As a gentle wave ebbs away from the foreshore of the Thames, it creates a curious sparkling sort of noise, as the little bits and pieces of old clay smoking pipes, pottery fragments, animal bones, centuries-old roof tiles, wig-curlers, thimbles, nails and needles – and modern-day disposable vapes – are clanked against the rocks. It recalls a video game I played as a child, where if I was struggling to figure out the answer to a puzzle, a chime would play and the screen would start to shimmer in the direction I was supposed to be looking. I trudge along slowly, staring just past my feet and waiting for one of the rocks to reveal itself as an imposter, something human-made. I look closer at what appears to be a small white pebble, and notice unnaturally square edges that betray it as a Roman tessera – a two-thousand-year-old tile that would once have formed part of a larger mosaic.
Because mudlarking forces me to fix my eyes downwards, it’s easy to forget the imposition of my surroundings, the skyscrapers of the city in one direction, the towering Shard and a distant Tower Bridge in the other. Curiously, when removing these icons of the capital from my mind in this way, I feel far more connected with my home city than I do when I focus on them. Rescuing a Tudor pipe from its lodging in a lump of clay, wondering who was last to hold it, when and where they chucked or dropped it into the river, how inconsequential an action its disposal would have been, and what random combination of currents brought it to the shore all these centuries later, you connect with London’s inherent transience. The clay pipe becomes a symbol of banality, a way to ground oneself against the maelstrom of a metropole.
A conversation I had a week or so prior with Gwenna Harman – a traditional singer and musician operating chiefly with Goblin Band – keeps coming back to me. “Mudlarking is like having social history laid out before you,” she said. “Tangible evidence of the lives that have come before, literally through finding a fragment.” She views folk songs in a similar way – as a way for the messy, strange, human realities that might be ignored by establishment history to survive.
Although born in London, Harman moved to Dartmoor aged three and spent much of her childhood immersed in its wild landscape. One of the CDs her parents owned was by a local folk band, and many of the places she knew by name were mentioned within its songs. When she found out that these songs were not original, that they had been passed down by her predecessors in the area for generations, “it became a whole new way to relate to this landscape that I already felt was such a part of me – I could take the ways it was part of other people’s lives and histories, and make that part of my relation to it as well.”
When she moved to London for university, at first she struggled to settle. “All the things that made up my self in the countryside were gone, I had to find new ways to find make who I am, not in relation to nature, and to find ways of coping.” In both mudlarking and folksong, “I found something similarly helpful. They were a way to denaturalise the rigidity of this glass, concrete space that I was being funnelled through.” Her relationship to folk music is multi-faceted – it’s a vehicle for political expression too, and has been her route to lasting friendships in the city with the community from which Goblin Band originated. As folk music has become more and more central to her life, she says, it’s become “like a saving grace. It was the way I found purpose and a community, a tangible connection to the history of a place that I had had in the countryside, but I hadn’t had in London until then. The whole time I was on my degree, I was like, ‘just another year until I can move back to Devon.’ Then when I finished it was ‘Oh no, I’ve got loads of friends!’”
There’s a lot that I relate to in what Harman says. Having spent much of my childhood in a small village, I also struggled to settle in the capital when I first moved here in 2015. I still find London’s intense pace and remorseless costs of living to be a frequent struggle. My growing interest in folk music, particularly that which concerns my direct surroundings (Shovel Dance Collective’s essential release centred on the Thames, The Water Is The Shovel Of The Shore, for instance), has also helped me make peace with this London-ness. The fact that so many exciting young musicians are now emerging from the city all around me has helped, of course.
With that said, I’m conscious that by nature of my being based in the capital, the introductory essays in the first two editions of this columnhave been skewed heavily towards just one city. In an effort to redress the balance, I got in touch with David Chatton Barker, whose DIY organisation Folklore Tapes is now a quarter of a way through a project that provides a far more comprehensive overview of England as a whole. I mean this quite literally. When completed, Folklore Tapes’ current Ceremonial Counties project will consist of 48 separate works of experimental music by 48 different artists, each of which corresponds to a different English county. They are being released as one cassette per month for a total of two years, a county and artist on each side.
It is the latest iteration, Chatton Barker tells me, of an open-ended project that began 14 years ago, not long after he and co-founder Ian Humberstone finished art school in Devon. Having grown up in suburban Manchester, with access to nature coming only via rare trips to the Peak District, “it was only when I moved to Devon that I felt the landscape resonating around me, and that I could immerse myself in it for long periods of time,” he says. “The historic overlay of the landscape was really palpable.”
Then under the name Devon Folklore Tapes, he and Humberstone set out to “give that landscape a voice,” as he puts it, with their first release responded to a sub-theme of witchcraft. Humberstone would later depart the project, but under Chatton Barker’s direction it gradually expanded and brought in a host of other artists and musicians. They released Lancashire Folklore Tapes exploring that county’s superstitions, Somerset Folklore Tapes centred on the Somerset’s ‘lost village’ of Clicket, Oxfordshire Folklore Tapes based on a notorious river current responsible for multiple drownings, and more. Geographical focus sometimes faded – other releases included series like Industrial Folklore Tapes, Occultural Creatures and Folklore Of Plants, as well as a host of one-off releases; at other times it strengthened, as on Chatton Barker’s own Brown Wardle Hill.
Released in 2023, Brown Wardle Hill “was an exception to a lot of the other projects, which were usually very collaborative,” Chatton Barker says. “This was just myself, so I could go really far into it.” He was by then living right next to the titular hill, on the South Pennine Moors, “so rather than driving for a few hours to a specific site that I was going to explore, with a small period of time in which to soak everything up, take field recordings, photographs and drawings, with this project I allowed it to take as long as it needed to take, which ended up being several years of walking the moors, several times a week.” He hadn’t moved there specifically for the fact, but it was pleasing that he encountered an area particularly notable for its prehistoric artefacts (copious Mesolithic flint scatterings; a Neolithic burial chamber in which the burnt remains of a woman and her personal items were found), historic sites (a 40ft stone folly built by out of work mill operatives during the Lancashire Cotton Famine of the 1860s; the supposedly haunted Intack Farm), and folk legends (the phantom Baum Rabbit who protects locals from the plague; The Queen Of The Well who lures unwitting ramblers into the water).
Chatton Barker wrote songs in response to all of this and more, and then brought them to a local brass band he had recently befriended. “They’d been a musical collective in the area for way over 100 years. The music they were playing was the archive of a lot of brass bands, so it wasn’t directly related to the landscape, but they were playing it in the landscape, and there was something undeniably important about that,” he continues. Rather than record them professionally, he asked them to play in their practice room, “slap bang in the middle of the valley that all these legends were related to.” It made for imperfections, which was precisely the point: “I’m interested in how they might have been playing differently because they were at home, in a place that they felt comfortable. I’m willing to let high end professionalism go in favour of that intangible thing.
“A lot of what I keep coming back to is that sense of place,” he continues. Folklore Tapes releases, for which the wider physical packaging is as important as the music itself, often come along with extra-musical ephemera, “a pressed flower or a stone rubbing, or something like that. It’s important that there’s something hand-touched to tie it to a place.” For the Ceremonial Counties series, each release contains a cut-up piece of an Ordnance Survey map for that tape’s county. “In my imagination I like everybody getting together and putting the map back together like a jigsaw, and going on a big, collective ramble.”
Released as two counties per cassette, the combination of each pair is entirely random. The way in which an artist approaches their composition is largely up to them. Other than the piece being as close to 15 minutes in length as possible, Chatton Barker offers little in terms of a brief. Although many of the musicians are composing in response to a county they may have grown up in or live in today, this is not essential. “Some people have said ‘I’m going to pick somewhere I’ve never been and I’m going to find stuff out.”
It makes for considerable variety throughout the series, and even within individual cassettes. Take Mersesyide / Hertfordshire for instance. One side, Benjamin D. Duvall’s ‘The Beach At Crosby’ begins starkly in the here and now – a recording of the beeps, rumbles and tannoy announcements of a Merseyrail train moving into the sound of Duvall speaking to himself atop the Blitz rubble that remains strewn across the titular beach, then gradually edging its way into a strange abstracted drone piece. “I had started by considering various bits of Merseyside folklore, but couldn’t really connect any musical ideas with them,” Duvall tells me over email.” I’ve always found the Blitz Rubble at Crosby Beach to be a tangibly weird place, with the debris being these different layers of history that you can walk through and rummage around in.
“So that’s what I did – took the train to Crosby on a really dull day when there was hardly anyone about, walked through the rubble, traced it with stones, gathered up some bottles and cans to make wind flutes, read out any bits of text I found amongst the rubble and generally paced around talking into my recorder. Things in the landscape suggested connections – the wind turbines in the bay suggested propellers which along with the sounds from the shooting range at [nearby army training camp] Altcar put me in mind of the bomber planes that caused the rubble to be placed here… and I just tried to dig out meaning from the pieces around me. I thought it would be interesting to use narration/speaking to further root it in place and because the words could probably do a better job at expressing the feel of the location than just instrumental sounds and field recordings.”
Contrast that with the flipside, Sam McLoughlin’s ‘Eight Tales’. Where Duvall’s work was fractured and corporeal – a mirror for the scattered remains of brick, metal and glass that line the shore – McGloughlin’s sonic palate is close, acoustic and otherworldly. What he tells me he envisioned as “a series of connected vignettes [that] create a sort of dream journey through various haunted spots of the county […] a kind of abstract audio ghost tour,” each is envisaged as the soundtrack to a specific story, such as a hunter who witnesses a group of cats leading a tiny funeral procession, or a trader who fakes his own death only to be killed by a priest who, when he later sees him alive, assumes him to be an evil spirit. “Although there is some blurring of the borders,” McGloughlin adds. “There are so many folk tales from Hereford that I didn’t want to just focus in on one so decided to fit as many on the 15 minute side as possible!
In just one of the tapes we can see the variety that makes the project so fascinating – the way, paradoxically, that by focussing on the way one artist responds to a specific place, it evokes the countless ways they haven’t approached the project. “You can’t do all of folklore, even just within one county, the work can never be fully done” says Chatton Barker. Rather than some attempt at categorising and documenting all of England, then, Folklore Tapes is best viewed as a tribute to the intimate relationship between music and landscape, and the way in which the former can help one connect or make peace with the latter, wherever it might be. “Literally everywhere has got these hidden layers,” Chatton Barker concludes. “They don’t go away. The inspiration is endless. I really hope this project will encourage people to explore a little deeper.
Sam AmidonSalt RiverRiver Lea
Salt River might be under Sam Amidon’s name, and its material (traditional tunes, shanties, shape-note songs and hymns mixed in with songs originally penned by Yoko Ono, Lou Reed and Ornette Coleman) drawn from a repertoire he’s been building for a while, but his collaborator Sam Gendel is equally to thank for its brilliance. Amidon and Gendel, the latter a saxophonist and experimental producer, are longstanding friends and mutual admirers, and got together at the end of last year with drummer Philippe Melanson in Los Angeles where they decided to mine Amidon’s personal archive. Their approach, the record makes evident, had more in common with jazz than anything else; the music here is exploratory, playful and forward thinking, prone to sudden-but-gentle shifts in direction, sometimes drifting all the way out into extended ambient jams.
Placing folk material in this context makes for something that’s often extremely moving. ‘The Golden Willow Tree’ is a dramatic narrative – the tale of a cabin boy who daringly sabotages a rival ship leaving its sailors scrambling in panic as they sink, who is then cruelly denied the reward he was promised for doing so – but Amidon makes it disconcertingly serene. His vocals are dreamlike, floating above the fray and weaving in and out of time with Gendel and Melanson’s temperate harp and drums. The traditional hymn ‘Old Churchyard’ – here called ‘Three Five’ – is sung over a complex loop of guitars and synths so that it becomes all-out psychedelic.
As with the richly played song of repentance ‘Cusseta’, later on the album, the religious songs on Salt River are particularly effective thanks to the rare combination of starkness and warmth in Amidon’s voice that allows him to deliver the words’ messages with an appropriate profundity. Countering that, however, is a playfulness that runs through the record’s core. This is encapsulated best of all in their rendition of Ornette Coleman’s ‘Friends And Neighbours’. Starting off as a ramble of simple guitar and percussion, then cut through by a chaotic lo-fi electronic improvisation, in the background are the sounds of clinking cutlery and murmuring voices captured during one of the communal dinners that followed the trio’s recording sessions. In contrast to the otherworldliness of his singing elsewhere, here you can feel Amidon’s lips curving into a smile as he sings, not least when Gendel and Melanson join him for an utterly joyous final chorus: “Friends and neighbours, that’s where it’s at.”
Jim GhediWastelandBasin Rock
Jim Ghedi’s version of ‘What Will Become Of England’ has been floating around for a few years. He released it as a single in 2022, and Stick In The Wheel offered an excellent dubbed-out remix on their recent Ruins EP (previously reviewed in this column). Based on a 1953 Alan Lomax field recording of the great Harry Cox, who himself said he’d heard it from a tin whistler in a pub but could remember only two of its original eight or nine verses, its floating status in Ghedi’s discography feels fitting given its unclear lineage. Lines like “Some have money plenty, but still they crave for more / They will not lend a hand to help the starving poor” feel so resonant across the centuries, that whether or not this song originally responded to a specific event is now by-the-by.
And yet, in the context of Ghedi’s new album Wasteland, the song feels that little bit more resonant still. An album concerning the degradation of a place once held familiar – “the process of watching someone’s surroundings and environment collapse,” as Ghedi puts it, as well as “death, personal loss, grief, mental health” to which the natural world is an ever-weakening remedy – at times the record brims and bubbles with anticipation of the end times, at others boiling over into a steaming flood. Ghedi sings as if through clenched teeth, plays guitar with a skewering rawness, and often deploys strings – sometimes for a rush of overwhelming emotion as on opener ‘Old Stones’, sometimes for transfixing melodic flourishes (‘Just A Note’), sometimes for a dark, Satanic jig (‘Newtondale / John Blue’). Ghedi’s combination of intensity and sublimity recalls Lankum to some extent, and yet where that band’s doom seems to descend from above like a thick black cloud, there’s something more earthen to Ghedi’s work – the horrific, terrifying beauty of a collapsing planet, turned into sound.
Michaela Antalová & Adrian MyhrSing NightingaleMappa
The title of this record is a translation of ‘Zaspievaj Slavicku’, a traditional Slovakian song, which flautist Michaela Antalová and double bassist Adrian Myhr use as the jumping-off-point for a frequently bedazzling exploration of how the bird’s song might tie together their respective Slovak and Norwegian folk traditions. ‘Night Singing’ is the record’s anchor, where Antalová’s fujara – an upright wooden bass flute traditionally played by shepherds – is quite literally laid over a recording of a nightingale’s nocturnal mating calls, closely mimicking in an intimate moment of direct communion, but elsewhere the pair take an exploratory approach. The record can be sprightly, as on the self-explanitorialy titled ‘Dance Nightingale’ as much as it can be abstracted and intense – as on the 7-and-a-half-minute abstracted epic ‘Worm Moon’, named after the springtime full moon in March that marks the nightingales’ migratory return from Africa.
Guest Helga Myhr plays Hardanger fiddle (the nine-stringed national instrument of Norway) on a number of songs, including the newly-penned ‘Lament’ and ‘Rosenhave’ on which Antalová probes the similarities between the Norwegian seljefløyte (willow flute) and the Slovak koncovka (overtone flute), while also exploring the nightingale’s symbolic associations with love, sacrifice and loss. Of the traditional Slovakian songs, meanwhile, ‘Dolu Ovce Dolinami’ indicates that the scope of the record may reach further than just Antalová and Myhr’s native traditions. Here, Javid Afsari Rad allows the Iranian santur (the nightingale, incidentally, is also Iran’s national bird) to weave its way just as deftly into the fray.
Bridget Hayden and The ApparitionsCold Blows The RainBasin Rock
Bridget Hayden’s folk music is the kind that makes you stop and pay attention. The experimental musician’s new record with her band The Apparitions, Cold Blows The Rain, is direct in its nature – renditions of eight traditional folk songs that she grew up on, sung to her by her mother – but vast in its power. The music moves at languorous pace, an enveloping cloud of strings and plucked banjos that evocatively – and intentionally – recall the sodden, misty beauty of her native West Yorskhire. Rich as it is, however, it is always secondary to Hayden’s singing. Many of the songs here are well known – ‘Lovely On The Water’, ‘She Moved Through The Fayre’, ‘When I Was In My Prime’ – but she sings with such depth that Cold Blows The Rain operates on a level apart from such trivial concerns as obscurity. She has the ability to tap into my very favourite thing about folk songs – the power of the universal.
Kelby ClarkLanguage Of The TorchTentative Power
Kelby Clark is a Georgia-born, now Los Angeles-based banjo player, whose new record Language Of The Torch is ostensibly a collection of improvised clawhammer pieces. It’s a style of playing usually associated with old-time music, where the hand assumes a stiff claw-like position and strikes downwards with the motion of the arm, as opposed to the upward finger plucks of other styles, one of the defining folk traditions of his birth state, but as the title of one of the pieces ‘Tennessee Raag’ would suggest, in his hands it can also be used to explore a parallel Eastern influence. The elasticity of Clark’s playing, and the incorporation of drone via guest Jeremiah M. Carter’s harmonium, does clearly draw a lot from raga, however, there’s an idiosyncrasy to the record that elevates it beyond just a genre experiment – the way Clark attacks his instrument, allowing songs to unspool in tumbling, organised chaos, is magnetic and feels distinctly his own.
Ansis Bētiņš & Artūrs ČukursSlavic Folk SongsXKatedral
In Slavic traditions, ‘white voice’ is a method of a capella singing based on an open throat and free volume. It’s how musicians Ansis Bētiņš and Artūrs Čukurs have chosen to explore the diverse selection of songs (although with a politically pointed focus on Ukrainian material) that constitutes this sprawling double album – the style’s inherent openness proving an apt way of unifying various cultural threads. Having grown up immersed in the folk music of their native Latvia, striking up a friendship during their time in a youth choir, over time the two singers started tracing how relatives of the songs they were raised on would start appearing further and further afield, shaped by different cultures’ interactions and then filtered through geographic particularities. Many of the songs are not ‘properly’ performed in these white voice arrangements, but of course that’s not the point. By filtering them through Bētiņš’ and Čukurs’ singular context, Slavic Folk Songs invites us to consider the other contexts in which these songs and their relatives have existed across Eastern Europe and beyond for hundreds of years, the countless lives they have shaped and the infinite ways in which they have done so.
Various ArtistsA Collection of Slow Airs By Some Very Fine FiddlersNyahh
A slow air is a form of Irish traditional music where a solo instrumentalist plays with no strict metre or structure, with an open-ended melody that often derives from that of a sung song – frequently in the sean-nós style. A Collection of Slow Airs By Some Very Fine Fiddlers, as the title suggests, presents 10 superb examples of the form. Some, like Tola Custy’s shapeshifting ‘A Leap Year Like No Other’, are self-penned. Others pay tribute to particular musicians who inspired them directly, such as Sinéad Kennedy’s beautifully sparse ‘Táimse im’ chodhladh’, the air to an anti-imperialist song which she learnt from her teacher as a teenager, but whose lyrics would only later find their resonance. Others still place their recordings in wider historical contexts; Ultan O’Brien’s ‘Seán Ó Duibhir A’ Ghleanna’ is an ode to Mrs Galvin, a player and folk song carrier who provided a crucial link between the remnants of pre-Famine material that preceded her, and the 20th century players who were to follow. Where jigs and reels are envisaged for dancing, airs are for listening and contemplation – often to deeply emotional effect, and so it is that this record reveals the most when treated to close listening. Because all of the musicians included were invited to record themselves, the tunes offered little studio treatment, little eccentricities slip through. The chirp of crickets in the background of Danny Diamond’s ‘A Dream Of Home’, for instance, which he composed during a period of existential crisis, not knowing that a relocation to Minnesota would soon follow, or the muffled stomp of a foot that gently anchors Mossie Martin’s ‘Thomas Burke’.
Tartine De ClousCompter Les DentsOkraina
The songs that make up Compter Les Dents come from the Vendée department on France’s Western seaboard – dramatic songs that reflect the area’s dramatic history. Vendée’s coastal location means that it was heavily affected by the wars of religion in the 16th century, undergoing a period religious tumult that eventually transformed it from a protestant area into a stronghold of staunch Catholicism, and fostered a rebellion against the French Revolution that descended into a grisly guerilla conflict. When Napoleon returned from his exile in Elba, the Vendée refused to recognise him. The vocal trio Tartine De Clous draw from the region’s song both for their intense beauty, and, in the words of their press material, “to reclaim the people’s tradition from those who would seek to exploit it for nefarious political ends. Their commanding three-part harmony doesn’t lose its grip throughout the record, but the deft inclusion of occasional instrumentals warrants a mention too – deliciously lopsided accordion on ‘La Veuve’, a gradual crescendo of drone and a peppering of roguish fiddle on ‘La Mignonne À L’ombrage’. This is folk music at its most ruggedly affecting.
Jacken Elswyth With CA ConradA Cast Of FlowersLanterne
The second record of banjo improvisations in this month’s Radical Traditional comes from the prolific Jacken Elswyth – whose work as both a player and the head of the excellent Betwixt/Between series of cassettes has already seen her featured in this column on multiple occasions. Elswyth’s latest comes as part of Lanterne Records’ series of “conversations between artists working with music and text,” and pairs her with the poet CA Conrad. Conrad has penned five poems for the zine/CD release, which Elswyth read, ruminated on and then responded to through seven unprepared pieces. She’s no stranger to using external sources as a starting point for improvisation – 2022’s Six Static Scenes, for instance, used moments of idiosyncrasy from her banjo predecessors as starting-off points – but here the relationship between inspiration and result is more murky. Conrad’s poems are themselves fragmented, stream of consciousness pieces, and for the titles of her delicate and contemplative compositions Elswyth has fragmented them once more, picking out words to form evocative phrases like ‘I Peel’, ‘Queer Shine Plunging’ and ‘Other Shimmer Compass’. It makes for a release that is at once absorbing and opaque – its ‘meaning’ is your own to ascertain.
Sam GrassieJarabi, Winter Has GoneSelf-Released
This short release from Sam Grassie – the Scottish fingerpicking guitarist who has become a fixture across the wider British scene, reliably transfixing whenever encountered– is an attempt to marry Celtic trad with his parallel love of desert blues. An attempt, it’s worth saying, that is quite the success. Grassie finds common ground in the way both his native fingerpicking and the Northwest African style can whip up tempests of sound, interweaving them with one another to remarkable effect.
