Children Of Alice

Originally published as a Warp Records press release for the debut LP by Children of Alice.



Children of Alice have been quietly producing amorphous and intoxicating soundscapes as part of the Folklore Tapes collective for a number of years now, beginning in 2013 with Harbinger of Spring on the shared Ornithology release. This poetic conjuration of rebirth and new growth was the first unfurling of post-Broadcast creation from James Cargill, one half of the personal and artistic relationship at the heart of that epochal and increasingly feted band. The name Children of Alice was chosen as an act of tribute to the late Trish Keenan, for whom Alice in Wonderland and in particular Jonathan Miller’s summerhazy 60s idyll of an adaptation, was a presiding inspiration. The name invokes her abiding spirit and also creates a sense of continuity with the evolving Broadcast soundworld, which became more concentrated and individual as it refined itself and adapted to new configurations. The group (or perhaps we should call them a collaborative triad, since they occupy island territory far removed from the familiar shores of rock, though still keeping it in vision on the far horizon) consists of Cargill along with his former bandmate Roj Stevens (who played keyboards in Broadcast) and Julian House, co-founder of Ghost Box records, whose distinctive graphic design work also gives the label its signature look, and hidden prestidigitator behind The Focus Group.

Both Stevens and Cargill lent their incubating musical presence to the 2013 Focus Group album Elektrik Carousel, and a fully-fledged collaboration was hatched with the Ornithology record a few months later. Stevens had released a solo record on Ghost Box in 2009, The Transactional Dharma of Roj Stevens, whose clicking and ratcheting clockwork rhythms suggested the cogs and teeth of complex interlocking machineries and automata set into keywound or water-powered motion. He brings a similar sensibility to the recordings here, creating an impression of irregular, juddering forward motion, a Heath-Robinsonesque progression. House is a concrète collagiste, his assemblages torn by abrupt a deliberately rough-edged jump-cuts, audio analogues of his visual work. Cargill’s warm synth colours infuse the whole with sustaining solar radiance, and bass lines redolent of the Broadcast duo LP Tender Buttons occasionally rise to the surface before drifting off on the mercurial flux of transformative sound. Julian House had previously collaborated with James Cargill on the album Broadcast and the Focus Group Investigate the Witch Cults of the Radio Age, and Children of Alice further explore and expand upon these researches (and those carried out on the Mother is the Milky Way tour CD). These are sound pictures whose discrete movements, organically morphing musical matter and sudden transitions produce a sense of passage through a kaleidoscopically refracted panorama and form a narrative of journeys into inner landscapes. The sound world is gently psychedelic, full of backmasked tapes, phased flutes and analogue hum. Clocks and birds chime and twitter, processed autoharps and glockenspiels glint and shimmer, woodblocks and hand-drums plock and patter.

The music the Children of Alice triad make is impossible to narrowly define. It dissolves the limiting boundaries between field recordings, musique concrète, electronica, programmatic classical music, psych folk, experimental rock, radiophonic sound, library cues, hip-hop sampling and imaginary soundtracks. These four pieces (songs or tracks seem inadequate handles to define them) are pastoral concrète, a romantic English modernism (for, to answer Paul Nash’s rhetorical question, it IS possible to go modern and be British) which replaces brutalism and the clashing bruitage of the city with birdsong, folk chatter and the sundappled buzz and hum of a summer’s afternoon (shades of XTC’s Summer’s Cauldron, with its ‘insect bomber Buddhist droning’) and hedgerow bricolage. There is an inherent lightness to these sound pictures, a feeling of expansiveness and joyful exploration. Inner and outer worlds meet, and the divide between them becomes indistinct and, in the end, irrelevant.

Harbinger of Spring is the lengthiest pieces here, a sonic suite which guides us through a varied terrain, its successive sections like rooms in a spatially transcendent mental mansion, interiors and landscapes interpenetrating like one of Paul Nash’s surreal rooms, lapped by oceanic edges and lit by pendant moons. Beginning with cuckoo sounds which spring from carved, concertinaed clock automata to transform into woodland heralds of the turning season, this playful pastoral tone poem evokes both post-war electronic and electroacoustic composers such as Jonathan Harvey, Trevor Wishart (the morphing of human agonies into bird choruses in the immensely powerful Red Bird), Bernard Parmegiani and Pierre Henry, and British composers such as Benjamin Britten with his Spring Symphony (Broadcast had already drawn on Britten’s music for their song Echo’s Answer) and the Delius drift of reveries like The Walk to the Paradise Garden and In A Summer Garden. Messiaen’s Catalogue D’Oiseaux piano pieces are also a point of comparison, their field-notated birdsong imitations set within musical evocations of landscape, weather and seasonal climate. The fact that comparisons from the classical and avant-garde worlds are easier to draw than examples from the realms of rock and pop indicates the sui generis nature of Children of Alice’s music. There really is nothing else like this being produced at the moment.

Harbinger of Spring set the pattern for subsequent releases in the Folklore Tapes Calendar Customs series – a harbinger of the seasonal tone-poems to come. The Liminal Space from FTCCI Fore Halloween, Rite of the Maypole – An Unruly Procession from FTCCII: Merry May and Invocation of a Midsummer Reverie from FTCCIV: Crown of Light summon up the spirit of seasonal rites and traditions, whether as remembrance, reproduction or ongoing observances. Landscape, time and ritual are inseparable, and these pieces are full of the spirit of an age in which the seasons of man and the cycles of the pastoral year were in close synchrony. The nature of the music makes the substance of time malleable, folding it in and stretching it out, moulding it until it becomes immaterial, eternal. Only timelessness remains, a process of perpetual becoming, recession and renewal; but never an ending or a beginning.

Elements of these pieces trigger associative responses, particularly from those Broadcast fans attuned to the influences Trish and James have promulgated over the years through mixes and interview effusiveness. A revving motorcycle engine brings The Owl Service to mind; cracking flagellations and ‘orgy vocals’ Delia Derbyshire, Brian Hodgson and David Vorhaus’ White Noise track My Game of Loving; swooping sirens and agitated voices the public information films which portrayed a world in which fatal danger was everpresent in the seemingly ordinary and everyday; singing, glassy sonorities the unearthly calls of Les Sculptures Sonores; the ratcheting clogs of a large clock, with its imprisoning linear temporality, the mechanism which features in the Angela Carterish Czech fairytale fantasy Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (a firm favourite of Trish’s); and are those stridulating creaks and boings the sound of Froglets, making a surprise visitation from the soup-rich asteroid of The Clangers? These associations (and many more particular to the individual auditor) all add to the richness of the experience. For these are condensed and multi-layered soundworlds which bear repeated listening. They are unique works of singular imagination, and this first LP by Children of Alice is an extraordinarily inventive work. May it be a harbinger of many further explorations and investigations of cults and rituals, inscapes and landscapes, the temporal and the transcendental to come. Meanwhile, lay back and immerse yourself in these transformative sonic poems, take the hands of the Children of Alice and let your mind drift and come into sudden sharp focus as they lead you into undreamed of yet instantly familiar worlds. Like Alice herself on that hazy summer’s day, dream and wake UP!

Valerie and Her Week of Wonders

Notes for a filmclub screening.

Valerie and her Week of Wonders is a Czech film made in 1969, the year after the Prague Spring and its brutal suppression by the Soviet Union. It’s a colourful fantasy, both rooted in its time and place (it’s very central European and very 60s) and with a universality which gives it broad appeal. Part surrealist serial, part folkloric fairytale with elements of gothic horror it is the story of a young girl’s first steps towards the adult world. Her dreamworld is populated by a strange cast of characters, grandmothers, monsters, minstrels and missionaries whose identities are constantly shifting as if they were all part of some carnivalesque parade or harlequinade. Through her adventures she learns more about the world she inhabits and becomes more confident in negotiating her way around it, more sure of herself. Throughout it all she remains magically protected, partly through the agency of her magic earrings; her unassailable innocence is like a protecting veil, repelling those who would assault and corrupt her. It is a story about the usefulness of stories, the value to be found in fairytale fantasies which help us find our place in the world and warn us of its dangers without ever losing our sense of enchantment with its manifold wonders.

The psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim wrote about the value of fairytales in guiding children towards the adult world in his 1976 book The Uses of Enchantment, taking a Freudian perspective on their scarcely concealed subtexts. He suggests (and I’ve changed his use of male pronouns to make it more relevant to the context of Valerie) that ‘in order to master the psychological problems of growing up – overcoming narcissistic disappointments, oedipal dilemmas, sibling rivalries; becoming able to relinquish childhood dependencies; gaining a feeling of selfhood and of self-worth, and a sense of moral obligation – a child needs to understand what is going on within her conscious self so that she can also cope with that which goes on in her unconscious. She can achieve this understanding, and with it the ability to cope, not through rational comprehension of the nature and content of her unconscious, but by becoming familiar with it through spinning out daydreams – ruminating, rearranging, and fantasizing about suitable story elements in response to unconscious pressures. By doing this, the child fits unconscious content into conscious fantasies, which they enable her to deal with that content. It is here that fairy tales have unequalled value, because they offer new dimensions to the child’s imagination which would be impossible for her to discover as truly as her own. Even more important, the form and structure of fairy tales suggest images to the child by which she can structure her daydreams and with them give better direction to her life’.

Angela Carter was a little more wary of finding useful guidance for negotiating life’s universal dilemmas in fairytales. She liked Charles Perrault’s no-nonsense variations on Little Red Riding Hood and Puss in Boots. But she remembered bed-time readings of Hans Christian Andersen with horror. ‘Please make it stop, I used to say…but they kept on assaulting my sensibilities with Andersen’s fairy-tales with a grand air of self-satisfaction. Weren’t these dreadful stories Children’s Classics? Weren’t they only doing their cultural duty by forcing them on me? Isn’t the function of a good fairy-tale to instil fear, trembling and the sickness unto death in the existential virgin, anyway? And why should children have a good time? The sooner you learn your own impotence in the face of universal despair, the better’. She sought in her own revisionist fairytales, collected in The Bloody Chamber and elsewhere, and in her anthologies of traditional folkloric fairytales, to find examples which reflected women’s experiences; stories which might be of use to women and girls alike, presenting them with heroines they could identify with and learn from. In her introduction to her Virago Book of Fairy Tales collection she wrote ‘that I and many other women should go looking for fairy-tale heroines (reflects) a wish to validate my claim to a fair share of the future by staking my claim to my share of the past. She notes of fairy-tales that ‘on the surface, these stories tend to perform a normative function – to reinforce the ties that bind people together, rather than to question them. Life on the economic edge is sufficiently precarious without continual existential struggle. But the qualities these stories recommend for the survival and prosperity of women are never those of passive subordination’. Carter certainly found something of value in Valerie. She saw it when it received it premiere in the National Film Theatre in London, emerging in the 80s after a long period of obscurity languishing on the shelf of the banned. She loved it, and it was a strong influence on the writing of the screenplay of The Company of Wolves, her adaptation of her own Bloody Chamber stories, and her subsequent adaptation of her early novel The Magic Toyshop for a TV film. The Company of Wolves is a close cousin to Valerie, created very much in the same spirit.

Valerie is often thought of as being the last of the films emerging from the so-called Czech New Wave, a group of filmmakers emerging from the FAMU school which had been established in Prague in 1947. Having been banned for many years by the authoritarian Communist government, with its reforged iron links with the Soviet Union, it has been rediscovered in the west in recent decades and has steadily built up a cult cache fostered by a dedicated band of proselytisers. Many of these have emerged from the musical world, amongst them Andy Votel of the Finders Keepers label, who organised a number of screenings and who released Lubos Fiser’s luminous score on Finders Keepers, and the late Trish Keenan of the group Broadcast. Trish had a particularly personal relationship with the film and voiced what many perhaps feel in her sleevenotes to the soundtrack release. Watching the film and subsequently listening to her cassette recording of the soundtrack, ‘it was like a door had been opened in my subconscious and fragments of memories and dreams rejoiced right there in my living room’. Broadcast have been a favourite band of mine for a long time and it was Trish’s reverence for Valerie, expressed in a number of interviews, which made me seek it out. I found a copy on an old Redemption dvd, a label which mixed horror and Euro exploitation, the self-produced photographic covers no less lurid for being in black and white. The print they used was faded and dust-flecked (they had no resources for restorations) but the magic shone through nonetheless. I was immediately entranced. It’s magical central European fairytale world seemed to work according to a dream logic all its own, but I felt wholly attuned to it, not worrying about whether it made any sense or had any overt meaning. Its spell was cast, its enchantment made manifest on some deeper level than the rational. I knew I would be returning again and again to the town square with its central fountain, to the strange underground crypts, the labyrinthine house, the surrounding fields and lakes. Trish wrote about being ‘confirmed by the church of Lubos Fiser’. I was a convert too.

The film is an adaptation of a novel by the poet and surrealist writer Viteslav Nezval. Nezval was a creative force in a number of artistic fields in the early twentieth century. He was instrumental in setting up the Poetist movement in the 20s, whose writers aimed to lyrically portray the Czech landscape and to view the world through a heightened, imaginative perspective. It was essentially the direct opposite to the socialist realist outlook which would predominate from the Stalinist period onward. Inevitably there was a manifesto, the Poetist Manifesto, which was written in 1924. It set out the poetist beliefst thusly: poetist art should be ‘playful, unheroic, unphilosophical, mischievous, and fantastic’, and offer ‘a magnificent entertainment, a harlequinade of feeling and imagination…a marvellous kaleidoscope’. The sense of playfulness, of a kaleidoscopic masquerade of the fantastic is certainly characteristic of the film Valerie. It is also shot with a beautifully lyrical eye, full of sun-dappled lakes and mist-hazed meadows, evocations of the sensual world in its landscapes and its small details (and there is indeed something very Kate Bushlike about Valerie). The lyrical feel is beautifully captured in the cinematography of Jan Curik, who collaborated regularly with Valerie director Jaromil Jires. The scene in which Valerie runs through the morning meadow has an almost mystical quality to it, the light and mist suggesting a heavenly otherworld. Curik manages to convey the feel of summer with an almost palpable warmth and freshness. His evocation of summer moods is particularly impressive given the fact that it was apparently raining for the greater part of the shoot.

This Czech lyricism found visual realisation in a number of films in the late 20s and early 30s on which Nezval collaborated with director Gustav Machaty. He wrote the scripts for Erotikon and From Saturday to Sunday and was also involved with the 1932 picture Ecstasy. This achieved a certain notoriety due to the scenes in which its female star, Heddy Kiester, goes skinnydipping in a Czech lake. No big deal in its homeland, where the lyrical feel for landscape was often accompanied by a sensual connection between character and natural environment. However, when Heddy Kiester relocated to America, changed her name to Lamarr and became a major Hollywood star, such innocent pleasures were seen as scandalous in the censorious climate of the post-Hayes code era. The Hayes Code had been written by Will Hayes in 1927 and subsequently revised in 1930, when it was given more clout in order to save the great American public from being corrupted by the movies and led into the ways of sin. With covert input from the Catholic church, its puritanical conservatism is ironically similar to the censorship imposed by the Soviet state (and all authoritarian regimes). Valerie would fall foul of such censorship, its anti-clericalism and depiction of a younger generation vampirically fed upon by a corrupt elder generation interpreted as veiled anti-authoritarianism. Its very lack of readily identifiable plot and morally unambiguous message was enough to outrage the philistine overseers of the iron state. If they failed to immediately understand a work of art, they deemed it ‘elitist’, assumed it harboured a dangerous subtext and banned it.

Another collaborator on these three films from the late 20s and early 30s was an artist called Alexandr Hadkenschmied. His role was fairly loosely defined but he brought an experimental and exploratory aesthetic to bear on what was largely straightforward narrative drama. He emigrated to America in 1939 (he was obliged to leave the country after working on an anti-Nazi documentary), where he adjusted his name to Alexander Hammid and married the writer and filmmaker Maya Deren. They collaborated on the 1943 film Meshes of the Afternoon which bears some resemblance to Valerie in that it is a film which proceeds according to dream logic, shifts from domestic spaces to natural environments (the beach in this case), features magical objects and tokens, is filled with an atmosphere of heady surrealism and is viewed from a female perspective. There is a shot in Meshes, often reproduced, in which Maya Deren (who takes the dreamer’s role) stands at a window, hands pressed against the glass, looking pensively to one side, her face merging with the reflections of foliage and branches in the pane. This pose is almost exactly reproduced when Valerie gazes out from an oval carriage window. A conscious homage perhaps? You can sometimes see Maya peering up from the basement of the Cavern Club in Exeter when the door opposite the Boston Tea Party is open for bar deliveries. Incidentally, Meshes of the Afternoon, like Valerie, has been influential on a number of musicians. The group Pram, who emerged from the same Brum scene as Broadcast titled and EP Meshes and, in case this didn’t sufficiently spell out their love of Maya Deren, also wrote a song called Meshes of the Afternoon for their Helium LP.

Valerie and Maya Deren - on the threshold of dream

Viteslav Nezval was also a founding member and leader of the Czech surrealist group, which grew out of the concerns of the Poetist movement, and was officially established in 1934. Czechoslovakia was a significant site of surrealist activity, a satellite with a strong connection to the mother planet of Paris. This was perhaps unsurprising given the tradition of the fantastic in late 19th and early 20th century Czech literature; a tradition whose most renowned proponents were Franz Kafka and Gustave Meyrinck (author of The Golem), even if both did write in German. The novel Valerie and Her Week of Wonders is a product of Nezval’s surrealist period. It was completed in 1935 but not finally published until a decade later, in 1945. By this time, Nezval had utterly renounced surrealism, poetism and any form of art which delighted in the unfettered imagination. He’d long been a communist, but he now grew more hardline and followed the Stalinist credo that socialist realism was the only valid form for art to take. Art which formed a useful social function or provided emotive propaganda for the state. Films about socialist martyrs were perennially popular. Jaromel Jires would make one in the wake of Valerie’s post-Prague Spring disappearance, And Give My Love to the Swallows. Nezval even sank so low as to pen a poetic paean of obsequious praise to Stalin. Like most manifesto-writing artistic tyrants, Nezval wasn’t content merely to follow his own artistic path. He wanted everyone else to travel it as well, with all alternative routes to be barricaded with road blocks. He attempted to dissolve the surrealist group in 1938, but fortunately failed to exercise his reductive authority. The group went underground during the war and the subsequent Soviet dominion but re-emerged during the Prague spring of the 60s. One of its major creative talents was the artist, filmmaker and animator Jan Svankmajer, whose superb, surrealist take on Alice in Wonderland, simply titled Alice, screened at Studio 74 in the Phoenix as part of the Animated Exeter festival last Friday. Alice was established as part of the surrealist canon from the early days of the movement, and its influence can certainly be felt in Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, the film in particular. Alice was also a firm favourite of Trish Keenan, who particularly loved Jonathan Miller’s dreamy summer of love version for the BBC, with its languorous score by Ravi Shankar.

Nezval’s loyalty to the party had one advantage in subsequent years however. It meant that director Jaromil Jires was able to get his long-planned film of Valerie passed for production by the communist authorities who dictated what was or was not acceptable. The presence of Nezval’s son Robert in the cast (he plays the check-suited drummer who leads the players into the town square) lent a further air of official sanction to the project. It’s certainly not the kind of thing which Nezval himself would have approved during his tenure as head of the Orwellian Ministry of Information film department from 1945-50. However, he was safely out of the way by 1969, having died in 1958, his reputation for unswerving loyalty intact. Sadly, his son, born out of wedlock and presumably unrecognised by his father in the hypocritically puritan climate of the party hierarchy, committed suicide in 1971, shortly after the film’s release.

Jaromil Jires was part of the Czech new wave movement which emerged in the 60s, taking advantage of the new spirit of post-Stalinist liberalism which led to the Prague spring of 1968. This was the year in which the reforming president Alexander Dubcek attempted to outline a new form of socialism and free his country from totalitarian control. A number of important talents emerged from the FAMU film school, including directors Frantisek Vlacil, Jiri Menzel, Vera Chytilov, Jan Nemec, Milos Forman and Ivan Passer. The new wave films of the 60s often had a spirit of youthful rebellion which fitted in with the more general worldwide sense of generational conflict which characterised the decade. The assumptions and authority, moral and political, of the older generation were brought into question, and the emerging generation attempted to forge a new worldview, a new way of living. Forman’s Loves of a Blonde and The Fireman’s Ball, Menzel’s Closely Observed Trains and Larks on a String, Juraj Jakubisco’s Birds, Orphans and Fools and, in particular, Vera Chytilova’s Daisies and Fruit of Paradise all partake of this spirit, as does Valerie. This congruence with wider countercultural trends is one reason why the films of the Czech new wave, and Valerie above all, have found such favour with musicians in the modern alternative rock sphere. Indeed, some of you may remember the Exeter collective Birds, Orphans and Fools, named after Jakubisco’s film, who brightened the city with music, art and screenings of strange and wonderful movies a while back. Another collective formed around members of the American psych-folk group Espers, going by the name of the Valerie Project. They got together to record an alternative soundtrack to Valerie, having already performed it live at several screenings, thus proving the transatlantic appeal of the film. The recording was released on the Drag City label in 2007, so you can cue it up and experience the film in an entirely different way. Although this does seem sacrilegious given the sheer sublime beauty of Lubos Fiser’s luminous score.

Several of the filmmakers associated with the Czech new wave left the country after the Soviet invasion of 1968 and found a natural place in the independent American cinema of the 70s, which had also emerged from 60s countercultural origins. Milos Forman made One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Ivan Passer the underrated Cutter’s Way, a brilliant post-60 lament which heralds the dawn of Reaganite America. Valerie was made after the Soviet tanks had rolled into the streets of Prague in 1968, ending the brief, bright spring promising the summery air of freedom to come, now crushed beneath rumbling, clanking treads and smothered by iron grey clouds. It’s often regarded as the last film of the Czech new wave and therefore has a certain valedictory air to it (valedictory Valerie). Its summer idylls are dreams of what might have been, and in their universality, also serve in general as a requiem for the softer kind of 60s utopianism.

Valerie was Jaromil Jires’ third film. The first, made in 1963, was The Cry, whose central protagonist is a TV repairman who gains glimpses into the lives of the customers whose homes he enters and who also reflects on his own life. It’s loose, playful and full of incidental observations and incorporates dream and fantasy sequences in a way that Richard Lester would in his 60s movies with or without The Beatles. The year before making Valerie he shot The Joke, an adaptation of Milan Kundera’s novel of the same name. A real product of the Prague spring in that it was unthinkable that it could have been made earlier, it cast a bitterly ironic and straightforwardly critical eye on the Stalinist period of the 50s. Its central character suffers terribly for a throwaway quip on a postcard sent to his girlfriend which reads ‘long live Trotsky’. The film was still shooting when the Soviet tanks rolled into Prague. Inevitably, it didn’t fare well with the new regime.
Valerie was unlike anything Jires had previously produced. This undoubtedly owes a great deal to one of his key collaborators on the film, Ester Krumbachova. Krumbachova was a figure of major importance within the Czech new wave. The fact that she only directed one film herself (The Murder of Engineer Devil of 1970, surely due for rediscovery and re-release) merely serves to undermine the French auteur theory which would ascribe the director as the singular creator behind any given picture. She wrote, or co-wrote, a number of scripts for the landmark films of the new wave, including Jan Nemec’s Kafkaesque The Party and the Guests, his lyrical Martyrs of Love, and collaborated most fruitfully with Vera Chytilova on two films towards the end of the 60s, Daisies and Fruit of Paradise. These surreal, highly colourful pictures both feature wilful female protagonists who act out their desires in a manner both strident and playful. Fruit of Paradise in particular has a lyrical sensuality and feel for landscape and palpable texture which is very reminiscent of Valerie. The symbolism of the forbidden apple and the fruit of paradise, of the Edenic garden also links the two films. Valerie cheerfully crunches into one of the apples which have been lined up around her funeral bier. Indeed, she eats a variety of fruits throughout the film, as does the protagonist of Fruit of Paradise. This natural sense of pleasure, the pleasure in the natural, is very different from the conspicuous consumption of the doll-like automatons of Daisies, who self-consciously ‘go bad’ to fit in with a world which they have decided has no meaning or purpose. They end up cramming their face full of rich meats, creamy desserts and cakes from a banqueting table which they raid and thoroughly trash.

Krumbachova was, in addition to being a writer and sometime director, a costume and set designer, roles she fulfilled for Valerie. Clearly she was a woman of manifold talents and her creative influence over Valerie was considerable. This female signature on the film is important given the sensitive subject matter of a young girl’s coming of age and her vision of the adult world of sexuality through the symbolic lens of folkloric fairytale. Her authorship and her creation of the film’s visual look noticeably transforms the tone of the book and avoids any element of exploitation which might otherwise have tainted the story. This is Valerie’s film, Valerie’s dream, Valerie’s useful fairy-tale. We see everything through her eyes. She may be subject to various threats, confronted with disturbing and even horrific sights, assailed by vampires, wereweasels and perverted priests. But she remains magically protected throughout, either by her enchanted earrings, or by Orlik, or increasingly be her own command over every situation. Her adversaries try to bind her to the machineries of time, but she soon masters the mysteries of dream logic. She becomes a lucid dreamer, recognising that ‘it’s just a dream – I’m dreaming it all’. And if it’s her dream (the dream of life) then she can control it, wander through it and watch, learning all the time. Valerie observes her own story with curiosity and even, later, amusement (the moment where she sticks her tongue out at the priest whose about to burn her at the stake is priceless). The adult world is initially frightening and bewildering, with its secrets, hypocrisies and contradictions (represented by the shifting nature of the familial characters, their ever-changing masks). But as she learns, loses her fear and gains command of her environment, it becomes something to anticipate with equanimity and pleasure, stripped of its secrets and lies. The final parade and circle dance offers a world of guiltless pleasure ,the repressive, hypocritical priest penned in a domed cage like a squatting black toad to keep him from doing any further harm. But Valerie isn’t ready yet. She wanders around the sunny glade, watching and smiling before retreating to her familiar white bed, drifting into peaceful sleep to wake from her dream.

Krumbachova’s set designs contrast the clean sunlit rooms aboveground with the dusty crypts below; the sepulchral gothic world of tombs and cobwebs with the obsessively tidy and well ordered spaces of the grandmother’s house to which they are connected, providing a subconscious underside. Valerie’s room is a pure, unsullied white, her sanctuary and the outward manifestation of her inner world. It is briefly and shockingly invaded by the black-clad, predatory priest as he tries to possess her physically and colonise her secret self. But he is repelled by her power of innocence, confronted with his own monstrousness. His assault on Valerie’s innocence kills him, as will the weasel’s later on (although death is a relative state in this dreamworld).

Krumbachova’s costume for the weasel, with his lustrously black vampiric cape, draws heavily on traditional gothic elements. The monster make-up, with white face and bald head, pointed ears and prominent teeth, is a variant on the look of Max Schreck’s Nosferatu from FW Murnau’s 1922 classic (a film which Nezval hugely admired). The weasel (more literally translated in the novel as polecat) takes the vampire back to the peasant figure familiar from old Central and Eastern European folklore. Far from the aristocratic figure of Bram Stoker’s novel, these creatures of village superstition were more animalistic and more likely to be a threat to your livestock than your maiden daughter. Rather than fearing garlic, they were likely to reek of the stuff.

Krumbachova suffered like so many in the wake of the Soviet invasion, and retreated from the world of film for a while. She did return in triumphant fashion in 1976 however, designing the sets and costumes for Karel Kachyna’s wonderful fairy-tale film Mala Morska Vila (The Little Mermaid). Her creations include the incredible blue undersea hairstyles sported by the merfolk – resplendent impermanent waves. They’re the finest movie hairstyles since Ernest Thesiger’s Dr Pretorius grandiloquently unveiled Elsa Lanchester’s white-streaked art deco Bride of Frankenstein barnet back in 1935. The blue mermaid look was one which the singer Jane Weaver adapted for her 2010 album The Fallen By Watchbird, her own version of a Czech-style fairy-tale fantasy.

Mention finally has to be made of Lubos Fiser’s gorgeous score. With its lullabies and fanfares, gothic organ chords and delicately plucked lutes, children’s choirs and lusty male choruses, lyrical themes and crashing dissonant chords, music box waltzes and meditative harpsichord nocturnes it is the perfect accompaniment to Valerie’s kaleidoscopic dream and the constant abrupt transformations which occur within it. The lightly tinkling celeste motif which heralds the magical transformations wrought by Valerie’s earrings is a recurrent sound and perfectly evokes the aura of enchantment which surrounds her like a shimmering shield. Fiser went on to score another colourful gothic fantasy in 1972, Juraj Herz’s Morgiana. But he was also a prominent composer in the post-war Czech world of classical music, although he suffered neglect through his failure to conform to the requirements of the state. His piece 15 Prints After Durer’s Apocalypse gained him international recognition after it won a UNESCO prize in 1967. His classical work benefitted to an extent from a revival in the period after the Velvet Revolution, and the process of rediscovery continues to this day, some 17 years after his death.

Fiser’s lullaby theme for Valerie, the music we hear both at the beginning and end of the film and throughout in a procession of variations, was adapted by Trish Keenan for the Broadcast song Valerie, included on the 2003 album Haha Sound. This presented her own take on the film’s aura of enchantment, voicing her identification with Valerie and her wondrous adventures. I’ll leave you with the lyrics as a guide, Trish’s code for entering the dreamworld of Valerie:

Inside the mask another disguise
I fall to sleep before closing my eyes
Tiredness draws in my head a cartoon
Sun at the window, good things coming soon
Shake your earrings over my head
Lay down your dreams on my pillow
Before bed
The silence of ice at the borders of day
Sun in my face will not keep them away
Sinking me into the white of your room
Sky through the curtain, good things coming soon
Shake your earrings over my head
Lay down your dreams on my pillow
Before bed.

Calendar Customs II: Merry May

The first Calendar Customs collection from the Folklore Tapes folks focussed on Halloween. It sought to unearth the layers of tradition and vernacular observance which have been largely displaced by the gothic horror pageantry which now characterises All Hallow’s Eve. For the second volume, they have spun the seasonal and calendrical globe to its obverse face, the light rather than the shadow side, and celebrate May and its merrie rites. Halloween, or Samhain in the old Celtic calendar, marked the setting of the sun, the diminishment of its fires as winter’s dark set in. May Day rejoices in its resurgence, the rebirth of the light which heralds summer’s suffusing warmth and easeful languor.

As with the first release, the music creates sound pictures of specific festivities or rituals, or more general springtime atmospheres. Appropriately enough, given the invocations of ancient traditions contained within, it is presented in a format which is, by the modern measure of accelerated time, an ancient relic in itself – the cassette tape. It is packaged with the care and imaginative use of graphic design which Folklore Tapes pride themselves in providing. The inscribed cover is a mutable symbol which could be interpreted in any number of ways: the top of a maypole; an British dreamcatcher; a diagrammatic, time-lapsed aerial view of the weaving dance around a maypole; a handmirror reflecting the fresh vitality of youthful blossoming; or an abstracted focal lens fixing the season’s vigorous moment of awakening. Or all of the above. Both the cassette and the box in which it is housed come in a light shade of pink, the colour with which the edges of some May blossoms are blushed. A small length of maypole ribbon is included, a gift whose handling summons something of the spirit of bright revelry which is the abiding mood of Mayday. Mine is a lovely emerald green, the proliferating colour of spring’s explosion of thrusting, unfurling growth. A small, photocopied booklet offers notes setting each track in context, giving clues as to the soundworld the artist has created. Its rough, handmade quality adds to the impression that the box set is a personal gift, an artefact which has been put together with minimal resources and a deliberate rejection of digital sophistication, but which as a result has a real, individual touch bearing the authentic imprint of the artists involved. Oh, there’s also an essay on May customs and cultural history by some bloke called Jez Winship. It’s alright, but he does go on a bit. He gets his Shakespeare wrong too. It should be ‘How am I, thou painted maypole?’, not ‘though painted maypole?’. Honestly! I suppose he’s only human, though.

The tape (or, more likely, the accompanying digital download) begins with the comfortingly familiar chimes of a domestic clock, with its household echo of Big Ben’s city tolling translated from the big smoke to a country cottage. Its clockwork carillon calls out from the mantelpiece to rouse the sleepy to wakefulness in the middle of the night, to begin the day long May celebrations at midnight. Time to venture out into the woods and fetch in the branches of may. Carl Turney and Brian Campbell, usually operating behind the surgical masks of Clinic, here set up their Lost Tapes Record Club to present this manufactured anthropological field recording, Alan Lomaxes of inner space. Tramping bass and processional percussion combine with reverse tape night calls and splashy harpsichord dabs, the latter adding a 60s psychedelic touch. The processing and electronic backdrop lend a bleary-eyed haziness to the sound, a dreamers’ parade. The second section of this three part piece (a mini prog concept trilogy) introduces the dawn birdsong chorus, and a sense of calmness and peace pervades. Soft variations on the old medieval round Summer Is Icumen In are played in fluting tones which sound at times like the exhalations of a mellotron, with its slight, breathy delay. Counterpoint voices emulate the intertwining calls of the birds as human and avian worlds combine, the birdsong recordings continuing to burble away in the background. It summons the spirit of a Vaughan Williams or Delius idyll, paradise gardens or larks ascending. With the day blooming into post-dawn life and light, the May rituals come into their full flowering. The third part of the piece brings in the springy, lo-fi thumps of tambour and marching drum. Electronic sounds spiral and wiz over the elemental rhythm, darting and bounding like fizzing will-o-the-wisps caroming in Brownian motion around the May paraders. It’s the background buzz of nature’s busy noise, the humming drone and dense sonic weave of summer after winter’s silence, order and pattern emerging from apparent chaos. Human voices join in the chorus, in their own simple, limited fashion.

The Blue Funz offer a two part piece evoking Beltane rituals on the Isle of Mull; Need-Fire and Milking Cows Through Cake we are bluntly informed, without any further explanation forthcoming. The sound picture gives us a fairly clear idea as to what is going on, however. We begin with the crackle of fire, like cellophane sweet wrappers being crinkled and rustled. Cow bells clank and jangle, carrying an eerie echo, as if heard through mist. A gentler, lulling female voice sings a soothing, slightly distracted melody in the background, leading the bovine herd onward. Glinting thumb piano or celeste plinks add to the aura of magical suspension. May Eve is a time for lighting bonfires, like All Hallow’s Eve, or Samhain, its shadowy counterpart. The veil between worlds grows thin during these temporal interstices, and protective measures must be taken against maleficent incursions from elsewhere. Thus, cattle are driven through the purifying gates of twinned bonfires as they are led out to pasture. The Need (or Neid) fire is lit from and ember nurtured from the previous year’s fire. A slightly sinister chant is introduced, hinting at spirit worlds a dream or errant fancy away from our fleeting perceptions. A bowed instrument like a sarangi sounds scraped, overtone burnished notes like the clarion calls of an otherworldly horn. But where do they come from, and whence do they lead us?

The second section shifts to an interior resonance, bringing us into the cowshed. The sounds of cows lowing, and the pizzling squish of milking, accompanied by pumping, machine-like percussion, gives us a clear picture of what is going on. Choral synth sighs lightly float around the space, producing an ambience of placid bovine contentment. Tinkling notes could be the splash of milk into containing vats (whether through holed cakes or not) or a continuation of the magical tingle felt outside. Apparently there is only one dairy herd on the Isle of Mull. The unpasteurised cheese produced from the happy cows is reputedly exquisite.

Arianne Churchman’s Minehead Hobby Horse builds a sound picture of a North Devon tradition which has become rather overshadowed by the renown of the Padstow ‘Obby ‘Oss a little further west along the coastline. It begins with the sound of a spectral, radiophonic sea (like the sound the BBC’s electronic workshop produced for Samuel Beckett’s Embers). A finger tapping drum rhythm beats out a procession. Processional drums are a recurrent motif running through this Calendar Customs release, along with the sound of birdsong. A reedy accordion wheezes into life, building up the bare bones of a folk tune; a sketch for a song we already know, even if we’ve never heard it before. A wooden clacking and clopping is a reproduction (or perhaps an actual recording) of the erratic, circling progress of the horse and its snapping, toothless jaws. Shouts of ‘hooray’ come from the horse’s milling entourage of outriders. The piece pauses halfway through, accordion set down for a moment, to allow for a count-up (‘one-hooray, two-hooray’ etc). It’s almost like a belated intro. We can imagine leaping morris dancers or some special and jealously guarded Minehead hobby horse moves coinciding with each celebratory cry.

Rob St John’s Bringing in the May returns us to the Delius idyll, spring as a blessed time of re-awakening. A slow showering of piano notes could be the aural depiction of May blossom slowly drifting to the ground, or shivering in a gentle breeze. Sweetly bowed overtone notes in the background create the impression of refracted light glinting through branches. What sounds like a viola adds limning colour to the piano. The circling, downward spiralling arpeggios are like the peals of distant bells. A piping flute, wavering like a whistling kettle, brings in a slightly off-kilter element. The flute is another characteristic sound threading through this compilation. It is the traditional instrument for evoking pastoral moods and the melodic outpourings of songbirds. Its recurrence in this context underlines the central principle behind May Day celebrations, that of going out into the fields and woodlands and renewing a direct sense of connection with the natural world. Let’s all sing like the birds. Rob St John’s repeated piano figure could also be a Messiaen-like imitation of birdsong. Towards the end it shifts up a couple of octaves, a raising of the spirits as our May communion fills us with a feeling of lightness and joy.

Ian Humberstone’s The Hunting of the Earl of Rone is a soundpicture of a particular May tradition carried out in Combe Martin on the North Devon coast, an observance which blends seasonal ritual with local historical pageantry. We hear a hubbub of festive voices and a braying horn calling the gathered hordes together to set off on the hunt. A hunt for human prey in this instance – shades of the Hounds of Zaroff. We are led on once more by processional drums, and the swaying tune of an accordion (an easily portable backpack of an instrument). A flanged electric guitar takes up the melody, ramping the folk up into psych territory. Pattering percussion produces the impression of a slightly chaotic pursuit. I don’t give much for the Earl’s chances.

Mary and David’s (that's David Chatton Barker, I presume) Wish Before Sunrise concerns the tradition of bathing the face in May dew, the belief being that it would lend the complexion a pearlescent glow for the rest of the month. Mary and David use small sounds to create an atmospheric evocation of this observance. It begins with tambourine and drum – the drum once more suggesting a procession going out into the fields. Recorder pipes away, leading us on a merry morning dance. Sprayed zither chords sprinkle us with cold droplets of dew, and the metallic bowing of strings (or of a cymbal’s edge?) suggest hands dipped in cold water, scooping up a cold palmful of May moisture to lave the face. The gleaming plink of plucked strings could be spilt drops splashing back down. Crystalline chime shimmer catches the diamond glint of light on dewdrops. The susurration of whispering voices invoke personal prayers to nature spirits. They are followed by bright, scintillating sounds, glissando glimmer and pulsating oscillations. The bright gleam of singing wineglasses or Tibetan bowls and the warm radiance of a resounding gong. All of which create the impression of a complexion brightening into a healthy, translucent glow.

Rite of the Maypole: An Unruly Procession is the latest concrete sound collage by Children of Alice, the post-Broadcast trio featuring James Cargill and ex-bandmate Roj Stevens alongside Julian House, Broadcast’s graphic designer, collaborator under his Focus Group guise and co-founder of the Ghost Box label. Children of Alice very much continue the experiments first formulated on the Broadcast and the Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age LP. Rapid transitions and cinematic jump cuts create a kaleidoscopic sound collage akin to the fractured form of an experimental film. You can imagine the visual analogue to the sounds, with superimpositions and sudden edits, animated interjections and scratched frames, solarised footage and saturated colours producing an effect of heightened reality. The approach is not far removed from that taken by Richard Philpott in his 1989 film The Flora Faddy Furry Dance Day, included on the BFI Here’s A Health to the Barley Mow DVD of folkloric films. Philpott attempted to use film’s ability to collapse time to create connections between the modern-day celebrations in Helston, Cornwall and a more ancient worldview and symbolism. Images of the labyrinth are flashed up to forge a subconscious link with the dancers as they spiral through the narrow streets of the town.

Children of Alice’s procession is unruly partly in its similar disregard for temporal convention, its disregard for direct continuity and fascination with the juxtaposition of seemingly disparate elements. These create subconscious connections which subtly rewire the brain – truly psychedelic music. It begins with drums, tambourines and birdsong again. These are soon processed into fluid, psyched-out patterns, however. Bells toll, but odd reverb is applied so that their attack is blunted, their directional provenance rendered oblique and nebulous. This is music which attempts to blur the rigid framework not just of time but also of space. Birdsongs are concreted, which doesn’t make them strange as much as emphasise and work with their inherent strangeness. Birdsong is best approximated through electronic means, since their soundworld often feels closely analogous to electronic music (just listen to the remarkable call of a bird of paradise). It’s no surprise that imitative birds such as starlings have found it so easy to add the sounds of mobile phones and car alarms to their repertoire.

The interjection of a laughing female voice hints at the licentious aspect of May Day revels, the lustiness which so vexed Puritan critics in the 16th and 17th centuries. The voice forms a direct connection with the birdsong which has preceded it, calls which are a mix of territorial assertion and mating cry. The ‘unruliness’ of May license brings the human world closer to that of nature, to the seasonal awakening it feels instinctively drawn towards. An opening door and the jingle of keys seems to indicate a passage into another time and place, another scene. A wavering oscillation sounds a vaguely futuristic alarm call, which could also be heard as the whooping and stridulation of frogs and insects. A trundling, springing rhythm creates a slightly comical, cartoonish sense of movement through a boggy landscape, with bubbling and burbling sounds suggesting a squelchy passage. The revving of a motorbike engine acts as punctuation, and perhaps also references The Owl Service. Its title music also used a mixture of instrumental and concrète sound and employed startling collisions of sonic materials – including a motorbike engine.

Children of Alice seem to incorporate, knowingly or not, all the elements of the Calendar Customs May compilation. Next in this extraordinarily condensed, multilayered work we hear piping sounds, the pastoral flute once more. It is subject to reverse masking and other manipulations, but it still bears its established associations. Two step drum beats once more mark out a procession, and the combination with the drawn-out, curving cries of electronic estuary birds (more meetings of human and avian worlds) suggests that we may be in the midst of the ‘Obby ‘Oss celebrations in Padstow, our senses synaesthetised by a combination of ale, crowd psychology, sunshine and repetitive music. An echoed cluster of xylophone notes perhaps marks a brief, refreshing shower, as well as providing another moment of transition. Glassy sounds resemble those produced by Les Sculptures Sonores for the 70s BBC children’s programme Picture Box. More childhood memories are stirred as a cheerfully creaking, ratcheting duo bring to mind the Froglets from The Clangers. Another jump cut and we are in the middle of a village festival, bass and drum patterns reminiscent of those found on Broadcast’s Tender Buttons LP creating an impression of bustling crowds. Car sirens, bikes and shouting voices bring us into the soundworld of the public information film – time for the Advisory Circle to intervene with an admonitory message, perhaps. There is another switch to an interior resonance, and the chaos dies down. What sounds like an amplified autoharp (of the kind Trish Keenan used to play during Broadcast gigs) is slowly strummed. Its upward glissando conjures warming flames in the fireplace of a village inn. A slowly tapped drum relaxes the rhythms of the day, winding down as evening progresses. And so to bed.

Sam McLoughlin’s I Want to Sing Like the Birds Sing, Not Worrying About Who Hears or What They Think is as good as its wordy wish. It begins with a shimmering, celestial synth drone, the clear air of a crisply blue-skied morning. Harmonium and pattered finger drums add their more earthbound voices before birdsong recordings are once more introduced. Sam then begins his duet, piping with untutored instinctiveness on a wooden flute. The sound becomes denser as more flutes are layered on top, until a joyfully cacophonous chorus has filled the spectrum. Chinking mug percussion is added, lending further urgency to this frenzied attempt at transformation, to enter a birdlike state of unconscious grace – to become the song. The drone drops out at some point, the early morning shimmer clarifying into day as the dawn chorus amasses more and more voices. The piping ceases to allow space for a firmly plucked zither arpeggio. It’s like a free jazz big band dropping out to make way for a featured soloist. John Coltrane’s Ascension, for example. The celestial drone returns and the manic piping builds up mass and momentum once more, swanee whistles adding a particularly antic note (free jazz swanee whistle, now there’s a thought). The recordings of birdsong carry on underneath, like a play along tutor. This is how it should be done. It sounds a hell of a lot of fun. Do try this at home.

Malcolm Benzie rounds things off in low-key fashion with Hawthorne. Birdsong recordings play in the background one more time (this not surprising for someone who plays in a band called Eagleowl). A low-fi drum machine sets up a relaxed rhythm over which bass and guitar gently sway. Benzie’s vocals, easing back in the mix, are pleasingly mellifluous, with a light Scottish inflection. The repeated refrain offers a descriptive paean to the hawthorn bloom, sung as if addressed to the flowering bushes themselves as the may is gathered in. It’s a morning song, soft and blurry with waking. A hymn of sorts. It all ends with the birds, a final fluted note pitch-shifted down until the sound is switched off. It’s a perfect way to end, to disperse the conference of birds and bid farewell to Merry May. But what a fine survey it has proved to be. What calendrical quadrant will the Folklore Tapes family alight on next, I wonder? What further curious customs and arcane observances will they uncover? We will have to wait and see.

Folklore Tapes Calendar Customs I: Fore Hallowe'en

The latest release from the Folklore Tapes folk (the Devon prefix dropped as they search further afield), Fore Hallowe’en, finds them taking a new direction, recalibrating the co-ordinates. Previous recordings have focussed on the stories and atmospheres which suffuse particular places and areas, lending them that indefinable sense of magic and sacred presence. Fore Hallowe’en (a title to file alongside Sandy Denny’s After Halloween) marks the beginning of a new venture, resetting the co-ordinates for time rather than space. It’s the first in a proposed series ordered under the title Calendar Customs, which will investigate the ritual observances, customs and moods of seasonal festivals and sacred days. Calendar Customs 1 guides us through one of the most powerful and atmospheric of these periods, the smoke-wreathed and cinnamon-scented days of Hallowtide. The ten artists who contribute to the compilation unearth and re-animate the spirits of the Celtic festival of Samhain, the foundation upon which Halloween and the All Saints and Souls days of the Christian period have been erected.

As with most cultural and spiritual transitions, there is no sudden and absolute transformation. Rather there is an evolution which leaves many elements of the beliefs and customs which have ostensibly been incorporated, co-opted and supplanted intact. It was a subtle evangelising tactic on the part of the early church in Britain to absorb and recalibrate rather than confront and destroy a deeply ingrained worldview and the long-observed rituals associated with it. Indeed, it was an approach specifically put forward in a letter from Pope Gregory to St Augustine in the late 6th century. He instructed the missionaries who were setting out to convert the Britons ‘do not pull down the temples. Destroy the idols, purify the temples with holy water, set relics there and let them become temples to the True God’. The aspect of this true God becomes subtly altered by what remains of the old ways, however. More localised and vernacular, reflecting aspects of the landscape and environment, and the culture which they shape. It inadvertently serves to illustrate the universal ground connecting all religions at some deep level, the common need for a sense of meaning and sacred presence in the world which they express. Britain my have gradually become nominally Christianised, but people’s lives still centred on the routines passages of the agricultural year. It was around these that celebrations and holy days of whatever doctrinal colour were moulded.

Samhain was a festival marking seasonal transition. The harvest had all been gathered in and it was now time to prepare for the encroaching cold and darkness of winter. In the Celtic calendar, this was the deathly start of the year, beginning at sunset (the inverted dawn of the Celtic day). It was tenebrous moment in which the world was less fixed and stable than usual, the boundaries more permeable. Supernatural forces were able to pass through with greater ease. The dead were available to commune with, and goblins, demons and witches were abroad, full of capricious or evil intent, determined to make the most of a night which lent them such potent license. It was brief interlude filled with fearful danger and intoxicating possibility. It is this spirit which the Folklore Tapes artists seek to evoke.

We begin at the end, with The Summons of Death. Ian Humberstone’s track opens with spectral winds, synth white-noise susurration from which shifting masses of Ligeti cloud voices coalesce. Glinting sounds in the background hint at something ghostly darting and swooping within the rushing currents of air. A faint, piping melody emerges, distant, haunting and half-heard. It’s both sinister and lulling, a lilting, swaying charm of a tune, leaving the listener hypnotised and rooted to the spot with rapt, immobile fascination. And then, a crashing upstruck chord on distorted guitar marks an appearance, a landing. IT’S THERE. Death has made its dramatic ‘boo!’ entrance from the smoke of a stage explosion. The soft piping melody is picked up on electric guitar (because Death is, like, heavy), the wah-wah fluctuations suggesting the beating of wings or the sharp swish of the scythe. Popping Casio percussion provides the bones of a skeletal rhythm, the carpal steps for a dance of death. This is something of a pantomime Reaper, a figure from a medieval pageant played out in the village square (or even in the graveyard of the parish church) rather than the saturnine chess-player of Bergman’s Seventh Seal. Sounds of flight at the end, the beat of displaced air, leave him winging his bony way into the night, the appointed soul harvested.

Magpahi's EP on Finders Keepers

The title of Magpahi’s Derwen Adwy’r Meirwon is Welsh for the oak at the gate of the dead. It’s the name given to a notable tree standing sentinel at the head of Adwy’r Beddau (the Pass of Graves). It bore arboreal witness to the Battle of Crogen in 1165, a triumphant day in the annals of Welsh history. It was here, beneath Castelh Crogen, that Prince Owen Gwynedd ambushed the cocksure army of Henry II and massacred them. The ancient oak is now fantastically distended with age, its bole bloated with layers of fungal growth. Magpahi (aka singer Alison Cooper) invokes the spirit of the oak in its dying days, taking on its voice and celebrating its longevity and the centuries of history (‘1004 winters’) to which have passed around it. The lyrics adopt the anthropomorphised perspective of the oak, portraying it as a sentient, self-aware being. The fragile, echoing vocals and circling acoustic guitar figure are tinted with small touches of instrumental colour: a breath of harmonium, a flutter of recorder, a passing buzz of bowed overtones and a scattered shower of percussive rain. It’s a sound which draws comparison to psych folk old and new, from Mellow Candle and Vashti Bunyan to Espers and Marissa Nadler. The melancholy beauty of the song recognises that the great oak’s days are nearing an end. ‘I’m splintered in two’ it laments, ‘branches next to dew’. For the ‘keeper of these gates’ it is ‘time to depart’. We hear those gates open with a rusty skreek like the scratching of branch against glass. The wordlessly crooned outro sounds like a mind wandering, fading away, language put aside for once and all. As with Ian Humberstone’s track, it ends with a departure. The dissipating ghost of the melody is something which will, perhaps, remain in the air as an aural haunting. The imprint of the spirit of place.

Snail Hunter’s Domnhuil Dhu has absolutely nothing to do with Sir Walter Scott’s famous poem Pibroch of Donuil Dhu, a misty-eyed bagpipe clarion call designed to stir the patriotic blood of the Scotsman It is far, far stranger than that. The title may offer some clue. It’s Gaelic for Black Donald, an old Highland nickname for the Devil. Such a familiar mode of address points to the common belief that the Devil and the pre-Christian supernatural beings from which his malevolent trickery descended were living amongst everyday folk. Only a few subtle, tell-tale signs distinguished them to the sharp-eyed observer, dispelling their veiling disguise.

Snail Hunter’s track is essentially an imaginary soundscape, a programmatic piece whose effects are prompts for pictures projected onto an inner screen. An intitial descending sprinkle of notes sounds like an arpeggio stroked from an omnichord, the 80s electronic autoharp which resembled a plastic artist’s easel. It’s a landing, a fade-in, or the drawing apart of a cinema curtain. It’s also vaguely reminiscent of the glittering descending chords punctuating the soundtrack of the 1970 Czech film Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, which alert us to moments of magical transformation and protective enchantment. The sense of cinematic scene-setting is furthered by the introduction of a late 70s high-pitched, ethereal synth drone à la Shine On You Crazy Diamond. We gain the impression of having passed into some otherplace, a territory adjacent to but at some remove from the mundane world.

Graculus - the friendly cormorant

Footsteps church through shingle. Then, in the distance, we hear a weird, choking gull squawk voice, which appears to be spitting out the words ‘what is this?’ in a tone of horrified disbelief. Is it a shape-shifter caught somewhere between human and avian form. Perhaps it is a cormorant, a bird which has amassed a good deal of folkloric associations over the ages. It is often seen as an embodiment of ravenous hunger and greed, largely due to its ability to gulp implausibly large fish down its gullet. It’s black plumage and habit of sunning itself with wings outstretched like a gothic cloak have inevitably led to comparisons with the Devil. Milton makes such a simile in Paradise Lost. In a passage concerning the Devil’s winged travels he writes ‘up he flew, and on the tree of life,/The middle tree and highest there that grew,/Sat like a cormorant’. It has also been seen as a bird of ill omen, portending doom, often in the form of an oncoming storm at sea. It is associated with death, and there are Nordic myths which hold that fisherman drowned at sea can return home from time to time in the form of a cormorant. It’s importance in ancient folklore and mythology was recognised by Oliver Postgate, who made the loyal watchbird of Noggin the Nog, Graculus, a cormorant.

A sharp intake of breath in the aural foreground suggests that our point of view protagonist is taken aback by this apparition. It is something he has come across by chance, a strange spectacle which is both fascinating and alarming – and also potentially dangerous. Mellow synth fluting reminiscent of the music produced by Radiophonic Workshop composers Peter Howell and Roger Limb for early 80s Doctor Who whistles in the background, maintaining the otherworldly ambience. As the bird voice grows more prominent in the sound spectrum and we creep nearer to whatever is making these guttural utterances, we also hear the break and recession of waves. We are on a shoreline, then. The cormorant (let’s for the sake of argument assume this is what it is for now) repeats its three words pained bewilderment. Has it become suspended halfway between a magical transformation from man to bird? It seems to be choking something (there are those associations with gluttony). Has it been poisoned? Or caught its gullet on a fish hook and line? Or is it spewing up oil from a slick it got washed up with? I have a picture in my mind, but I won’t reproduce it for you. It’s for each listener to discover their own mental movie. Our POV character, having approached nearer and nearer with a stalker’s stealth, now reveals himself. No longer fearful, he bursts into harsh peals of cruel laughter, a devilish guffaw. It’s the self-delighting mirth of the villain at the point of triumph, when he realises that his evil masterplan has been realised to the last detail. Perhaps he was a huntsman all along, the birdman his prey. The subliminal background atmospheres suddenly explode into a wild electronic bacchanal, a frenzied and violent freak out of blurting, distorted synth. There’s a furious sloshing of water, as if something is being held beneath the surface and is thrashing about, desperately trying to get free. And then all is calm again. Whatever has been done has been done. Perhaps the cormorant’s power has been appropriated, absorbed. We end with an ascending chord, the mirror of the descending chord with which we started. The curtain is closing, the scene fading out – or it may be an ascent and another flight.

More watery shoreline sounds set the scene for Eva Bowan’s Aos Sí. The Sí are perhaps better know as the sidhe or the shee, the supernatural fairy race in Irish and Scottish folklore and mythology. The shoreline atmospheres and subaquatic compression of sound suggest that we may be encountering a selkie, the mythological Celtic and Gaelic creatures who transform from seal into human form when they leave the sea (a sort of wereseal in effect). Unstable, wavering arpeggios evoke the bob and sway of oceanic swell. A girlish voice whispers half-decipherable lyrics in a high Bjorkish register. It is dispersed in blurry ripples of phased and floating reverberation. Foggy guitar chimes sound like a narcotised version of Robin Guthrie’s hazy Cocteau Twins chords. The whole song passes in a slow dazed drift, heavy-lidded and somnolent. The voice becomes progressively more processed until it is just another element in the dreamy soundscape; the selkie gradually divests itself of all traces of the human side of its nature. It becomes submerged in the harmonic drone of the sea from which it briefly arose, until we begin to wonder whether we really heart it at all. A few sounds at the end conjure one last picture. Steps on the shingle, bells calling the watcher back inland, waking him from his reverie, and the ever-present wind which, if you listen carefully, might still carry the faint voices of the siren singers.

The cold wind blows into the next track, sometime Clinic duo Carl Turney and Brian Campbell’s Punkie Night. There’s a thoughtful continuity in this connectivity of atmospheric weather conditions which makes for a satisfying whole. It gives the impression of a journey, with magically instantaneous transitions from place to place, granting a multiplex perspective on this special night. It’s like a sonic equivalent of Ray Bradbury’s novel The Halloween Tree, in which a group of children take a supernatural flight across the world to learn about the varied traditions of Hallow’s Eve and the Day of the Dead. One of these, Punkie Night, is particularly prevalent in Somerset. Children march through villages or towns carrying lanterns made from pumpkins or mangel-wurzels, sometimes following a cart on which the punkie king and queen ride. They sing the punkie song as they go along: ‘It’s punkie night tonight, it’s punkie night tonight. Adam and Eve would not believe it’s punkie night tonight’. The lanterns, with their grotesque carved faces, were supposed to ward off evil spirits, but can often seem to gather them together instead, their fiery glow transforming children’s faces into flickering shadow-masks with mischievous goblin grins.

The wind whistles in the chilling pitch it is constricted to when blowing through the cracks in doors and windows, or fluting down the long flue of the chimney. A struck match reinforces the impression of a stark, bare interior, now lit by candle or rushlight. Choral synth voices flowing up and down hint at aethereal spirits abroad in the windblown night. A children’s chorus begins to chant the punkie night song. It’s a repetitive and banally declamatory refrain which seems to grow stranger with every re-iteration. An eerie resonance gradually envelops the words until they become spatially ambivalent. Are the chanting children still outside or have they somehow gained access to the domestic interior? Or, more terrifyingly yet, have they taken up residence in the intimate, private spaces within the skull? Ritualistic, tub-thumping drums beat out a hopping and leaping processional, which is joined by a rolling melody. Low metallic harpsicord hammers and repetitive folk techno patterns bring to mind the occult electronica of The Haxan Cloak, or Pye Corner Audio in certain moods, with a similar indebtedness to horror movie scores. Rising, gliding notes in the background conjure images of lines of floating punkie heads bobbing along, angular eyes and serrated grins aglow with fluttering candlelight. The synth choir of strange angels comes soaring back in, and we have the sense of a great assembly coming together. A colourful village custom being enacted for another year, or something less innocent? Once more, we are left with the wind whistling its chill tones through the cracks in the doors and windows, the procession receding into the distance outside. But is there anyone left inside, or is the room now empty, its gathering shadows dimly held at bay by the dwindling stub of a sputtering candle?

Such troubling speculations are dispelled by the clatter of junkyard rhythms as the Taskmaster, Trickster, Troublemaker of Bokins’ track takes to the makeshift stage. This dancing, skeletal percussion brings to mind Tom Waits’ Bone Machine. Clicking spoons and clanking iron, shaken bunches of keys and rattled tins full of dried beans provide the dry, jerky moves for a bony reel. A guitar adds a disjointed melody, phased effects giving it a broken, hesitant flow. Strummed intervals give it the sound of a spirit-possessed Appalachian dulcimer at times, lending a folkish aspect to the grim merriment. A hobo ghost dance around a fire some way from the mountain trail, perhaps, glimpsed peripherally by the weary traveller. A few synth blurbs are added to heighten the sense of the uncanny. The analogue synthesiser is definitely the chosen means through which to evoke the supernatural on Calendar Customs I, and has proved adept at doing so in many other contexts too. A babble of voices becomes vaguely audible, pouring forth a chittering, half-human burst of goblin scat. Then there is a change in register. A sinister drone shrouds all sound, somewhat in the misty mould of John Carpenter’s score for The Fog. It’s a ‘something inexorably approaches’ drone. We hear clanking, hammering, rusty creaking and the actinic glint of sparking metal. Some dread forge or unholy workshop, perhaps. The track ends before we are able fully to divine the nature of this infernal space.

Children of Alice are a trio bringing together James Cargill and old Broadcast compatriot Roj Stevens with Julian House, Ghost Box co-founder, graphic designer and artist (under the guise of The Focus Group). This is an incredibly exciting venture for fans of Broadcast, amongst whom I unhesitatingly number myself, suggesting as it does a new post-Broadcast direction. Their debut piece, The Harbinger of Spring, was released on Folklore Tapes V – Ornithology last year. Something of the same concrete collaging which the characterised the Broadcast and Focus Group collaboration Witch Cults of the Radio Age is used to delineate the strange dimensions of the Liminal Space (the edgeland or interzone), their track on Calendar Customs. It begins with a tuning in, a crackling sweep across the frequencies until the desired wavelength has been fixed. A trundling, ratcheting rotation suggests motion, as does the plodding, pedestrian bass pacing which lopes alongside it. Fragments of fluting synth melody paint impressionistic glimpses of the passing world. These are low key sounds, soft and muffled, their origins obscure. They seem to be coming from somewhere else – the liminal space. Through one of the jump cuts and aural transmutations which were a feature of Harbinger of Spring, the wheel is displaced by a watery trickle. Perhaps it was a waterwheel all along. It’s a gentle, liquid sound which also seems to carry the faint murmur of voices. This sense of voices emerging from and merging with natural sounds is a characteristic of the Calendar Customs compilation as a whole.

We hear some kind of clicking and ratcheting clockwork machinery. It’s the kind of complex, interlocking polyrhythmic patterning which ran through Roj Steven’s Ghost Box album The Transactional Dharma of Roj. Are we inside the mechanism of a large clock, like the one which features in Valerie and Her Week of Wonders? The Children of Alice, individually and collectively, are expert at transporting us through a progression of discrete spaces and states. It’s the equivalent of an aural psychedelic trip, something which Broadcast singer and writer Trish Keenan used to talk about. We hear the opening melody and the trundling rotation again. It feels different in the context of what we have heard since. Could it be a strange music box turned by a small handle? The piece is anchored and given structure by these repetitions, lent variety and contrast by the juxtaposition of different sound blocks. A coconut clopping once more gives the impression of movement – the horse pulling the cart whose uneven roll we have been listening to, perhaps. Backward vocals are slowed and processed until they are no longer recognisably human. They become part of the general ambience, the hum of the aether, tuned out. This music which is all about transformation and transition. The wheel keeps on turning, but it’s travelling in no readily identifiable direction. It is non-spatial motion – a temporal rotation, fitting for this new calendrical Folklore Tapes venture. And then, suddenly, it stops.

Mary Stark’s Nos (Us?) creates a sound picture of a huge, resonant space – a cavern, perhaps. It is filled with the scuttle and stridulation of insects and the call and fluttering flight of birds. Some stertorous breathing and sighing suggests a living presence; The case itself as a womb filled with life. Bat squeak and pizzicato droplets add further detail to the scenario. The swell of an organ drone, which has the overtone shimmer of church bells heard from within the nave, gives this the feel of a sacred space. And then the echoing, compressed resonance, which has mapped out a confined interior, is gone. We are in the open air, the birds still singing. They have made the transition between states. There’s a sense of relief, of horizons expanding and light flooding in. It’s as if we have arrived at some illuminating conceptual breakthrough, one which has finally allowed us to walk out of the Platonic cave.

David Orphan’s La Mas Ubhal (Quinque Sect) refers to a drink which mixes spiced ale, cider and roasted apples. Sometimes referred to as lamb’s wool, it was made for the old Irish feast of apple gathering, which used to take place on All Hallow’s Eve. Quinque Sect means, roughly, The Fifth Way. The track begins with roughly bowed notes, scratchy and coarse. The apples being peeled, perhaps. The piece as a whole has something of the feel of free improv, with the kind of small, discrete sounds which AMM or the Art Ensemble of Chicago used to deploy. Warm analogue synth notes are introduced, full and rich, adjusted to give off a flickering vibrato shimmer. This is the solar sound of a fire burning steadily and comfortingly in the grate. More small instrumental noises suggest quietly purposeful activity: The tracery of a thin, synth oboe-like pattern of notes (a tendril of cinnamon scent curling from the pot, Bisto-style), a slack jazz bass twang and an electric bass riff. Bowed overtones glint into the shadows, and there’s a strange trumpeting, some beast emerging or maybe just stomachs rumbling. The electric bass takes up a Fog ‘something’s getting nearer’ riff – four beats with the first strongly emphasised (DUHN, duhn duhn duhn). We hear a coalescence of voices, half chanting, half gasping (they want some of the mas ubhal, and now). A slithering, shuffling approach with sweeping guitar effects hinting at something uncanny in the air. A chanting voice is abruptly cut off. The Quinque Sect is never revealed to us. Perhaps it is a mercy.

Rob St John finishes the Calendar Customs survey with a lovely instrumental piece, Old Growth, which is full of wistful seasonal melancholy. Descending chords are picked out on a classical guitar which sounds like a lyre or Celtic harp. They are limned by delicate synth accompaniment, the mellow light of the late October sun. This descending sequence paints a picture of bronzed and yellowed leaves slowly spiralling to the ground. As the title suggests, it as an end, but also a beginning, making way for new growth in a new year. A blackbird sings its heavenly song, and further songlike synth notes are added to fill out the mantric repetition of the underlying chords. It fades out on a long held chord, which encourages you to add you own humming drone to the autumn harmony.

It’s a beautiful, prayerful note on which to end a really fine and varied collection, which evokes, through means traditional and experimental (the two poles blending without any sense of contrivance or strain), this magical time of year in all its varied moods: beautiful and unsettling, dark and illuminated, wistful and impish, fearful and full of hope. The first exploration of Calendar Customs has produced riches and treasures aplenty. I look forward eagerly to further investigations.