The Ceremonial Counties tapes earned a special mention in my end-of-year list as 2024’s best series, and if the size and quality of the project is anything to go by, 2025 could be a repeat performance. The latest counties to get the special treatment are Shropshire and Nottinghamshire, with Bridget Hayden responsible for the former and Daniel Weaver the latter.
Hayden has been at the forefront of the north of England’s experimental music scene for a while now. A founder-member of Leeds-based drone maximalists Vibracathedral Orchestra, she has since become a protean outsider and purveyor of the strange, dabbling in everything from improvisation to textured noise rock to stripped-back traditional folk song (look out for her forthcoming album, Cold Blows the Rain, with backing band The Apparitions – reviewed here). She is currently based in Todmorden: a place – like neighbouring Hebden Bridge – that exists in the edge of a kind of Bermuda Triangle of weird music, linking Leeds, Sheffield and Manchester. Her link to the county of Shropshire is she grew up there and recorded the whole piece in her old family home, which is in the north of the county, and her admiration of the author Mary Webb (1881-1927), an unappreciated genius whose novels and stories traversed and sometimes combined history, romance, horror, early feminism and an earthy, eldritch variety of nature writing (have a look at her short story The Name-Tree – it’s like a cross between Arthur Machen and Charlotte Perkins Gilman).
Focussing on Webb’s preoccupation with Shropshire legend, Hayden contributes a haunting tableau full of decaying grandeur. This particular story, The Legend of Llynclys Pool, deals with a cursed family and a sunken palace. There is an uncanny piano segment, sounding like it is coming from either a different room or a different world, followed by low, buzzy drones and spooky melodies: childishly simple but unnerving and somehow ancient. Halfway through the piece, there is a sudden interruption, a kind of shift or change of angle, as if everything has just sunk a little deeper. It’s eerie and beautifully controlled. There are temporal shifts too, symbolised by the incursion of synthesised instruments and the subsequent reappearance of the slow, stately piano. The whole thing is a rich, thoughtful and strange journey.
Weaver’s side of the tape – Ghosts of the Meadows, Sneiton and Forest Fields – eschews the common ground of legend and myth in favour of a more personal interpretation of a theme. He uses the idea of ghosts to examine attitudes towards death: his fifteen-minute slot finds room for both terror and comfort, beginning with a loping refrain played on one of his many home-made string instruments. Its initial mood – almost jazzy – is nullified by repetition and slight change, paradoxically becoming something new by remaining the same. When change does occur, it does so organically. Each minute is different from the last, but the slippery nature of the music means that you are never quite sure how that difference came about.
Weaver’s instruments include repurposed tin, aluminium and clothes pegs, but it doesn’t come across as overly ramshackle. Indeed, what links it to Hayden’s side of the tape is a sense of control. Sometimes that control seems to hang by a thread, as on the most mind-bendingly improvisational segments, but Weaver’s sense of timing is always evident, as is the hold he exerts over the mood of the piece. Even when it sounds like the aftermath of a tornado in a post-apocalyptic scrapyard, his guiding hand always steers things back towards a single point, the unavoidable end-point.
Both of these pieces are entirely wordless, and yet they both convey striking and very different stories: Hayden’s mythic and haunting, Weaver’s inevitable and personal. Rarely can so much have been said, and so eloquently, in half an hour of instrumental music.
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.
