The next stops on Folklore Tapes’ tour of England’s ceremonial counties are Gloucestershire and Hampshire. For the Gloucestershire edition, the mysterious sound artist Zandra takes us to the graveyard of St. Mary’s church in Painswick, an old wool town near Stroud. Painswick is not short of its weird traditions: in the 1800s, the local gentry held processions in honour of the god Pan, while the town is one of the few remaining places to practice the tradition of ‘clipping the church’, in which parishioners link hands and embrace the church before reciting prayers or celebratory chants. But perhaps Painswick’s biggest claim to folkloric fame is the legend of its yew trees. The graveyard is said to contain 99 yews, and if a hundredth is ever planted, the devil himself will appear and uproot it.
It is this legend that Zandra focuses on in a beautiful, melancholic and surprisingly melodic piece. Repeated strums of acoustic guitar and ghostly, wordless vocals are joined by lightly scraped strings in what sounds like a gentle but uncanny incantation. The piece ebbs and flows for the first four minutes or so, with the dissonant strings sometimes threatening to overwhelm the eerie but tuneful guitar, but never quite getting the upper hand. Then a genuine tune emerges, a folk song whose words seem decayed as though the singer had spent some time in the grave they are singing about. The tune is eldritch, with an ancient-sounding quality – it would make a perfect musical accompaniment to an Arthur Machen story – and grows stranger and more intense as it progresses, with spooky found sounds, field recordings, and a splash of psychedelic guitar creeping in towards the end. Lovely, freaky and slightly uncomfortable.
The other side, Hampshire, comes courtesy of the composer and sound artist Edd Sanders, a member of Red River Dialect. Like Zandra, his practice is built on a mixture of acoustic instrumentation and found sounds. Here, joined by fellow sound artist Jamie McQuilkin, he creates a piece around a sustained, organic drone, full of shifting textures. It has a distinctly improvisational—and therefore unpredictable—feel to it, with notes rising in a semblance of melody above and alongside the underlying drone. The natural feel for change emphasises the human element: this is not a cold or academic piece, despite its obvious experimentation. Just over halfway through, a more melodic form asserts itself, and the composition begins to resemble something like a wild, free-form take on folk music. Like the Gloucestershire piece, it takes inspiration from a church tradition, in this case, the changing of the bells.
As is routinely the case with these Ceremonial Counties releases, both sides complement each other beautifully, and both shine a valuable light on the eccentric corners of England, which should be celebrated but are in danger of being forgotten.
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.