Martin Green – The Portal
Reveal Records – 25 September 2020
Some time in the recent past, the phrase ‘the new normal’ passed from the mind of a journalist or a social scientist into the consciousness of the English-speaking world. It may seem like little more than a soundbite, but it marked the point when people first came to realise that society was changing beyond recognition, that our notion of normality had to alter for good. The last few months have hung over us like some weird, hauntological amalgamation of past and future. To begin with, there was the very real threat of food shortages and civil unrest – a threat that chimed with our shared history (and in some cases memory) of post-war rationing or the riots of the 1960s. Then, enforced isolation created a world that seemed more akin to dystopian science fiction than to real life. People have had to do things in new ways, and have had to create new vocabularies to describe exactly what is going wrong. New words that often strike us as callous or crude or otherwise overly euphemistic. Of course when words change, expression changes. And when expression changes, so too does art.
Martin Green is perhaps best known as the accordion player in award-winning folk trio Lau, but his latest project sees him go well beyond the boundaries of traditional music – beyond the boundaries of any kind of music, in fact – to create something entirely new. The Portal is a staggeringly ambitious multi-media creative endeavour. It began life as a podcast, became a kind of living story, was adapted for the stage and is now an album too. It is also a love letter to the great British tradition of standing in a field, dancing like a lunatic and generally losing your mind. Green explores the importance of trances and trancelike state and the music that accompanies them, from morris tunes to rave anthems, and he does it all through a strangely captivating narrative involving a pair of sound recordists who never met but who spoke to each other through the secret messages in their recordings. The story seemed to grow organically, and in the form of the podcast, it became a kind of invented oral history, a beguiling mixture of the contemporary and the traditional.
Of course, Green’s vision is best experienced as a complete package. But though the whole is impressive, the parts that make it up are well worth individual examination. The album is a five-track cycle of songs that reflects the story. Green has always been an astute collaborator, and here he brings in some outside help in the form of electronic producer James Holden, whose brand of weird, atavistic trance is perfectly suited to the blend of ancient themes and modern techniques Green is preoccupied with. Other collaborators include Lankum’s Radie Peat. The Irish singer lends her talents to the opening piece, Angela, which begins with harsh electronics and faltering, cut-up vocals. Traditional instruments and modernist blips flutter around each other; there is a tension between discordance and melody which is only heightened by Peat’s singing, which is at once earthy and otherworldly.
Former Radio 2 Young Folk Musician of the Year Brìghde Chaimbeul appears on the second track, Etteridge. Sombre keys play out over a haunted soundscape before Chaimbeul’s extraordinary and unmistakable smallpipes take centre stage. It makes for a beautiful nine minutes, quietly epic, the darker corners of the piece decorated with drone and scrape, static his and ghostly vocals. Again, tension and duality seem to be the order of the day. This time the tension is between the steady piano and the lyrical, wild-sounding nature of Chaimbeul’s piping.
On The Tup, Green is more explicit about his trance influences. A mind-bending, almost space-age mood of retro-futurism pervades the whole track, with glitchy electronics to the fore. It features the distinctive sound of Iranian musician Yasaman Najmeddin’s qanun, a kind of gigantic zither, but it owes more to Kraftwerk or the pulse and throb of classic late twentieth-century dance music than to any incarnation of world or folk music.
Last year Green won an Ivor Novello award for his work – along with Opera North – on a sound installation in which listeners wore headphones and heard sounds triggered by sensors situated along the River Tyne. It served as an indication of the sheer ambition and scope of Green’s work. He is clearly an artist in the most profound sense of the word, a creator of immersive worlds who is himself entirely immersed in his work. On The Portal’s title track, that idea of immersion reaches its peak. A disarmingly simple and repetitive build-up, made up of uncannily robotic vocal samples, breaks into a blistering slab of minimalist lysergic trance, shifting and transformative. It sounds like a love letter to rave culture, and would not be out of place in a field full of dancers illuminated by glow sticks and fire poi. But it is equally potent through a pair of headphones in a darkened room, where you can really appreciate the attention to detail Holden brings to the production, the subtle twists of pacing and time and the quirky sounds that pop up here and there.
Final track The Herd provides a counterpoint: there is what sounds like a snippet of an old morris tune in the introduction, and then a melancholy bagpipe melody takes over. There is a just-discernible spoken segment (that seems to be extolling the virtues of Buckfast tonic wine), then some unearthly musical screeches, and finally, something resembling a dance tune kicks back in, bringing the whole thing to an inexorable, and darkly mysterious, close.
‘The new normal’ may not have been a thing when Green conceived this thrilling piece of art and music, but as he developed his ideas the world was changing around him, in a way that possibly began to question the nature and value of creative work. As a result, The Portal is more than just a means of escape, a way of losing yourself in the primitive allure of dance and music. It is a kind of mirror to the world as it is now, a hauntological document that plays on our strange relationship with the past and our uncertainties about the future. Green has created a multifaceted artwork that is as original as anything that has come out of this strange year.
The Portal is out today (25 September) and you can also listen to the accompanying Podcast.
Order via Bandcamp: https://martingreenmusic.bandcamp.com/album/the-portal
Listen to the Podcast (available on Apple Music/Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts and all good podcast
platforms).
Photo Credit: Mihaela Bodlovic