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The Folklore Tapes project is an attempt to document the occult, mythological and downright mysterious elements of the UK’s heritage via music and the written word. Their latest and most ambitious endeavour is The Ceremonial Counties Series, the slow release of a series of tapes reacting to each of the 48 ceremonial counties of England. Each tape covers two counties – one for each side – and each county is represented by a different musician or group, whose remit is open to interpretation but is limited to the fifteen minutes offered by a single side of a tape.
We dive in with Vol. V, which covers Norfolk and West Yorkshire. It’s the perfect place to start (for me at least – I was born in Norfolk and spent the first few years of my life exploring its coasts and fields and damp hinterlands). The job of interpreting this most ambiguous of counties falls to Pefkin, the musical alter-ego of Gayle Brogan (who is also one half of drone-folk duo Burd Ellen). She has chosen to focus on the myth of The Lantern Man, an apparition said to haunt the Norfolk Broads, enticing nighttime travellers with hypnotic lights. The idea of the Lantern Man is widespread in folklore: it appears variously as ignis fatuus, will-o’-the-wisp, jack-o’-lantern, hinnypunk, and friar’s lantern, but its Norfolk iteration has a richer and spookier feel than most. This might be due to the fact that the Lantern Man’s lights were said to attach themselves to human souls, effectively turning victims into new lantern men. It might also be down to the Norfolk landscape’s inherent uncanniness.
The source material comes from 1849, and the testimony of a Mrs Lubbock of Irstead, herself the repository of an oral history passed down through generations. Brogan’s response to it feels rooted in place rather than time: strung-out drones and hums, scratchy flickers, field recordings of owls, a siren song of vocals. A simplistic interpretation could posit that the humming background represents the flat, ambiguous Norfolk landscape and the glitchy effects and haunting vocals stand for the visual and aural lure of the Lantern Man. But Brogan’s work extends beyond the interpretive; it seems loaded with historical and mythological significance and, more importantly, a deep understanding of the strange relationships between landscapes and the people who inhabit them.
West Yorkshire gets its turn on Side B, where Dean McPhee contributes a track called The Bradford Boar. It refers to a legend with its roots in the late 1300s, when John of Gaunt was said to have offered a sizeable reward to anyone who could kill a giant wild boar which had been terrorising the area. According to the story, a local man killed the beast and removed its tongue as proof, the corpse being too heavy to carry. Meanwhile, a traveller came along and decapitated the boar, taking the head to John of Gaunt before the rightful claimant got there with his tongue. An argument ensued, and the gruesome evidence of the tongue in the end proved enough to make sure the right man got the reward.
Dean McPhee, himself a Bradford native, weaves an increasingly complex and satisfying web of looped guitar and effects, using ideas of repetition and subtle growth to create a taut atmosphere. The piece is so well-constructed that it seems to have its own narrative thread, and takes in elements of folk, prog, post-rock and the avant-garde to create a blistering tableau of sound that ranges from the melodic to the noisy and back again. As well as being a stunning piece of guitar work in its own right, it could also serve as a perfect companion piece to fellow Bradfordian Tom Branfoot’s recent poetry collection, Boar (2003 Broken Sleep Books), which covers the same theme in an equally creative way.
The two sides complement each other extremely well: both create very specific and sometimes haunting atmospheres, but they do it in very different ways, resulting in half an hour of music that absolutely flies by. If this sort of quality is maintained over the entire series we are going to have a stunning and important body of work on our hands.
Note on the Series: Each tape can be collected individually each month or as one entire subscription and they are available via Folklore Tapes direct at www.folkloretapes.co.uk or via their Bandcamp at https://folkloretapes.bandcamp.com/ and via selected independent record shops.
