The Leicestershire legend of Black Annis forms the basis of the first half of this month’s Ceremonial Counties offering from Folklore Tapes. Black Annis was a witch with a blue face who ate children and lived in a cave that she dug out with the help of her iron claws. There are various theories as to her origins: some academics link her with figures from Celtic or Germanic folklore or even trace her back to Egyptian, Greek, or Mesopotamian deities. Folklorist Robald Hutton argues that she was a real person, Agnes Scott, a religious ascetic from the late medieval period whose image was distorted over time until she became a kind of bogeyman figure. Experimental electronic musician Steve Watts surmises that her name became a kind of shorthand for a fear of change, which was both catalysed and crystallised by the Industrial Revolution.
Watts has created a piece which is suitably dark in tone. His background is in music for film and television, and it shows: field recordings of sinister crows combine with an eerie, childlike electronic melody in the opening section, and the result recalls the golden age of British televised folk horror. But things get progressively more industrial – and darker – as the piece progresses. Watts names David Lynch as a primary influence, and the ghost of ‘Elephant Man’ Joseph Merrick – himself a resident of Leicester – haunts the later passages. There are pained howls, noises that skirt the borders between man and machine. Both the maddening nature of repetition and the alienation that can come with change are explored here, sometimes apparently simultaneously, and the whole thing has a strong, filmic arc.
The second side, dedicated to Northumberland, is composed and performed by Grey Malkin, another British artist indebted to folk horror and hauntology. Malkin – former frontman of weird-folk band The Hare & The Moon, tells the story of the Duddo stone circle, an arrangement of five (formerly seven) sandstone megaliths in the shadow of the Cheviot Hills. Malkin narrates a spoken word passage from the point of view of the stones themselves, and backs it with spooky ambience, woodwind and electronics. Duddo is shrouded in mystery, and this gives Malkin free rein to interpret his subject in ambiguous and often abstract ways. It makes for a singularly haunting fifteen minutes, a musical landscape shrouded in mist, with occasional moments of melodic sweetness emerging from the miasma. A Reichian minimalism is backed by flutey new-age warblings and Malkin’s unassuming but distinctive speech and singing. Later, there is a soothing piano motif that gives way to a crunch of dissonance before the background ambience and calming spoken word leads us home.
This volume of the Ceremonial Counties series presents two artists using similar influences to achieve two very different pieces of work. It’s a great advert for the varied and fertile nature of British experimental music and also for the range and distinctiveness of this country’s landscapes and the stories they conceal.
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.