For the latest Ceremonial Counties release from Folklore Tapes, Benjamin D Duvall (Ex-Easter Island Head) explores the fragmentary nature of Merseyside’s Crosby Beach, and Sam McLoughlin delivers one of the most playful pieces in the series so far via eight Herefordshire tales.
For a place that feels so empty and windswept, Crosby Beach is a landscape thick with historical resonance and layered with meaning. There are the clean wild lines of the natural coastal landscape, the flat and disconcertingly wide beach that sweeps away to a line in the distance where water, sky and sand become indistinguishable from each other. Dotting the beach are a hundred cast iron figures which comprise Antony Gormley’s haunting sculptural work Another Place.
And then, in a kind of psychic space between the human and the natural, like a visual representation of the liminal, is a mile-long strip of rubble: the wreckage of hundreds of buildings bombed in Liverpool during the Second World War. The fragments – ranging from the monumental to the minuscule – were dumped indiscriminately and have since been worn away by salt water and sea wind, picked over by beachcombers and further jumbled by the tide.
It is a landscape full of melancholy and warning but also brimming with the potential of discovery. For the first half of the latest instalment of Ceremonial County Series Vol.IX – Merseyside/Herefordshire, Benjamin D Duvall has attempted to understand the literally fragmentary nature of Crosby Beach through an extended composition based on spoken word commentary, field recording and ambiguous, shifting ambience. For fifteen years, Duvall has been a mainstay of Liverpool experimentalists Ex-Easter Island Head, using prepared and percussed guitars to create bright fields of ambient minimalism, and while he brings much of that sensibility to this solo work, the spoken element – which describes a journey to and through Crosby’s wreckage – seems like something of a departure.
It’s an unbridled, enlightening success. Beginning with a recording of Merseyrail’s automated announcement for Blundellsands and Crosby, it soon falls down a kind of sonic rabbit hole and Duvall finds himself on the beach, describing the debris: broken pottery, brickwork, the concrete ghosts of buildings that in some way represent the four thousand Liverpudlian civilians who died as a result of wartime bombing raids.
‘I think of the object as a stylus with which I can read the grooves of this landscape,’ Duvall says, lifting a claw-shaped piece of rubble. It’s a mode of creation in which human choice is minimised, allowing time and history and nature to take over. At one point, he cuts open a bunch of cans and bottles, strings them up in the wind and records the sound they make: it’s an uncanny live-action sound-art installation, a history lesson and a self-referential comment on the act of making music all rolled into one. The mood is one of contemplation, melancholy and no small amount of reverence.
Which brings us, by the natural attraction of opposites, to the second side of the tape. Sam McLoughlin’s Eight Tales is one of the most playful pieces in the series so far. It takes the form of a suite of short works, each delving into a different aspect of Herefordshire folklore. The witchy, hauntological feel is established in the first section, inspired by the tale of a haunted inn. What follows is a rangy and eclectic set of tunes, pulling at the frayed edges of psychedelia, drawing on traditional folk and melting away into the spooked forests of experimental composition. It digresses into personal memory – McLoughlin, though Lancastrian, frequently stayed with family friends in rural Herefordshire – folklore, and history. There is a funeral procession for a cat, an eighteenth-century exorcism in Hereford Cathedral, and a satanic mass. Imagine The Wicker Man but set on a cider farm.
McLoughlin’s aesthetic is admirably DIY; his technique results in a diverse bricolage of sounds, but his magic lies in the way he makes it all hang together. Parallel to the scattergun artistry is an accomplished musician with an ear for melody and a knack for musical narrative. The guitar playing is adroit, the atmospherics delightfully eerie. It’s creaky and timeworn but somehow pristine, like you’ve just discovered it in an attic and can’t quite blow all the dust off. Ceremonial County Series Vol.IX is a perfect accompaniment to the darkening days of autumn.
Note on the Series: Each tape can be collected individually each month or as one entire subscription and they are available via Folklore Tapes direct at www.folkloretapes.co.uk or via their Bandcamp page at https://folkloretapes.bandcamp.com/ and via selected independent record shops.
Also:
Our latest Mixtape, released for Samhain, features a number of Folklore Tape releases: