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.

Devon Folklore Tapes VI: Theo Brown and the Folklore of Dartmoor

Devon Folklore Tapes 6 (or DFTVI, to follow the acronymic condensation) is the latest in a series of beautifully presented artefacts which combine visual art, commentary and music, assembling a multi-faceted, harmonious whole. Each release has its own theme and geographical or temporal focus. DFTVI takes as its subject the folkloric explorations of Dartmoor undertaken by Theo Brown, largely in the post-war period from the 40s through to the 80s. This covers the prime hauntological period in which white heat futures and ephemeral pop presents combined with the revival of ancient memory and seasonal ritual. Brown was largely self-taught, a traveller who drew inspiration from her own youthful experience of the moor and its surrounding villages. She furthered her knowledge of its living lore by talking directly with its inhabitants, gathering new funds of story and anecdote. Hers was an idiosyncratic approach to the study of folklore, and one which found little favour with the more by the book elements of academia. The value of her work, which was notable for its combination of accessibility and scholarly breadth and depth, was only belatedly (and in many cases begrudgingly) recognised. Her papers now reside in the Exeter University archives; she was admitted to the halls of academia in the end, where her work is available to the more broadminded scholars of today. There’s currently a small display in the Old Library at Exeter University which includes material relating to Theo Brown alongside the contents of DFTVI and accompanying notes.

Ian Humberstone and David Chatton-Barker, the artists behind Devon Folklore Tapes VI, clearly sense a fellow spirit in Theo. They liken her to Delia Derbyshire, Lotte Reiniger and Vera Chytilova, the late Czech director of Daisies and Fruit of Paradise, who died earlier this year. Like them, she was a passionate individualist who pursued her own determined path in the face of indifference and disdain from a predominantly male establishment. Brown trained as an artist at the Westminster School of Art in the 1930s. Although she never fully pursued her talents in this direction, she produced some beautiful woodcuts, which provided the illustrations for a number of her books on folklore. Reproductions of seven of these are included as postcards in the DFTIV treasure box. David Chatton-Barker invokes Theo’s artistic spirit in a lovely design used in promotional material (which you can see at the head of this post). An imprinted profile taken from a youthful photograph is given a leaf-veined craquelure. It’s a powerfully poetic image, contrasting the freshness of youth with the engraved lines of age and experience – of time. The leaf veins suggest fragility and autumnal withering, but also a connection with the landscape and the cyclical renewal of the seasons. In this case, such renewal can be seen as a metaphor for the revival of Theo’s life work, and thereby of the vital spirit which defined her and gave her such vigorous purpose.

Nested at the heart of the DFTVI box are 7 7” singles, containing the music central to the project. To my knowledge, this is the first time a Devon Folklore Tapes release has been bereft of any actual cassette amongst its contents. But the title has become a recognised signifier of the series’ qualities and character. It’s suggestive of field research archives filed on modular shelving units in 70s brutalist bunkers, or of the forgotten rooms of rural town museums whose exhibits have remained unchanged for decades. Anyway, Devon Folklore Singles just doesn’t sound right – too much like a tweedy dating night down at the village hall. The seven 7”s present soundscapes connected with seven Dartmoor villages. 7x7x7 – there seems to be some occult symmetry at play here. The Dartmoor summoned up by the music is definitely a magical place; one full of sinister resonance, with strange, unearthly presences hovering behind the thin veil separating worlds. It’s a veil as evanescent and nebulously shifting as a moorland mist. At any moment it might enshroud you and transport you from all that was solid and familiar. It’s this uneasy apprehension of the uncanny, which goes hand in hand with the unpredictable moods of Dartmoor weather and its wild landscape, which the music attempts to express.

Given that the music is aligned with particular places, and is designed to evoke their ambience and the sense of the stories which have settled into their contours and seeped into their subsoil, the ideal way of listening to it would seem to be to travel to the locales in question. A map is included in the DFTVI box, presumably with this end in mind. Obviously, a certain amount of recording and transferral of formats would be required. Unless, of course, you happen to have a portable wind-up gramophone to set up beside your wicker hamperful of cold meats, hard-boiled eggs and ginger beer. Headphone absorption will provide an immersive soundtrack, and create the suitable sense of being at a certain remove from the ruthless rationality of the 21st century world.

So what of the music itself? It is loose, low key, and determinedly low-fi and homespun, a reflection perhaps of Theo Brown’s own defiantly amateur status. It is largely what could be described as electronic music, with sounds rooted in the post-war period of modernist experiment and Radiophonic play. But it has the feel of real-time performance rather than work which is primarily constructed in the studio (reel time, if we’re still looking at analogue ways, which is certainly the impression here). MEV (Musica Elettronica Viva) and Gruppo Nuova Consonanza, with their use of electronics in an improvisatory context, might be a more apposite point of comparison than, say, Stockhausen and Berio or any of the other composers who sequestered themselves in the airless labyrinths of state-radio funded studios. We’ll get the chance to see how the music plays out live during the upcoming Only Timelessness tour (which arrives in Exeter on 22nd July). Electronic and experimental music has been used to good effect in summoning up states of dislocation, unease and panic in horror film soundtracks. It is put to such use in DFTVI, painting a sound portrait of Dartmoor as an eerie, haunted landscape; a spectral terrain in which temporal laws and the boundaries of the rational lose their hard-edged definition.

In the Postbridge piece The Hairy Hands, electronic oscillations and wavering tonalities are reminiscent of Louis and Bebe Barron’s unearthly whistles and burbles for the Forbidden Planet soundtrack. There is also a series of reverberant metallic scrapes, of the variety referred to as ‘terror zings’ on the Radiophonic Workshop LP of sound effects Out of this World. These reminded me of the unnerving creaks and isolated percussive cracks and splashes of Toru Takemitsu’s film score for Masaki Kobayashi’s 1964 compendium of Japanese ghost stories Kwaidan. Echo and reverb create the sense of a strange space, with the open expanses of the moor suddenly rendered dense and enclosed. It’s as if a transformation in the natural order of things has taken place, resulting in a disconcerting shift in perception. A similar effect is created in Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker. The rhythmic clacking of the railway track the three pilgrims are riding into the mysterious Zone is gradually and, initially, almost imperceptibly altered. It grows more reverberant, its overtones flatten and spread out like tendrils of enveloping mist. This transformation of sound marks the crossing of a boundary, a transition to a space and perceptual state in which the laws of nature (including acoustics) are subtly but fundamentally different. A heartbeat pulse growing steadily louder along with the introduction of respiratory rhythms which sound like heavy, bestial breathing herald the manifestation of the hirsute hands of the tale in question. These are said to have appeared on a number of occasions over the centuries to menace travellers taking the road into the village, and hinder their passage. There is a final frenzy of freeform noise on the Hairy Hands track, a chaos which seems to mark the terrified apprehension of the beast by the unfortunate passerby. A fearsome crash brings things to a halt, perhaps signifying the grim end of this encounter with a malevolent spirit. We can perhaps imagine a close-up on the spinning wheel of a motorcycle.

It’s all highly cinematic. The imaginary soundtrack is a modern version of classical programme music such as Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique. 60s and 70s horror film atmospheres are invoked elsewhere on DFTVI. The synth drone and rushing wind at the beginning of the Old Crockern tale from Two Bridges recalls the chill ambience of John Carpenter’s brooding, pulsing synth score for The Fog. In Wistman’s Wood, a heavy bass thudding measures the implacable, inescapable approach of some stomping entity, or of the Wild Hunt whose route legend maps across the skies above the stunted oak treeline. It’s a relentless pounding which recalls the terrifying aural assault in The Haunting, Robert Wise’s 1963 adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s classic of the supernatural. In the tale of ball lightning invading a church service in Widecombe-in-the-Moor with what appears to be a guiding intelligence, swishing sounds panned wildly across the stereo spectrum, together with scraped strings bent into upwardly ascending arcs (the Radiophonic Workshop’s ‘terror glissandos’) summon up fiery elementals. These will-o-wisps swoop and dive like sluggish swifts, their bobbing flight weighted down by dubby basslines. This brings to mind the scenes in the Hoichi the Earless section of Kwaidan in which spirits in the form of glowing balls of flame dart like moths across a ruined temple graveyard. The otherworldly atmosphere is enhanced by Toru Takemitsu’s tenebrous music, all wispy susurration and spectral sound.

There is an element of soundscaping to some of the music, with field recordings, processed to a greater or lesser degree, incorporated to summon up the spirit of place. Wild weather is also an important aspect of the moor’s changeable moods, its barometer needle likely to swing with a suddenness which has caught many an unwary wanderer out. Fairies, spectres and elementals arise from the sounds and atmospheric conditions of particular sites. Dartmoor is a primal landscape which encourages a return to an animist view of the natural world, a sense that its elements are imbued with a variety of inherent spirits. DFTIV begins with the rushing of wind, from which cries emerge. The battering white noise of a gale or the rushing white noise of a river are highly suggestive. Just as any sound can be filtered out from a white noise base on a synthesiser, so the mind can parse any number of sounds through the filter of the imagination. The track based around the Old Crockern tale from the Two Bridges area draws forth a spectral horse from the scouring wind. Dessicated Casio rhythms provide the bones of sound which evoke a skeletal canter, a bounding, rattling ghost ride. Horror sounds pile up again towards the end, with splintering freeform piano and grating stridulation leading to much wailing and howling. Finally, it all falls apart, and we can imagine a pile of bleached bones scattered across the moorland scrub.

The Wistman’s Wood track begins with a whooshing space wind, with the amplified cracking of twigs and circumambient pinging reverberations suggesting the eerie suspension of time and sound in this moss-muffled, dwarf-oak canopied expanse. The pounding approach of the Wild Hunt is all the more alarming for intruding upon the quietude of this ferny, lichenous sub-world. The Piskies Holt in Hexworthy, a natural underground passageway by the Dart, is depicted with wavering, watery sounds. Glass bowls are struck and lowered into water so that the note glides downwards. Bell-like droplets drip with cold resonance, as if they were splashing on the surface of a granite chamber. The occasional slippage of sound charts uneven surfaces, wet slides and muddy skids. There are linked levels of liquid language here. The continuous flow of the river acts as a ground for the plinking pizzicato of the drips. Swirls, currents and eddies are the over and underlying overtones of this rushing drone. Sighing exclamations arise from these sounds, the gurgling oohs and aahs of the piskies. They are sweet and filled with childlike wonder, but feel as if they could easily and instantly morph into sharp-fanged hiss and screech.

In addition to the sounds of wind and water, we also hear the sounds of fire in the Widecombe tale of Jan and the Devil. This is a variant of the many sorry accounts of inadvisable deals with horned and cloven-hoofed strangers in which the soul is the disposable currency of exchange. Jan’s reckoning with his Satanic creditor is heralded by a tolling bell and low rumbling John Carpenter synth. Tarry, sticky sounds like glutinously flowing and banking lava queasily conveys a hellish presence. Wild, untethered theremin suggests supernatural flight on eerie currents, whilst electronic hissing blows out billowing clouds of sulphurous vapour, as if from some unholy censer. A wailing siren, the subconscious trigger signal for panic and fear, is succeeded by a series of thuds – the firm and sure knocks of fate at the door. A sickly buzzing accumulates, a swarming aural halo for the Lord of Flies. Jan is carried away, accompanied on his escorted passage to hell by the intensifying sounds of torment and strange chthonic storms leaking up from the underworld.

The two Dartmeet tracks make effective use of field recordings, the riverine flow a white noise bed from which other sounds burble up. For the Hungry Dart, throbbing low frequency oscillations hint at dangerous currents beneath the surface. It’s a pulsing, mesmeric drone, hypnotic and inviting. The simple, fatalistic rhyme, which voices an almost sacrificial acceptance of periodic drownings, offerings to the river spirits, gradually becomes distinct from the chaotic flow. It is intoned with dull lack of inflection, as if by the dead souls buried in their silted and pebbly graves, their hair wavering like waterweeds. More of the drowned join in as a call and response chorus builds up. This river’s sub-drone seems to shadow the repetitive, eddying melody, drawing enchanted listeners in to swell the siren choir.

Jan Coo and the Piskies begins with a chilling howl and startling piano pounding, the discordant disruptions of a winter storm. The background presence of the uncanny is heard in the murmurous voices breathing ‘Jan Coo’ at the threshold of audibility, and by the unevenly ascending melodic steps of rubbed wine-glass sine waves. Pure and ringingly sustained and with little initial attack, it is difficult to place their point of origin. They just appear, manifesting out of the blustering backdrop. Rushing water and birdsong locate the moment at which the boy in the story is drawn by the voices and disappears for ever. A metallic horror creak (a ‘terror twang’) perhaps denotes the opening of a heavy door. It is followed by silence, apart from the steady, constant rush of the river. It continues its progress, oblivious and uncaring as to the fate of the boy who has been unceremoniously plucked from the continuum of existence. It’s as if he simply never was.

Some of the pieces on DFTVI depict the more human aspects of Dartmoor life. Pub atmospheres are evoked for the Forest Inn at Hexworthy and the famously isolated and invariably winter snowbound Warren House Inn near Merripit. The Hexworthy track is a sound collage of voices and noises (coin rattle, glass clink and accordion wheeze) which recalls the studio goofing of Jefferson Airplane’s A Small Package of Value Will Come to you Shortly. The slight air of artificiality lent by exaggerated echo creates a sense of distance, suggesting that what we are hearing is a ghostly impression from a time long past. After the ‘time please’ bell has been rung, and a final wave of lusty laughter has passed around, the voices fade. We are left with small, wavering pings and glinting harmonics, the hubbub of human conversation reduced to tiny particulate sounds half heard in the suggestive crackle and hiss of the fireplace. A harmonium drone articulates the hum of silence in the early hours emptiness of the bar; a silence which contains echoes of antiquity and the accumulated imprints of convivial chatter and merry carousal. Flexible bass notes bent downwards emphasise the emptiness of the space, the quiet after the spectral gathering has been dispersed. They remind me of the springy bass lines in Krzysztof Komeda’s score for Roman Polanski’s 1967 Hammer Spoof The Fearless Vampire Killers.

The Warren House Inn track summons up the interior atmosphere in the heart of winter, with doors and windows battened down against the besieging ice and snow. The mordantly matter of fact tale told is of an innkeeper’s sudden death, and the practical preservation of his body by his wife and daughter in the salt pit with the freshly slaughtered pig. There he lies until the snows melt and civilisation can be reached once more. Free improv creak and scrape, along with tiptoeing pizzicato, conjures an atmosphere of tense suspension; the itchy, fidgety feel of being shut in for prolonged periods, until the small sounds of the building become amplified to overly sensitised perceptions. A sudden grunt of pain marks the landlord’s last gasp. Or perhaps it is the shocked reaction of the vicar upon seeing the body in its salted mortuary. The tone throughout is comically sinister, the Addams Family via Royston Vasey. The scrunch and pop of the fire with which we are left, with its clustered layers of short-lived sounds, is reminiscent of Concret PH, the dense piece of musique concrete which Iannis Xenakis built up from tiny edits of recordings of burning charcoal.

There is a flavour of low-key psych-folk to the track The Sow of Merripit Lake. A dour ditty is chanted against a simple repeated acoustic guitar figure. This is the mournful mantra of the pig and her litter who are said to wander the foggy night at certain times of year in search of whatever measly scraps of food might assuage their hunger. Hollow ocarina whistling in the background suggests the wind playing through the cracks of doors and windows. A contrast between domestic interior and wild exterior is established, which makes the synth mewls of the piglets in the outer cold all the more pitiful. The lament of the pigs is really the human cry of starving peasants down the ages, a symbolic litany for hard times in a harsh and unforgiving environment.

More lonely and mournful sounds are heard in the tales of Dolly Copplestone and the Snaily House, both of which centre on isolated cottages. Dolly Copplestone, with its deliquescent shower of crystalline notes and hymnal minor key organ, veers in tone between new age and holy minimalism. The falling windchime synth lines are like poor Dolly’s tears as she sits alone in her cottage, cut off from the world by the jealousy of her hard husband. The Snaily House conjures up the interior of a cottage in the woods inhabited by two women. Their solitude and lack of visible means of subsistence led to rumours of witchcraft. The more sad and prosaic truth, however, was that they had been living off a limited foraged diet of snails and slugs. We hear a melancholic tune, a fluting moogy melody played over clanking piano chords. It’s as if the women were entertaining themselves during the long, lonely days. Creaking doors mark their forays out into the woods to gather their food. The ceramic clatter of snail shells in pots and jars provides the signature sound of the house.

The final track of DFTVI is The Last Wolf, which refers to the belief that the last wolves in Britain were killed in the woods around Drewsteignton and Brimpts in the 1780s. Metallic clanks and sonic booms expressionistically represent the killing shots and the fall of discarded shells. Low key music in the background sounds like an electronic pibroch lament, a solemn epitaph for the eradication of a native species, and for the steady erosion of the idea of wilderness.

Only Timelessness, the film which the artists have made for the DFTVI set, transforms their field trips into filtered eyeflash rushes of abstract colour and pattern from which significant forms and locales emerge – trees, ferns, rivers, wild ponies, churches, inns and bridges. The curved back of the moorland horizon, with its granite tor vertebrae, is a recurrent presence, an outlined theatrical backdrop which instantly conveys the sense of place, even when reduced to semi-abstraction. The artists rightly draw a comparison in their notes with the visionary work of the American experimental film-maker Stan Brakhage. They are themselves occasionally glimpsed wandering about in that hazy, dreamlike drift which 8mm film can convey so well. It’s a mood which Derek Jarman evoked in his super 8 films; his Journey to Avebury might be seen as a point of comparison here. Some of the film stock was buried in soil and other organic matter from the moor and left for some time. The acids from the earth worked on the celluloid and produced the rich colours of chemical decay; purples, aquamarines and rusty reds of the sort which might film the surface of an acidic Dartmoor pool or mire.

Only Timelessness - the artists are present

The idea of incorporating the processes of decay into a work is a particularly resonant one, and has been used by a number of artists in recent years. This is partly due to the rapid progression of recording technologies, the resultant redundancy of old media, and the reflection on change and passing time which this occasions. Richard Skelton has buried instruments in Lancashire soil, the resultant imperfections once unearthed providing a record of natural transformation. William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops series uses the oxide erosion of magnetic tape as an integral part of the music, which becomes an almost philosophical meditation on time and its depredations. Tacita Dean’s film Kodak uses the last 16mm black and white stock ever produced at the firm’s factory in Chalon-sur-Saone. It thus stands, in the very substance of its medium, as a record of redundancy and ruin.

There appears to be a good deal of double projection in the film as digitally preserved on DVD. The corroded footage is layered over more concrete scenes shot on Dartmoor to create a kind of dual vision. Present time is juxtaposed with geological time (or maybe a heightened visionary time), the flickering patterns of long-term erosion and decay patterned over water, rock, moorland scrub and the structures of human habitation and cultivation. There is an elemental quality to the unearthed film, something of the air, earth and fire to the scratches, burns, folds and cracks. They make the texture of the film material evident, and make us aware of the act of seeing. Strands of bracken and nettle are pushed onto the lens to form plantform silhouettes. They remain for a fraction of a second, imprinting their complex outlines on the retina; part of the protean shifts of colour and pattern, of the ever-changing transformation of matter. The finger of the artist is sometimes seen poking them into place, again making us aware of the processes involved, of the retinal film of vision through which we perceive the world. The film of corroded film is like a veil between worlds, a glimpse of otherworldly vision. It hints at another dimension existing parallel to our own. The tales cited in DFTVI record the moments when it breaks through.

There are serendipitous conjunctions between image and music (a special condensed mix of the album accompanies the 30 minute film). Or perhaps that directing finger is at work again, creating hidden patterns of divine order. For the Copplestone track, vertical scratches visualise poor Dolly’s falling tears, etching them onto sky and landscape. The footage of Widecombe church is licked with chemical flame, a magical fire which blazes but doesn’t burn.

DFTVI is an artefact to be treasured. A map to the treasure, guidebook to the terrain of legend, catalyst for the inner eye of the imagination, visionary prompt and scholarly primer. But most of all, it is a thing of beauty, put together with great care, artistry and love. It’s a worthy memorial to the life, legacy and spirit of Theo Brown. And sufficient tribute to placate the piskies for a while.