo album, "Zithers" (Cloud Valley, 2020) is entirely solo, featuring just two instruments, both of them – as the title suggests – zithers: the electrified 74-string chord zither that has been a key instrument for him throughout his career, and a more recent one of his own devising, the marovantele, which has 22 pairs of strings on each side. As a world music journalist Andrew Cronshaw writes features and reviews, particularly for fRoots magazine but also including the Nordic, Baltic and Portuguese chapters in The Rough Guide to World Music, etc. Apart from his own albums, he has produced, and often engineered, albums by June Tabor, Silly Sisters, Bill Caddick, Zumzeaux, Brendan Power, Salamakannel, Nikolai Blad and others, and produced the mixes of Flook's Flatfish and of Hannu Saha's Mahla. Session work includes playing on albums by Hue & Cry, Scott Walker, Suede, Natacha Atlas, Martin Simpson, Pascal Gaigne, B.J.Cole and Ute Lemper, on film soundtracks including Outlaw King, Tolkien, GI Jane, and others. The song 'Zitherbell', which he co-wrote and performs with Natacha Atlas on her album 'Foretold in the Language of Dreams', appears in Jonathan Demme's film 'The Truth About Charlie'.

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