Oxfordshire and Derbyshire are the latest Ceremonial Counties to get the Folklore Tapes treatment, with Oxfordshire being represented by the nebulous experimental collective The Funz, while sound artist and audio archaeologist Mark Vernon takes responsibility for Derbyshire. The Funz, in one guise or another, have been on the trail of psychedelic enlightenment for somewhere in the region of thirty years. Functioning primarily as a duo (Daniel Potter and Alexander Borland) but often augmented by guest musicians, they are joined here by Jody S Smith. Depending on the project, they assign themselves a different colour. Here, they are The Grey Funz, a designation that suits the rain-soaked pastures of downland England and conjures up images of the standing stones of Rollright and Avebury.
Black Horse Tails explores the legend of Alfred the Great’s ‘blowing stone’, and the stories about mysterious flint henges told by the denizens of the Black Horse pub in Checkendon. It begins with a field recording of sheep and songbirds, and progresses, like the journey that inspired it, through a series of weirder landscapes. It is rich in lowering drones and haunted scrapes, and provides a brilliant exposure of the underbelly of tradition and ritual, the whispers that pass from pathway to pub, from shepherd to traveller to innkeeper. Within the wider framework of the piece, there is a gentle, acoustic ditty from the point of view of a shepherd who finds an urn fragment on the hillside, a Badalamenti-esque passage of warped electric guitar, some eldritch, decaying banjo not too far from what Milkweed are doing at the moment, and various segments of field recording and spoken word, culminating in an alluring tale told in the warmth of The Black Dog. It all makes for a rich, strange tapestry.
Derbyshire’s turn comes in the form of The Drowned Villages of Derwent Valley, an extended, contemplative field recording by Mark Vernon, which reacts to the story of the Derwent Valley’s drowned villages, Ashopton and Derwent, settlements submerged in 1944 after the creation of the Ladybower Reservoir. Vernon uses the villages as symbols of memory and its murkiness. His concern with nostalgia and decay is relayed through a series of spooky, watery sounds. There are darting, electronics, as slippery and elusive as fish. Swathes of onrushing white noise. Moments of near-silence. In Vernon’s soundscapes, the otherworldly rubs shoulders with the human. There is the implication of haunted architecture: a church bell creeps up on you and then recedes into the distance. The bell Vernon uses in his recording is the same one that was removed from the church in Derwent and now hangs in St Philips in Chaddesden. Like The Funz, Vernon makes use of recorded oral history to tell part of his story, and the human voice becomes part of the soundworld, drifting in and out before it too is submerged.
The curatorial guiding hand behind the Folklore Tapes means that every individual instalment in this series so far has featured two very different but surprisingly complementary artists. In this case, we are given two distinct views of landscape and tradition, one of which uncovers a mythic past and one which explores how events in more recent history can be made strange by memory and nostalgia. Both sides are awash with unexpected and often eerie beauty.
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.
