Tunnels are emphatically spooky. It’s a surprise that there isn’t more literature, art and music exploring the inherently creepy (or, for a claustrophobe like me, downright horrific) aspects of what lies beneath our feet. The raw material is there for the taking. There are famous tunnels beneath so many cities: Paris has its catacombs, London has its buried military citadels and closed underground stations. Bristol and Liverpool are each home to miles of underground spaces, from medieval vaults to labyrinthine 19th-century follies. The Victorians were history’s great tunnelers, and one of their most impressive achievements was the subterranean wagonway known as the Victoria Tunnel, which runs for more than two miles under Newcastle-Upon-Tyne. Originally built for transporting coal, it became an air-raid shelter before falling into disrepair in the latter part of the twentieth century. More recently, renovations have taken place, and the tunnel has hosted guided tours and an art installation.
Into this world of dripping darkness steps Maryanne Royle, a Rochdale-based musician, composer and artist working in sound and vision. She can usually be found in industrial dub sound collagists Prangers, but here she takes a solo route into Newcastle’s underground history, and emerges with one of the most atmospheric pieces yet seen in the ever-impressive Folklore Tapes Ceremonial Counties series. The Stone Throat straddles social history, hauntology, and a creepy post-industrial soundscape, moving deftly from field recordings by a local historian to throbbing, pulsing electronics and eerie fragments of found sound. It reframes the Victoria Tunnel as a living, changing entity. Snippets of song, warped and delayed, drift in and out, as if from a different world entirely. Royle creates a picture of a world characterised by scrapes, drips, and thuds, a world created for human use but grown alien. An added treat is the inclusion of Sophie Cooper’s electromagnetic recordings, which further thicken the alluring miasma.
Side 2 comes from Somerset, and is brought to you by Paddy Steer, who is a composer and instrument-maker from Manchester. Steer works in between the worlds of electronic music and improvisational jazz and has been a fixture of the experimental music scene since the 1980s. Here, he heads to North Somerset, creating a piece inspired by Brockley Coombe Road, one of the most haunted places in the county (just down the road is a place called Goblin Coombe, which tells you all you need to know about the weird feel of the area). Steer casts the locale as a kind of West Country Bermuda Triangle, where vehicles do strange things, and semi-human figures lurk at the edge of sight.
A chaotic, buzzing sense of humour pervades Steer’s work: he is willing to lean far enough into hauntological genre tropes that his sense of self-awareness occasionally becomes apparent. This is no bad thing: experimentation is just a word serious people use to justify play, and boundary-pushing music has the right to have fun. Steer remains locked into the ghostly mood he creates, even when he peers around the curtain, even when his musings become abstract and digressive. Swerving Coach is full of percussive clatters, nagging electronic melodies, strange quacks and rhythmic bustle. It hangs together like a sculpture made of clutter, like one of the ramshackle, rusting creations in Rockaway Park, the outsider art space just down the road. It is a fidgety, fascinating folly, the perfect foil for the damp, evocative atmospherics of Side 1.
Note on the Series: Each tape can be collected individually each month or as part of a full subscription, and they are available directly from Folklore Tapes at www.folkloretapes.co.uk, via their Bandcamp page at https://folkloretapes.bandcamp.com/, and from selected independent record shops.
Read all our reviews in this series so far.