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On the latest Folklore Tapes Ceremonial Counties release, a fuller picture of the hidden history of England emerges as Rob St John covers strange beasts of Durham and Preston duo Powders cover Staffordshire’s ceramic industry.
The first half of the latest edition of Folklore Tapes’ Ceremonial Counties series is a watery, slippery music that seems to explore the links between the North East’s landscape, its history and, most intriguingly, its worm-lore. County Durham is famous, in folklore circles at least, for the legend of the Lambton Worm, one of the most compelling pieces of English dragon mythology. The story of strange beasts, ill omens, violence, revenge and an unbreakable curse has had a lasting hold over the imaginations of storytellers and folksingers.
On Worms or Dragons, Rob St John digs deep into this mythology, but approaches it via musical rather than oral tradition. The piece is a single fifteen-minute reflection that combines field recording – most notably the sound of a river – with delicate, ever-changing instrumentation. It has an immersive ebb and flow to it, ambient in feel but narrative in structure, by turns bucolic and ominous.
St John is uniquely suited to his subject matter: as a musician, writer and artist, he has long been drawn to landscapes, the damper and stranger, the better. Additionally, he spent much of his childhood on Pendle Hill in his native Lancashire, a place where folklore and history are at their richest and most beguiling. This seems to have rubbed off on his practice: a sense of the eerie and a feeling of rootedness (rootedness in a landscape, but also in a kind of deep time, an ancestral folkloric tradition, that is tied to place and feeling rather than blood and lineage) pervades much of his work.
The second side is by Preston duo Powders (Josh Horsley on cello and Carl Brown on all things electronic). Like St John, they recognise that sweet spot between ambience and narrative and put it to good use, albeit in a different way and to a different end. Their chosen county is Staffordshire and their contribution, Crazing, pays tribute to the region’s legacy as a powerhouse of the ceramics industry.
Here and there, semi-familiar melodies emerge on the cello. There are periods of twinkling percussion, reflecting the sound that pottery makes when it cools. But here too are darker passages, reflecting the industry’s poor working conditions and the way in which working families were sidelined when the demand for Staffordshire pottery decreased. Slow, steely beats and wailing cello provide an icy counterpoint to the piece’s lighter moments, but there is always a sense of continuity: grimness is met with defiance, coldness with the glow of hope. The whole composition is expertly balanced.
With each new release in the Ceremonial Counties series, a fuller picture of the hidden history of England emerges. It is becoming ever clearer that these tapes are more than just musical curios, they are important documents, and highly entertaining ones at that.
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.
