One of the most experimental, challenging and innovative acts in contemporary alt-folk – or, as they term themselves, broken folk – Lunatraktors (Clair Le Couteur and Carli Jefferson) have delved into the archives for Quilting Points: Invitations and Open Calls 2019–2025, a gathering of reworked archival fragments, salvaged songs, live performances and field recordings, many the result of the duo’s collaborations with artists, museums and galleries.
It opens with Diffraction Pattern, which combines loops from their 2019 performance installation for the opening weekend of the Turner Prize in Margate with an improvisation with mallets on 22 ¾, a 2018 performance piece exploring the sonic properties of a bronze sculpture of the same name by Alla Malova, creating a hollow cavernous echoing that exudes a brooding melancholia. Larentalia, with its haunting dark pastoral woodwind notes, dates from a 2020 open call COVID project for the Medway Museum in Kent, an invocation to the Guildhall Lar, the tiny statue of a Roman household god excavated from a midden pit in Rochester, the lyrics incorporating the Carmen Avale, a chant from the twelve Arval priests of Ancient Rome who were devoted to the goddess Dia, and offered sacrifices to ensure the fertility of ploughed fields, the original lyric a call to embrace strangers for “how do we know who stands without if they’re turned away at the door?”
Opening with a hollow drone, made for Collateral, a 2021 work by Brigid McLeer commemorating the victims of textile factory fires, and part of Standing Wave, an ongoing investigation of sympathetic resonance in cultural spaces, Museum Studies (Queen Street Mill) is two ethereal layered improvisations involving clog dance, harmonium, body percussion (sounding like firecrackers exploding) and overtone singing.
The first of the live recordings, the vocally trad-flavoured Now The Time comes from a COVID lockdown performance at the now indefinitely closed Theatre Royal in Margate in 2021 and was written to help fill the LGBTQ experience gap in the folk archives, winning the George Butterworth Award in 2022 as, amid harmonium, drone, body percussion and ululating, Clair tremulously sings “there was talk around the town, I knew/The way I walked was put to question/And I who had been bold became afraid/Fearing the looks I’d given”, speaking of repression and rejection (“My mother said the Church would take/Me in and none the wiser/But I told her the Church would take/My life, and all my savour”) but of defiance in the face of persecution (“When the men, they came for me/In the safety of my kitchen/A moment’s choice was opened there/In a life where few are given…And I said: In the orchard, there is rope/And there is a ladder/And all I’ve grown is hanging there/Good wood to build a fire”.
Featuring birdsong field recordings and woodwind, The Hoard is a pagan pastoral soundscape conjuring the gathering and burial of a Bronze Age hoard inspired by the Malherbe Hoard in Kent. It features a rattling ring instrument discovered in the hoard, alongside bronze pour and axe heads and recordings by artist Nayan Kulkarni from the copper mines beneath Alderley Edge. You could hear this in your own Wicker Man soundtrack.
By way of a complete change that underlies their playfulness, recorded live at the Preservation Room in Canterbury during the 2020 lockdown and opening with a resonating hollow gong, The Boy I Love is a wonderful interpretation of the 1885 George Ware music hall classic made famous by Marie Lloyd, here rewritten to celebrate gender expression in pantomime and Music Hall.
At just over six minutes, the drone and liturgical chant-like The Truth Of Eanswythe’s Bones, written for Folkestone Museum in 2020, is a dampened percussion commemoration of Britain’s first female saint, an Anglo-Saxon princess said to have founded Folkestone Priory, one of the first Christian monastic communities for women in Britain. While impossible to prove, the bones found within the church’s north wall were assumed to be hers, hidden during the Reformation and now interred in the Folkestone parish church.
The second half leads off with Life, Clay and Everything, a spoken number by master potter Keith Bryner Jones written as a musical backing for the final moments of his theatre show book tour of the same name and urging to love rather than argue with or seek to control one another. The last live track, Pegasus, comes from the National Opera in Wexford and the children’s theatre show Pegasus The Clothes Horse, with wheezing, discordant junkyard percussion effects, voices, trad folk woodwind and sound effects and a musical theme based on the Irish traditional The Fairy Jig.
Another playful excursion with harmonium, puttering percussion and harmonised vocals, ‘Oss Girls was inspired by the traditional Padstow May Song and written for Lucy Wright’s 2024 exhibition of the same name, tapping into the pre-Christian fire festival celebration that marked the start of summer but also the socialist protest of International Workers Day in the rousing refrain of “Unite! Unite!” I have no idea who Aunt Ursula Birdwood was, or her old ewe.
The name of the duo’s occasional alter-egos, the tune a fragment of Copshawholme Fair and the lyric derived from 16th-century ballad Fortune My Foe, The Hazard Bears is a disorienting, fragmented and hallucinatory aural experience that, made for Billie M Vigne’s show The Bed Of Bill Bones, is combined with a 2024 commission for LORE.
The longest track at seven minutes, initially stripped back to virtually just Claire’s vocals and what sounds like a clock ticking before the noises swell, St Martin’s Land is actually a traditional folksong from Hookland, the duo’s arrangement borrowing from a tune used in school playground chants in Ashcourt, the title supposedly a secret hidden land within a hollow tree.
Previously released as a single, the penultimate joyfully, woodwind dancing Wassail stems from an invitation to lead a public wassail ceremony in the woods of Compton Verney in 2024, the music based on Somerset’s Apple Tree Wassail. Listening, I couldn’t shake the image of goblins carousing. It ends, finally, with the second Museum Studies subtitled Kunsthalle Zürich, a pulsating, almost sacrament-like piece commissioned by no-wave composer Vincent Teuscher for his 50th birthday party in the converted brewery and overlaying two improvisations of low whistle, overtone singing and hand and foot percussion responding to the resonance of the stairwell and recorded on a phone with a condenser microphone.
Released as a limited edition of 500 hand-numbered CDs in a double-sided map-style fold-out that gives the backstories to each of the tracks and includes a Fresnel lens magnifier and download code sticker, you’ll be hard pushed to find a more marvellously inventive or mesmerisingly idiosyncratic folk album – broken or otherwise – this year.
Quilting Points (June 20th, 2025) Broken Folk Records
Pre-Order via Bandcamp: https://lunatraktors.bandcamp.com/album/quilting-points-invitations-and-open-calls-2019-2025
The release is accompanied by a tour of independent venues, folklore centres and festivals. It will include site-specific performances, talks, workshops, and double-bills with other queer/trans artists: Alex Etchart, Goblin Band, Lucy & Hazel, and Maddie Morris. The remaining dates are listed below:
Upcoming Dates
13.6.25 – More Music, Morecambe, Lancaster, UK
14.6.25 – Horse and Bamboo, Rossendale, UK
17.6.25 – WhereElse, with Lucy & Hazel, Margate, Kent, UK
18.6.25 – Double bill with Lucy & Hazel, Secret location, Canterbury, UK
20.6.25 – Nest Collective, London, UK
21.6.25 – All Hallows, with Maddie Morris, Leeds, UK
26.6.25 – Uxbridge Folk Club, Uxbridge, UK
Tickets: https://www.lunatraktors.space/events