No offence to the under-18s but the canon of music created by, or prominently involving, children is not exactly spectacular. ‘There’s No One Quite Like Grandma’ by St Winifred’s School Choir? Nausea-inducing schmaltz inspired by a gin-addled Queen Mother with a partiality for racial epithets. ‘Just Wave Hello’ by Charlotte Church? Its repercussions are still felt where the yurt-dwelling spiritual healer now resides. The young Jacko had some bangers. Alas, the situation in which they were recorded and the person he became take some of the shine off ‘Rockin’ Robin’ and ‘With A Child’s Heart’.
It helps that Places We Have Never Been sits firmly in the experimental world and not in the realm of exploitative chart pop. In terms of highest praise, however, if you were to play this record to most Wire-subscribing musos without providing any info on who made it or how, they’d be unlikely to guess that those behind it are still at primary school.
These are no ordinary children. For one thing, they’re from Todmorden. Hotbed of UFO sightings. Location spot for The League Of Gentlemen’s Royston Vasey. Birthplace of Keith Emerson. It has its own Folklore Centre and a Clay Academy. It’s a beautiful part of the country, one that Jonathan Meades described as “uncannily akin” to the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Pienza in Italy. One difference being that here you’re more likely to stumble across a DJ set by the members of GNOD.
Primitive Percussion Youth Orchestra was founded by Mark “Spaceship” Williamson. To anyone who hasn’t been in the room when the collective has been rehearsing, composing, improvising, cooperating and brainstorming, it’s unclear how much guidance is set or provided by Williamson. Whatever the case, together they’ve come up with the goods.
At one of my young nephew’s birthday parties my sister had wrapped a tiny harmonica within each layer of the pass-the-parcel package. It’s not like the olden days when there was only one prize in the centre. This inclusive generosity meant that by the end of the game every child was blowing their newly acquired instrument with cacophonously tuneless gusto. I hastily made my excuses, party bag and slice of cake in hand. Places We Have Never Been is nothing like that experience.
You’d be forgiven for thinking it was made by a pupil of John Cage, an established hand like Loren Connors, or somebody from Ex-Easter Island Head. Each of its four pieces have been conjured from imaginary locations. Percussion is used, yes. Also, different stringed items and synths.
‘Forgotten Dreams (The Cave)’ starts with measured beats and tinkles, building into a droney affair, a bit like the quiet midsection of a piece by Godspeed You! Black Emperor or one of their more minimalist associated projects.
I’d like to say ‘A Cold Proposition (The Graveyard)’ is a spookier experience. In all honesty, I found it to be a lively and bustling menagerie of sound; an abstract echo of the animal-sampling ambient tracks you’d hear while enjoying a bowl of Python Pasta in the Rainforest Café. Guess that makes sense. Concentrate on the flora and fauna of a cemetery, instead of the beckoning human remains below, and they are places brimming with life.
The next piece is inspired by the place the previous piece evoked for me. ‘Creation Is Unfinished Yet (The Rainforest)’ is centred around what could be a bowed cello, wheezing deeply. Again, it is decorated by tasteful and unintrusive chimes, tappings and rustling. ‘There Is No Such Thing As Time (The River)’ is piano-based and it draws the overall experience to a close just as satisfyingly as The Necks might have done. All in all, this puts my failure to get a single good noise out of the recorder at aged nine into deeply shameful perspective.
