Cunning Folk – A Casual Invocation
Dharma Records – 11 December 2020
People create their own traditions. Every family has its individual and often idiosyncratic folklore. What may seem to the uninitiated onlooker to be bizarre, absurd or frankly silly is often actually a stage in a process that has been going on for years, a way for loved ones to cement their intimacy, a way for children to tacitly honour their parents or for groups of friends to stay loyal in spite of distance and the passing of time. Repetition bestows an importance on what otherwise might be nonsense; the phrases and actions we share become small binding spells, which in turn grow and link with each other and become webs, eventually even helping to define our personalities.
A folkloric way of thinking guides us even when we don’t realise it.
Every year, at some point between Halloween and Christmas, I read the same two stories, The White People and The Great God Pan, both by the Welsh author and mystic Arthur Machen. The first is an ambiguous catalogue of a young girl’s various interactions with a land beyond normal human consciousness and her initiation, through black magic, into that realm. It is full of weird spells and unnervingly naive language, and we leave it with the realisation that there is only a short jump from the games of children to the pagan rituals of apparently forgotten times. It connects us to our past in delirious and uncomfortable ways. The Great God Pan visits the same weird Arcadia, but accesses it through a foggy, gothic London and adds a dose of body horror, a strangely modern scene of sexual polymorphism and lots of grisly death.
This year I finished my annual Machen binge the day before I first heard Cunning Folk’s new album, A Casual Invocation, and the coincidence struck me as deliciously uncanny. Notably, it contains a psych-folk opus, nearly ten minutes long, called Pan To Artemis. It takes the words of an Aleister Crowley poem and attaches them to a lysergic jam that fuses elements of doomy space-rock, bendy trance, a kind of baggy swagger and nimble acoustic guitar. Imagine the Incredible String Band trapped in a Victorian drawing room with The Orb, or Hawkwind with bucket hats, and you might be on the right lines. It is a song about the act of invocation, but it is also an invocation in itself: it’s the kind of music that seems designed to take you to the same tantalising realms as the stories of Machen.
On most albums, a song like Pan To Artemis would be a centrepiece, a crowning glory, perhaps a triumphant finale, but George Hoyle, the man behind the Cunning Folk name, has other plans for his listeners, mainly in the form of the gigantic and sprawling closer, A Song Of Low & High Magic. It has the stretched-out mechanics of an epic doom-metal track (Supercoven-era Electric Wizard, perhaps) but its melodies are aligned with the folk and blues idioms, while the incantatory lyrics are delivered with witchy glee by Hoyle and guest vocalist Gemma Khawaja.
The rest of the album is no less impressive. Opening track Traveller Hide Your Soul looks at folk music from a unique point of view: it acts as a kind of protective spell against folk song collectors and in doing so shines a light on the unequal relationship between collector and source singer. It’s thought-provoking stuff, touching on issues or class and racial prejudice, but the tone is never overly didactic. Hoyle is a professional storyteller, and if there’s one thing his day job has taught him it’s that the best way to teach is to entertain.
We Are The Harvest begins with Neil Young-esque acoustic guitar and goes on, through glittering electronica and proggy keyboard (courtesy of Olly Parfitt), to revel in Hoyle’s rural Dorset heritage and the folklore of corn dolls. A Quest For The Teacher is a catchy pop song with a hint of reggae provided by Sam Kelly’s crisp but laid-back drumming. Kelly and Parfitt, who provide the musical backing throughout the album, were members of much-loved progressive psych-folk collective Circulus, as was Hoyle, and their shared musical past becomes apparent in their easy interplay and constant willingness to experiment.
On The Goddess they conjure up a kind of swampy krautrock beat and overlay it with devotional folk-pop, with Khawaja’s backing vocals kicking in during the simple, powerful chorus. The title track takes us back to the world between the corporeal and the supernatural with a slithering bassline (Hoyle plays all the album’s bass and guitars), and an eerie palette of electronic glitches, Doppler effect pulses and lyrics that talk of a ‘weird woven weave’ and a ‘universe of dream’. It’s as if Hoyle is experiencing the same world that Machen envisaged when he wrote The White People.
It’s worth saying that this album is completely different in scope and execution from Hoyle’s last work as Cunning Folk, 2018’s Constant Companion, which consisted mainly of traditional folk songs accompanied by Hoyle’s guitar and not much else. This album is both larger in scale (in terms of content) and subtler (in theme). The folk, blues and primitive guitar that characterised Constant Companion is augmented by a sometimes mind-boggling array of influences. It is headier, more ambitious, but somehow just as accessible. The spooked psych-pop of Witches is full of memorable hooks but tells an important story that touches on the mistreatment of women throughout history, while Always The Sun is drenched in the dreamy echoes of hauntology, a song on the cusp of the seasons, of day and night, of history and prehistory. Like much of the album, its power comes from its mystery: it feels at once ancient and modern.
Hoyle is something of a maverick voice in the British folk scene, perhaps even an iconoclast, and to the untrained ear, it might seem like these wild and beguiling songs fly in the face of our notions of traditional folk music. But his music connects with the side of our nature that revels in all things transformative, atavistic and pagan. It shows that we are all capable of magical thinking. This is folk music at its most transcendent, an antidote to the banal and a gateway to the weird.
Pre-Order A Casual Invocation on CD here: https://www.musicglue.com/dharma-records-dharma-shop/products/cunning-folk-a-casual-invocation-cd
Stream A Casual Invocation: https://lnk.to/BfKcjw
Discover more: https://cunningfolkmusic.com/