Justin Hopper & Sharron Kraus
Swift Wings
Independent
2022
Sharron Kraus and Justin Hopper have teamed up once before: 2019’s Chanctonbury Rings was a psychogeographic exploration of the iron age hill fort in West Sussex, combining elements of spoken word and hauntological folk (with the assistance of Ghost Box Records regulars The Belbury Poly). Hopper is a well-known voice at the intersection of hauntology, folklore and nature writing. Hailing from across the Atlantic, he has explored the darker corners of Albion with pioneering zest, creating written, spoken and visual documents that respond to landscape and memory in highly original and often very entertaining ways. Kraus has been creating weird and wonderful folk music as a solo artist and as part of psych-folkers Rusalnaia for a couple of decades, as well as collaborating with Tara Burke of Fursaxa and various members of New Weird America trailblazers Espers.
Swift Wings is the pair’s latest collaboration, and it sees them shine a light on the work of underappreciated Victorian poet Victor Neuburg, an acolyte of Aleister Crowley and an early patron of Dylan Thomas. Kraus provides the music: dulcimer, bamboo flute and recorder, as well as electronics, percussion and vocals. Hopper, along with Kraus, provides the spoken recitations of Neuburg’s poems. The interplay between the two voices shifts slightly throughout the album: on opener Ivory, both are on almost equal footing, but by the second piece, Orchard Songs, Kraus’ voice acts as a kind of echo to Hopper’s. This might seem like a small thing, but it is important: Neuburg’s poems are about the strange beauty of the natural world and its old, mysterious gods and rituals. The slippery identities of those gods and the ambiguous nature of those rituals are well served by Kraus and Hopper’s vocal exchanges. And Neuburg’s life, too, was full of ambiguities and contradictions. While his poetry was characterised by wide-eyed naivety, his personal life was complex, and his relationships – particularly with Crowley – were unconventional, to say the least (Crowley once paraded Neuburg around a Bedouin settlement on an iron chain, claiming he was a captured djinn).
But what really comes across in these poems is Neuburg’s affinity with the natural world: his ecstatic, rhapsodic reactions to woodlands, fields, and beaches are to poetry what Richard Jefferies autobiographical novel The Story Of My Heart was to prose. His evocations of mythical creatures have echoes of Arthur Machen’s story The White People. Kraus’ musical settings serve to emphasise this beautifully: modern and futuristic sounds rub up against traditional instrumentation, whispers haunt the corners of churches and coombes. Sprites emerge from the moss and the graves and dance to a droning soundtrack.
Frenchlands displays Neuburg’s almost synaesthetic perception of colour and light. The whole poem shines yellow and gold, and Kraus plays an eldritch dance on the flute that shimmers in perfect accord with the words. Cuckfield is ‘set in the key of blue,’ and Kraus provides a simple melody based on the call of the cuckoo, the bird that gave the village of Cuckfield its name. The creeping synth and manipulated vocals of October seem to herald inexorable change and the slow seep of time, while Rockpool is tinkling and tremulous.
There is support from a handful of guest artists, most notably Jane Griffiths, whose viola lights up the gently chiming Ivory and three other tracks, and bassist Neal Heppleston. The last thirty seconds of closer Rottingdean – which departs further than any other track from the strictly bucolic – features a small drum part played by Guy Whittaker. It is a sign, perhaps, of purpose, of the need to complete a cycle and to begin again, and it sharpens the mind of a listener lulled by the heavy, pollen-scented air of the rest of the album. It shows a delicacy of thought and an ear for the finer detail that elevates Swift Wings above mere document. It is a fitting legacy for a misunderstood poet and a fine work of art in its own right.
Swift Wings is out now and available via Bandcamp: https://sharronkraus.bandcamp.com/album/swift-wings