Arianne Churchman and Benedict Drew’s May is panoramic in scope but thematically focussed, and it manages to be both celebratory and strange, a nod to our folkloric past and a mesmerising hymn to the present.
I have a long-held suspicion that there are links – historical links as well as personal, subconscious ones – between traditional May fire festivals, rave culture and sonic experimentation. In Britain, and perhaps across northern Europe, May seems to be the month when people learn to talk to each other again. It’s as if, after months spent hunkered down in semi-hibernation, the festivities of midwinter fading into the past, we finally pluck up the courage to gather in groups again to celebrate warmth and light. This was true hundreds of years ago, and it was true in 1988 when Edinburgh’s Beltane Fire Festival was launched as a way of protesting against the increasingly strict laws governing rave culture.
While anyone who has been to a music festival, a rave, or any celebration that involves burning things to celebrate the coming of warmer weather will be able to tell you that modern celebratory gatherings are often part of a folkloric continuum and speak to an atavistic need for fellowship and warmth, there seems to be scant musical documentation of the role May plays in our collective consciousness, how our reaction to the warmth and implied fecundity of the season underlies how we make our art and how we live our lives. May is the most sung-about of months, but it is often as a setting rather than a subject, but Arianne Churchman and Benedict Drew’s latest collection of songs works as an attempt to wed folk history to the kind of trance-inducing music that reconnects us with our weird landscapes.
The opening song, ostensibly a version of folk favourite The Cuckoo, is, in reality, a lysergic suite of nearly fifteen minutes. It begins in a neo-pastoral vein, using the tricks of Ghost Box-esque hauntology – childlike vocals, a disarming sense of remove, field recordings of birds, radiophonic chirrups – to evoke a sense of lost futures and eerie nostalgia. But beyond the drones and blips, there is the constant promise of percussion. A kind of tribal rhythm seems to reside in the song’s DNA, and it makes itself clearer the longer you listen. In the end, the piece seems to exist somewhere between folk and trance. It is both an archival piece about the social history of springtime and a visceral example of the effect that this time of year can have on the human body and psyche.
The songs on May were recorded and released at various points between 2020 and 2023, but come together with an uncanny alchemy to form a thematically consistent double album. The duo have a background in experimentation, and their compositional methods are diverse and unconventional. At times, they rely on visual cues rather than traditional scores – a la Fluxus or John Cage – with results that flit between thick discordance and lullaby-like simplicity. It’s hard to tell where the space-age electronics end and the birdsong begins at the start of The May Dew, but the song soon resolves into a satisfying chant backed by rudimentary percussion and studio warbles. Incantatory vocals are a big part of May’s aesthetic, and over the course of four sides of vinyl, this creates a sense of extended and sometimes uneasy reverie.
Elsewhere, like at the beginning of The Branched Body to a Maypole, they employ a freewheeling electronic experimentalism indebted to Delia Derbyshire. Over it all, or rather within it, Churchman’s voice retains that Trish Keenan-like detachment. The Pleasant Month of May ushers us in with unspecified knocking and muted keys before the traditional melody weaves its way in with the mysterious allure of a siren song. Here and on Down By the Green Groves (Sing Sing So Green), the melodies have the sweet simplicity of Anne Briggs’ renditions of traditional songs, but there are always drones or pulses, bleeps or whistles, drawing the listener in multiple directions at once, and this tension, as well as being interesting for its own sake, reminds us of the way our landscapes are constantly being made strange by the changing seasons.
A similar trick is employed in the bucolic Day Song, which rests on a melody of plucked strings and a soporific background hum that slowly grows into a more urgent, strident drone as the song becomes busy and disconcerting. The Green Bushes makes use of repetition and layering, with Churchman’s multi-tracked voice in spiralling dialogue with itself. Searching For May builds from a kind of decentred nursery rhyme before pairing a beautiful melody with a drone and a series of clangs and electronic squelches, and The Ghost of Mary Potter concludes the album with a brief, sparkling coda which sounds like a final invitation to a realm of sleep.
Although these songs first appeared in various forms on Benedict Drew’s brilliant experimental label Thanet Tape Centre, this vinyl-only version of May is the first full-length release on Love’s Devotee, a new Pennsylvania-based label. If they manage to keep the quality this high, they’ve got a bright future: May is a hypnotically good album. It is a long, involving listen, panoramic in scope but thematically focussed, and it manages to be both celebratory and strange, a nod to our folkloric past and a mesmerising hymn to the present.
May is released on 3rd May 2024 via Love’s Devotee (LOVED-002)
https://acbd.bandcamp.com/album/may
You can hear a track from the album on our latest Folk Show here.