Following on from April’s Nick Granata/Dawn Terry split, Jacken Elswyth’s occasional tape series continues with its eleventh instalment. This one comes courtesy of London-based singing duo Bridget & Kitty and Sheffield free-folk improvisers Resonant Bodies, the live music outlet for Zebedee Budworth (hammered dulcimer and electronics) and Rob Bentall (nyckelharpa and electronics).
Bridget & Kitty contribute four songs, all traditional, and all delivered without musical accompaniment. But these renditions are as far from staid musical conservatism as you can get. The opener, Six Jolly Soldiers, was originally a song from the ‘unfortunate rake’ category, with a male protagonist succumbing to venereal disease, and is perhaps better known as When I Was On Horseback. Here, some deft lyrical repurposing turns the song on its head in terms of gender, giving the whole thing more complexity and ambiguity. But the duo are linked to their material in more immediate and visceral ways too. Known primarily as live performers, there is a vigour to their singing and a closeness to their harmonies, which is about more than simple musical affinity. Together, they seem to inhabit a space in a way that only the best vocalists can, and seem capable of making anywhere – your living room, or your morning bus – feel like a small, communal space filled with the warmth of like-minded people.
North Country Maid – taken from a version by The Watersons – is full of tenderness and yearning and highly impressive harmonic flourishes. Geordie has a low-key sleepiness to its melody that perfectly matches the song’s bittersweet sentiments. The Cruel Mother – a genuine epic of dramatic narrative balladry – is most astonishing of all. The low harmony functions almost as a drone and, along with the insistence of the refrain, gives the entire piece a hypnotic, dreamlike and strangely modern quality. All four of these songs are linked by their depictions of women’s experience, and in keeping with many of the previous Betwixt & Between releases, they act as a comment on the two-way dialogue between traditional music and contemporary performance. The duo are keenly aware of the historical, political and symbolic uses of song, and their refreshing take on folk music is not afraid to broach difficult ethical subjects.
Side two is taken up by a single improvised piece by Resonant Bodies. Cowering Fossil/Deluge of Memories is arranged like two extended reels, but any other relationship to traditional music is minimal, as the pair pick out melodies that verge on the free-form but somehow remain uncannily familiar, in the beginning at least. The two plucked instruments engage in a laid-back but increasingly complex dialogue before Bentall’s bowed nyckelharpa emerges to exhilarating effect with a repeated, cascading melody. The phantoms of traditional British and Scandinavian dance tunes linger in the track’s more kinetic sections, and the whole has a masterful balance and build that would put many a post-rock epic to shame.
Betwixt & Between is quickly becoming a valuable document of the outer reaches of British experimental folk music. Eleven tapes in, and the quality shows no sign of diminishing. Elswyth has an ear for the most exhilarating and satisfying sounds, and her curation – like her own music – is perfectly pitched.
Betwixt & Between 11 (23 September 2024) Betwixt & Between Tapes
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