Treated as something of a sideshow during his own lifetime, John Clare is now practically unavoidable in any discussion of the literary history of the county of Northamptonshire, a poet whose reputation as an untamed rural visionary often unfairly overshadows his exceptional body of work. He was also an illuminating prose writer and chronicler of changing landscapes, and a wanderer of almost superhuman endurance. Krzysztof Hladowski, formerly of The Family Elan, has formed The Clare Voyants to explore the mystical and musical elements of Clare’s life. He is joined by Rowland Thomas, Andy Jarvis and Gareth Hughes, and together they have created a collage of free folk, found sounds, traditional melodies and spoken word.
The piece circles around the idea of Clare’s truancy from an asylum in Epping, and his long walk back to his home county. Repeating musical motifs are punctuated by Hughes’ diaristic spoken interludes framed by the cawing of rooks and the twittering of songbirds. The group employ a rhythm called the aksak from Anatolian folk music, which mimics the pace of a desperate and stumbling kind of human movement. Punchy strums interrupt each other, trip over each other, speeding up and suddenly slowing down, the melodies seeming to stay just beyond the listeners’ grasp. Another section evokes an early kind of dreamlike (or nightmarish) psychedelia, a waltz accompanied by the chime and tick of clocks. It makes for a stirring and highly original take on Clare’s poetics.
On the other side of this month’s Ceremonial Counties release, The Universal Veil (Sam McLoughlin and David Chatton Barker) cover Buckinghamshire. The duo take Horace Harman’s Sketches of the Bucks Countryside (1934) as their source material and build up a longform (mostly) instrumental improvisation inspired by the sightings of strange, tiny witches on a farm in Eythorpe. The piece is meandering and ritualistic, diligently lo-fi and deliciously haunting. Chopped and decayed field recordings trade places with ethereal, repetitive passages played on instruments that don’t sound quite human. There are buzzes and plinks and jerks aplenty, but also eerily beautiful melodies, layered and collaged expertly to produce something that sits between Wicker Man psychedelia and Ghost Box hauntology (and is arguably more mind-bending than either). This is one of the most wonderfully warped Ceremonial Counties tapes yet.
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.