Mysterious UK-based producer U’s practice qualifies as folk music inasmuch as it is music that has folklore as its primary subject. Quantitatively speaking, though, the remit of his new album Archenfield is wider and more ambitious. U has previously embraced the jagged edges of post-punk and cold, glitchy electronics, but here he leans heavily into ambient, field recordings and plunderphonics to create a detailed folkloric map of Archenfield, a rural region in Herefordshire with a long and at times turbulent history.
Opening track Urchins employs a simple, repeated piano melody on crackling vinyl. It evokes those age-old hauntological themes of distance, time, memory and decay. But just when you think things are wandering unequivocally in the realm of The Caretaker, the piano suddenly surfaces and clarifies, and a child’s voice, clear and haunting, sings Is It a Kind of Dream?’s titular refrain. U has many musical avenues, and they are labyrinthine and twisting. It is an album to actively lose yourself in: not immersive in the meditative way of much ambient music, but constantly changing, always engaging.
U is, first and foremost, a collagist, and Archenfield is an assemblage of many disparate elements. There are dog barks and birdsong. Sin Eater skirts the boundary between music and documentary. Half Moon begins with a snippet of woozy, drunken brass and opens up to admit a surprise crash of percussion and a warble of space-age electronics. The Bitter Withy features a solemn, hymn-like and slightly warped rendition of the well-known folk song that casts Christ as a murderous child. It joins the dots between pagan and Christian modes of worship, a comment on how two different religious practices often existed in an uneasy balance in rural communities.
The album’s centrepiece is Black Vaughan, its title a reference to the wicked Sir Thomas Vaughan, whose ghost is a potent presence in Herefordshire folklore. A disembodied voice floats in and out. Foreboding percussion and a slow, funereal melody ramp up the chills. Part of U’s appeal is the way he lets things unfurl slowly but inexorably, creating a palpable sense of tension and release. This tension comes in diverse shapes and sizes: He’s Found It is a spoken testimony of a haunted tape recording, and is genuinely creepy, particularly when coupled with the cadaverous crawl of SPOOKS! and In Flanders, Again, a mournful instrumental ode to a history of conflict.
On one level, Archenfield is an ultra-specific homage to a particular place. The spoken and documentary elements situate the action within Archenfield’s historic boundaries, and tracks like Ariconium (referring to a Roman settlement near present-day Ross-on-Wye) seem largely reliant on location. But there is something universal about U’s vision. It acts as a reminder that we are all situated in history, and exist in a place whose story is bigger and longer-lived than any individual. The album’s final track, the atmospheric dialect poem Lost to the Plough, attains a kind of timelessness and a kind of uneasy peace with the landscape. It finishes with a recording of communal merriment, a reminder of the humanity that lies at the heart of even the strangest stories.
Archenfield (October 10th, 2025)
Bandcamp (Digital/Vinyl): https://majoranticlimax.bandcamp.com/album/archenfield