This month’s edition of the Ceremonial Counties tape series from Folklore Tapes features Essex and Rutland, two counties that share strong links to Britain’s Roman history, and both of these pieces touch on that legacy, albeit in very different ways. Laurel Morgan’s contribution, The Last Stand at Ambresbury, explores Ambresbury Banks, an Iron Age hillfort in Epping Forest. Here, according to legend, the Iceni queen Boudicca and her army of allied Celtic tribes were finally beaten by the Romans. Historically speaking, there is little evidence to suggest that such a battle took place here, but in a way that doesn’t matter: much of Boudicca’s importance lies in her status as a mythic symbol, a kind of folk hero. Morgan’s practice draws lines between this mythic Boudicca and modern ideas about landscape, ecology, feminism and rebellion. In the first half of the piece, she uses field recordings to embellish her otherwise unaccompanied singing, creating a wild topography of tone and melody. It is a largely wordless or glossolalic invocation: you get the feeling that Morgan is responding not only to a place but to thousands of years of history and its associated griefs and repressions. Midway through, a simple, primal drumbeat changes the mood: suddenly, there is a quiet determination to the multitracked vocals, and Morgan channels something earthy and ancient. The final section sees her return to a more peaceful form, something approaching acceptance, and the piece becomes a duet with nature, giving space to the corvid voices of the forest and the sound of wind in branches. The whole thing amounts to an incredibly moving and mysterious experience.
The task of creating a musical response to Rutland – perhaps the least well-known of the counties – falls to Richard Chamberlain, a guitarist and improviser whose recent work includes a stint in lo-fi psych-folkers Schisms alongside Sam McLoughlin and Bridget Hayden. Chamberlain’s tactic is to use Rutland’s diminutive size to his advantage by recognising the ways in which the county’s smallness make it unique (noting, for instance, that Rutland’s size may be a result of it being a Roman division of land – the implication being that it somehow skipped Norman land reforms and exists as a unique relic of ). He has created seven distinct pieces, each inspired by a different phase of Rutland’s history. The Forest of Rota’s Land kicks things off in a dense and scuzzy manner. Iron Shod at Walchelin Smiths is spare and cavernous, full of scrapes and echoing chimes. Elsewhere are moments that sound like improvised variants of 70s folk rock; doomy, scorched-earth psych; windswept drone. The guitar remains front and centre, in places a kind of black hole of distortion, pulling in the air from around it. It’s feverish but invigorating stuff.
Note on the Series: Each tape can be collected individually each month or as one entire subscription, and they are available via Folklore Tapes directly at www.folkloretapes.co.uk or via their Bandcamp page at https://folkloretapes.bandcamp.com/ and via selected independent record shops.