The latest Folklore Tapes’ Ceremonial Counties series covers Berkshire and Kent. Stella Maris, Tim Hill, and Revbjelde demonstrate the sheer breadth of England’s folkloric traditions and the breadth and variety of art that we can use to interpret those traditions.
This is the tenth volume of Folklore Tapes’ Ceremonial Counties series (previous reviews in the series can be found here), which means we have now traversed twenty English counties in search of the weirdest and wildest corners of mythology and tradition. So far, the series has varied widely in theme and genre while remaining admirably consistent in terms of quality. The latest chapters – covering Berkshire and Kent – are if anything even more eclectic than usual, ranging from devotional organ music and spoken word to freely improvised sax-folk, and taking inspiration from thousand-year-old hymns, Middle English poetry, samba, and the traditional ‘rough music’ of early judicial social gatherings.
We start with Stella Maris, a duo consisting of Ramsey Janini and Christian Fields. They tackle the county of Kent by channelling its most famous piece of literature: Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Janini, who comes from a Palestinian refugee family displaced in the Gulf War, has chosen to reset The Prioress’s Tale – often historically thought of as antisemitic – as a hymn in solidarity with all victims of conflict, particularly children and particularly those currently suffering in Palestine. Fields is the organist at St Agnes Longsight, Greater Manchester, and the piece was recorded in the church, with Janini adding guitar and flute. The arrangement is full of a creaky beauty, ranging from atmospheric medieval church music to very modern-sounding minimalism. The tone is one of reverence, but also of experimentation, and Janini’s narration uses simplicity and plainness rather than melodrama to make its point.
The most moving moment occurs when the narration intersects with the chanting of Alma Redemptoris Mater, an 11th-century hymn: the beauty and suffering in the piece seem to coalesce into something beyond music.
This series has developed a knack for pairing up some very different but strangely complementary sides, and this is very much the case here. Side two, dedicated to Berkshire, is an exploration of rough music – essentially the clangs and hoots that accompanied a charivari or skimmington, a folk custom used as an early form of punishment aimed at shaming an individual for a perceived wrongdoing. Tim Hill, a free-improv saxophonist, and Berkshire-based noise-folk collective Revbjelde trace the links between the rough music of days gone by and the DIY improvisation that still predominates in experimental music today. They do it with a great deal of aplomb: there are snipped up modular synths, a forceful, gleeful narration detailing the history of the custom, trumpets, trombones, sousaphones and all manner of drums and pots and pans.
Free improvisation perfectly captures the ribald, spontaneous nature of the skimmington, while the multiple distinct parts give a structural or narrative element to the otherwise boisterous proceedings. There are moments that come close to incendiary free jazz: horn riffs that spout a processional fire; fevered chanting (which will be familiar to anyone who has heard the Edgar Broughton Band’s 1970 single Out Demons Out). Sax loops nod towards a bizarre kind of pagan library music. The final brass section has a wavering, mock-funereal quality. Perhaps the most surprising element is the fact that the specific example of rough music or ‘hussitting’ that inspired the piece happened as recently as 1930 in the village of Woodley near Reading, proof that customs may lay dormant for decades without dying.
Like the first side, we are presented with a kind of journey, but this one is profane rather than sacred, its poetry coming from the gutter rather than the heavens. Taken together, they show the sheer breadth of England’s folkloric traditions and, of course, the breadth and variety of art that we can draw on to interpret those traditions.
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.