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.

The Dragon Griaule Stories by Lucius Shepard

Lucius Shephard’s sequence of linked but discrete stories featuring the Dragon Griaule originated in a Clarion Writer’s Workshop in the early 1980s. Seeking inspiration, Shephard went outside, sat under a tree and smoked a leisurely, contemplative joint. As he relates in the 2013 Gollancz Fantasy Masterwork collection of the Griaule stories (which sadly can now be considered complete since Shephard’s death earlier this year) he was visited by the dope-genius revelation ‘big fucking dragon’. And Griaule is indeed gargantuan, the mother of all fantasy dragons, more a mythic alpine landscape of the terrifying sublime than a living creature. From this unpromising seed grew one of the greatest sustained works of fantasy literature of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

The Dragon Griaule is a central presence throughout the stories, but also a significant absence. It is almost wholly quiescent since a duel with a wizard in a past distant enough to have been obscured in the distorting haze of layered myth and history. The traditional elements of heroic fantasy are here reduced to remote memory, twice-told tales and rote superstitions. The dragon is a landscape feature – it’s almost as if it’s been read into the landscape, ridges, rock-faces and caverns given animal form and animist soul. It is a scaled mountain range with forests bristling its back, its head a craggy outcrop and its gaping mouth a dark cave leading down into the labyrinth of its internal system. This sluggishly vital underworld, along with its unique ecosystem, is extensively explored in the second story, The Scalehunter’s Beautiful Daughter. Shepard has a fondness for such vast, enclosed worlds. His novel The Golden is a vampire tale set in an immense, Gormenghastly castle whose endless spaces form a many-levelled gothic universe, towering and hermetic.

The attempts to understand Griaule and the power it continues to exert, and finally to destroy it completely, forms a subtext which runs beneath all the stories. It is subjected to scientific analysis, cultural criticism and historical interpretation, but remains ultimately elusive – the unanswerable question and insoluble enigma. These studies are expressed through extracts from biographies, histories, memoirs, religious texts and art critiques, all of which make clear the multivalent impact such a manifestation of the sublime, an invasion from the fantastic other, has upon the mundane world. The actuality of this astonishing being is never in doubt. But it is something which is difficult to define and quantify. Its presence in the world pushes at and warps the boundaries of the possible, mockingly redefining humanity’s understanding of the fundamental nature of the universe. In the extraordinary opening to the 2004 story Liar’s House, Shepard writes a Genesis myth in which the dragons are held to have flown through the first fires of creation. As a result, they embody a metaphysical duality, an uneasy division of soul from body, which reflects the true nature of Creation. Their souls surround them like a cloud and affect the material body from without. Shepard concludes that ‘of all their kind, none incarnated this principle more poignantly, more spectacularly, than did the Dragon Griaule’.

Griaule becomes a mutable metaphor .The externalised soul is commonly perceived as a baleful influence exerted by the spellbound leviathan. The lives of those living in its shadow are characterised by a dour heaviness of spirit. They are afflicted by it as by a dull, background headache which won’t go away. It is thought to impose its will indirectly, guiding men and women’s actions as part of some greater plan. The ends to which it is working remain obscure, but it is assumed that they are destructive, vengeful and fuelled by hatred. It is bent on reasserting its dominance and ultimately revivifying its earthbound carcass, breaking free from the long rhythms of geological time to which it has been bound. It is a terrifying god, then, requiring constant appeasement an obeisance. Or it is a violently oppressive political force, thought vanquished and banished; a dangerous ideology driven underground but regathering its strength and coherence. Its continuation as part of the local landscape symbolises in solid form the drag of the dead, anchoring weight of the historical moment. This is a history which has been transformed over time before ossifying into a delimiting set of beliefs and assumptions. It also represents the arguments for and against the idea of free will within the human soul. And it is, above all, an inescapable genius loci, an overpowering spirit of place. A landscape which lives and breathes, and whose great, golden eyes occasionally blink open and stare blankly out from the beneath the bony overhang of its occipital brow. All of these possible aspects, these potential meanings, are explored in the Griaule stories. Indeed, they are themes Shepard has iterated in much of his fiction over the years. But here, they find their perfect, readily adaptable context.

Religions based on the fear (and secret hope for) wrathful reprisal are built up around the dragon and its mythology. Artists are inspired and consumed by the spirit of place, and those who don’t consider themselves artists feel compelled to create images of the dragon, or to collect relics associated with it. Ideologies and power bases grow up around its most significant relic in the remarkable final story, The Skull. This returns Shepard to the politicised territory of Central America which he mapped out with searing ferocity in early stories such as Salvador, Mengele and in the novel Life During Wartime. Shepard’s rootless, drifting characters, lacking moral compass or inner resolve, are the natural vessels of Griaule’s subtle manipulations. Or is it their own weakness, their inability to locate a firm centre of self or to form a solid sense of purpose, to find meaning in the world, which leads them to fall into reflexive behaviours which are then blamed on an external, demiurge force. As is often the case with Shepard’s characters, a hard-nosed, world-weary attitude prevails. Corroded romanticism, sexual obsession and a recklessness born of ennui lead to self-destruction, but also occasionally to the possibility of the salvation which is subconsciously yearned for. This may or may not be found in The Skull, which remains necessarily ambiguous. It is a political fantasy of extraordinary power and moral force. The spirit of Griaule becomes the template for all oppressive dictatorships, his dissipation into myth and the associated ideologies which the matter of myth breeds allowing for his rebirth in other forms. As Snow, the protagonist of The Skull, says about Jefe, the charismatic leader of the Temalaguan PVO (Party of Organised Violence) who is the reincarnated spirit of Griaule, ‘that prissy little fuck’s going to make Hitler seem like a day at the beach’.

In all the stories, the awe-inspiring, passively aggressive presence of Griaule is seen as an intrusion into the world, an invasion of the fantastic. This is a fantasy series in which the singular, dominant fantastic element represents control and oppressive, limiting power. As such, it is an anti-escapist fantasy, a quality it shares with M.John Harrison’s Viriconium tales. Whatever vague anti-heroism is to be found in Shepard’s Griaule stories is aimed at destroying the dragon. The erasure of the fantastic from the world, thinning its possibilities and reducing it to the mundane, is the ultimate goal. Fantasy, and the need for escape which it feeds, can be a dangerous force. It can breed monsters which grow in size and influence until they control our lives without our even being consciously aware of it. Perhaps it is significant that the dragon is finally rendered into a ruinous rubble by the power of art. We see how the obsessive, all-consuming art of the very first story, The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule, comes to fruition many years later. Representing the monstrous, detailing the mechanisms of its power and bringing its depredations to light can, incrementally over time, lead to its destruction. The Griaule stories are a handbook to the dispelling of damaging fantasy, to killing the dragons in the unwary mind and in the hard, unforgiving world. Their cynical surface is a necessary part of the process of dis-illusionment. What they ultimately offer is fantasy in the service of the real.

The Spectral Book of Horror

The Spectral Book of Horror is an instantly attractive volume. The cover is graced by a gorgeous painting by Vincent Chong showing two boys and a girl standing against a cracked and peeling wall, illuminated by a sickly yellow light. The girl clutches a standard issue creepy, porcelain-faced doll to her chest, whilst a large, bloodied knife hangs loosely from the hand of one of the boys. They wear animal, skull and Cthulhoid masks, and cast monstrous and devilish shadows, projections of their dark animas. It looks as if they are preparing to enact some ritual invocation, or are taking a break from one which is in progress. An invocation designed to raise those shadowy outlines in bodily form. Can we judge the book by this cover? To a certain extent, yes. It suggests that the terrors within will be of a largely domestic variety, and that whatever supernatural elements are present won’t be made overtly manifest. Rather they will be half-glimpsed, distorted shapes momentarily caught in the periphery of vision, or wraiths suggestively coalescing from the darkness in the farthest corner of the room. There may also be hauntings from the spectres of the intense childhood imagination which are never wholly exorcised, even if they are eclipsed by adult preoccupations. Both of these presumptions prove to be accurate.

The introduction by the collection’s editor, Mark Morris, recalls the days of the Pan, Fontana and Armada paperbacks of the 70s; a halcyon period of plenty for the short story in all the genres of the fantastic. These collections, the Pan Books of Horror Stories in particular, mixed old classics of terror and the supernatural with modern nasties, contes crueles which were sometimes little more than set-ups for gruesome fates, described with lingering relish. The Pan series was edited by Herbert van Thal, a man with a name eminently suited for the task. It looked great on the covers, and conjured an image of a Peter Cushing Van Helsing type, a smoking-jacketed connoisseur of the grim and ghoulish commenting urbanely from his walnut-panelled, book-lined study whilst drawing on an ornately curving pipe. Morris fondly summons up a childhood picture of reading torchlight under the covers on stormy winter nights, a memory which invites smiling nods of collective recognition. It envelops these anthologies in a warm, blurry haze of period nostalgia, and posits them as a strange form of comfort literature. My experience was rather different. The bleached photographic covers disturbed me, particularly the one with the half-buried head the colour of a swede, half-human, half-root vegetable. There were a couple of nasty stories which gave me bad dreams for a good many nights, and which I tried vainly to cleanse from my mind.

Morris seems to have the long-running Pan Books of Horror in mind when voices the hope that the Spectral Book of Horror may be the first in a regular series. Times have changed since van Thal churned out his increasingly tawdry selections, however. Newsagents no longer have revolving wire racks of mass-market paperbacks for people to pick up as casually as the daily paper. The market for short stories has shrunk drastically, spurious notions of value for money leading to ever-more bloated mega-novels, the increased wordage designed chiefly to expand the breadth of the spine and occupy a more prominent proportion of the display shelf. Concision is a largely lost novelistic art, and the short story is an increasingly rarefied and endangered species, protected by a few dedicated conservationists. Gene Wolfe wryly commented on the situation back in 1989 when he actually entitled his latest short story collection Endangered Species. A regular anthology from Spectral Press would by hugely welcome, then.

I think the first Spectral Book of Horror is a bit classier than the Pan books, however. Firstly, there’s that nightmarishly beautiful cover of everyday Lovecraftian terror. True, there are a few stories within which might have taken their festering place within the musty Pan covers. Anecdotal squibs like Tom Fletcher’s Slape, Michael Marshall Smith’s Stolen Kisses and the initial stages of Brian Hodge’s Cures for a Sickened World, which are essentially set-ups for gross pay-offs. All they need is an afterword from a cackling, corpse-faced crypt keeper cracking off-colour quips to complete the feel of an EC comics vignette. The other stories are far more substantial, however, with a refreshing lack of hastily scrawled tableaux of intricately agonising death (or worse). These stories are, dare I say it, more literary. They veer towards what was once defined as dark fantasy in an attempt to distinguish it from the splatter of the more visceral body horror emerging in the 1980s.

The majority of the writers are British, and the settings of their stories largely portray a determinedly de-romanticised view of the country. The stories of M.John Harrison and Robert Aickman, set in the dank, dilapidated no-spaces of unglamorous provincial towns and cities, are a touchpoint here; Harrison’s Egnaro, A Young Man’s Guide to Viriconium, The Incalling and his novel The Course of the Heart in particular. So too is the clammily creepy episode from the Amicus portmanteau film From Beyond the Grave in which Ian Bannern’s frustrated city commuter visits the drab home of ex-serviceman Donald Pleasance, from whom he has been buying matches, and meets his eerie, ghostly daughter (played by Pleasance’s actual daughter, Angela). This certainly came to my mind when reading Helen Marshall’s Funeral Rites, in which a Canadian post-grad student comes to lodge at the dingy Oxford house of the morose Mrs Moreland and her two palled, hostile nieces.

The Spectral Book of Horror is bookended by two well-known and highly respected genre writers, Ramsey Campbell and Stephen Volk. Volk’s novelette Whitstable, an affecting tribute to Peter Cushing in the form of a fictional portrait of the actor in his later years, some time after the death of his beloved wife Helen, was published by Spectral Press to great acclaim last year. There is a judicious mix of well-established writers and new voices (new to me, at least) throughout. I was particularly pleased to read something new by Lisa Tuttle, a writer familiar to me from her superb 1986 collection A Nest of Nightmares, along with subsequent novels and stories. Other familiar names include Robert Shearman (who re-introduced the Daleks to the revamped Doctor Who, and is a particularly fine exponent of the short story), Steve Rasnic Tem, Nicholas Royle (forming a connection with the early days of Interzone, and thereby indirectly with New Worlds, whose experimentalism it initially carried on), Conrad Williams, Michael Marshall Smith and Stephen Laws. But newer or less established writers provide material of equal power and accomplishment here. The Spectral Book of Horror serves a vital (and increasingly rare) function in this respect, providing new stories from familiar names, which will attract the attention of the discerning genre reader, whilst also building a nurturing environment in which a fresh generation of talent can be fostered.

Ramsey Campbell’s story On The Tour opens the collection and to a great extent sets the tone. Its portrait of Stu Stewart, former drummer of Merseybeat also-rans The Scousers, finds Campbell back on home, Liverpudlian territory. Stewart’s is a life eked out on the thin, dusty sustenance of worn and threadbare dreams, confined within the grooves of the record stacked amongst the seldom-browsed LPs of Vin’s Vintage Vinyl, the shop where he works. The mirthless humour of the exchanges he has with his boss Vin, dialogue underscored by indirect power play, together with the sense of a life staged as an increasingly desperate performance for an imaginary audience (the rock nostalgia tour bus which purportedly includes his house on its programmed route) puts this in the absurdist territory of Pinter and Beckett. The horror here is of mental breakdown, of sustaining illusions being dispelled. We are caught unsparingly within the subjective viewpoint of a life and a mind unravelling, following Stu’s steadily accelerating descent. The ironic juxtaposition of this narrative perspective with our comprehension of its increasing illogic and delusory disconnection from the real is reminiscent of the psychological sketches of the inner life Katherine Mansfield drew in her short stories. Campbell’s subtle direction of events towards a point where they go very badly out of control is what pushes this in the realm of horror, although the terrain is not established with any obvious generic markers. The suggestive final paragraph is a classic case of allowing the reader’s imagination to fill in detail, creating manifold horrors from the shadowy substance of their own fears.

Further excursions into the absurd can be found in John Llewellyn Probert’s The Life Inspector, in which the right to continued existence is weighed up according to the hermetic illogic of a relentless and briskly efficient bureaucrat. Nicholas Royle’s This Video Does Not Exist is a self-interrogating story, pitching a surrealist piece of absurdism involving a man who wakes up to find his head is no longer visible in any reflections against real world horrors read about in the papers and seen online and in the news in which people genuinely lose their heads. National and international events mirror each other, and the whole world seems to have descended into absurd drama, staged for a ready audience plugged into diverse media. In the face of this new, terrifying reality in which globalised, digital technology goes hand in hand with barbarous savagery, the main character’s personal crisis of identity comes to seem like an indulgence, and the story ends abruptly with his inner narrative being abandoned. The existential headless man scenario might be seen as typical of Royle’s thematic and stylistic territory, and as such there’s an element of auto-criticism here. I can imagine the story’s initial conceit being inspired by a Magritte painting, just as his novel Saxophone Dreams was inspired by the surrealist paintings of Paul Delvaux. Indeed, Magritte’s painting La Reproduction Interdite (Not to be Reproduced), depicting a man looking in a mirror which reflects the perspective we see of the back of his head, is described in the story, suggesting a probable point of inspiration. It was also used in the 1974 film Un Homme Que Dort (A Man Asleep), based on a short novel by absurdist writer Georges Perec, who also worked on the adaptation. This tale of existential drift and disappearance in Paris has definite affinities with Royle’s work (as well as dovetailing with his cinephile side), and I wouldn’t be surprised if he was familiar with it.

Magritte - La Reproduction Interdite

One of the pleasures of an anthology which has no explicit linking theme or subject lies in creating your own connections. Certain similarities or correspondences reveal themselves, and conspicuous differences in style and approach also become apparent. The subjective realism which Campbell establishes is further explored by a number of writers here. The fear of aging, and the attendant sense of life’s possibilities diminishing - of watching your life slide out of view, as Jarvis Cocker put it – is present in Michael Marshall Smith’s Stolen Kisses, Angela Slatter’s The October Widow, Conrad Williams’ The Devil’s Interval, Nicholas Royle’s This Video Does Not Exist and Steve Rasnic Tem’s The Night Doctor. A number of stories also feature lonely characters who are disconnected from society, for whom the prospect of mental disintegration is an everpresent and very real terror. Nora Higgins, the socially withdrawn protagonist of Helen Marshall’s Funeral Rites, conspires in her own fate, almost welcoming the oblivion of its cold embrace. Cecil Davis, in Angela Slatter’s The October Widow, is an aging, isolated character leading an enervated, bare bones life dedicated with van Helsing purity of purpose to the pursuit of a Pagan seasonal spirit, one of whose sacrificial victims was his son. The central relationship of the protagonist of Conrad Williams’ The Devil’s Interval, an aimless office drifter, is with his guitar, which becomes a dangerously uncontrolled channel for his suppressed emotions and banked up anger. And Ramsey Campbell’s Stu Stewart, trapped in a moment of eternally recycled nostalgia, is another aging loner cut adrift from the here and now.

Family life is another common thread, but few comforts are offered to counterbalance the hollow loneliness and mentally fraying isolation found elsewhere. Instead, it is shown at its most claustrophobic and controlling, swallowing up and absorbing individual identity and endeavour. This is the family of knotty Freudian entanglements, the unspoken subterranean roots dug up and exposed to the withering light. In Gary McMahon’s Dull Fire, the couple tentatively beginning a relationship carry the ghosts of their abusive mother and father with them on their rootless travels. The story contains a sentence which encompasses the generally downbeat tone of the collection, a Philip Marlowe-esque observation that a rundown hotel room is ‘the kind of place lonely suicides might come to end their miserable days’. It is, instead, the place where the protagonists try to start something which will ease their loneliness and misery. Robert Shearman’s Carry Within Some Sliver of Me (a poetic title with echoes of Ray Bradbury and Harlan Ellison) is full-on Freudian horror, describing a monstrous, devouring mother with repulsive literalness. As with McMahon’s story (with its equally monstrous father), the fear (or dull acceptance) of inheritance, of growing into the monstrous parent, is foremost. Monstrous fathers also turn up in Rio Youers’ Outside Heavenly and (to a lesser extent) Stephen Volks’ Newspaper Heart, while Helen Marshall’s Funeral Rites has a monstrous mother-in-law by proxy.

South coast modernism - the De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill

Alison Moore’s Eastmouth is about being absorbed into someone else’s close-knit family, and the anxiety of the isolated individual over loss of self-identity. The protagonist, Sonia, sees her dreams of a showbiz life wither and fade, reduced to the antediluvian end of the pier attractions of a southern seaside town caught forever in a mid-century stasis. The description of a ‘modernist pre-war building’ suggests that Moore may have had Bexhill in mind. The amazing De la Warr Pavillion, built on the seafront in 1935, is one of England’s finest buildings in the modernist International Style. It’s actually been recently restored to its former glory in a 2005 refurbishment and hosts a fine programme of art exhibitions and concerts. But I know what Moore has in mind – the tattered, dilapidated remains of pre-war utopian dreams. The story contains a sentence which perhaps contains the purest distillation of horror in the whole collection, when the man whom Sonia seems fated to marry boldly declares that Cannon and Ball, who are appearing at the theatre, are his favourite act of all time. She should have run screaming at that point. Moore’s evocation of out of season melancholy and grubby memories of childhood excursions to the seaside exemplify the seedy scenarios of a good many of the stories in the collection. It’s a place where ‘nothing changes’, where you are stared at by ‘dead-eyed gulls’ and the front is weakly illuminated by ‘sunlight the colour of weak urine’. An entropic environment redolent of personal and national inertia and decay. The view of the family as an oppressive, constraining force is here extended to the whole town; a closed community monomind, just a few shambling steps away from agglomerating to become a gesticulating zombie horde. There’s something a little reminiscent of an English variant on Shirley Jackson’s classic short story The Lottery here.

Ironically, the only positive take on the family as a supportive, encouraging unit is offered in Stephen Laws’ Slista; and the family here is monstrous, murderous and possibly not even human. Alison Littlewood’s story The Dog’s Home plays on the reluctant obligations and financial wheedling attendant upon relations with more indirect, spiky branches of the family tree. It’s also one of a number of stories whose first person narrative voice gives a misleading initial impression of balance and reason. Scary Aunt Rose is the dragon of the family, whose thorny harshness is tolerated and indulged in the hope of charming or inheriting a share of her hoarded wealth from her. Her hardness in the face of the family’s penury is contrasted with the unconditional love and loyalty of her dog. This dog becomes the emotional focus in a tale of betrayal and cruelty. Again, it is madness, the loss of rational control, which is seen as the ultimate horror here.

The family stories culminate in Stephen Volk’s Newspaper Heart, the Spectral Book of Horror’s final tale, a powerful piece firmly rooted in a specific time and place (October 1970 in the Welsh Valleys). As he did in his intense scripts for the Afterlife series, Volk unearths the fears inherent in family life, bringing them to life and examining them unflinchingly but with great compassion and empathy. The story is partly a variant on the creepy ventriloquist’s dummy tale, the dummy in this case being a baby-faced bonfire night guy rather than a tux-clad wooden-head with fixed grin and ruddy cheeks. It’s also a descendant of the old changeling folk tales, an acknowledgement of the ancient roots of late October and early November fire festivals. The horror elements here are a way of exploring any number of emotional and psychological subcurrents within the family. Parental anxiety over the child’s safety; the effect of economic depression on a marriage, and of marital drift on a child’s mental stability; the slowly corrosive effects of class-selfconsciousness and division; the thin boundaries between childhood and adulthood, with the marital home compared with the school playground; and a mother’s guilt at the unutterable suspicion that they might not love their child as much as they’re supposed to – or even that they might wish that they’d never had them. The familiar litany of period TV favourites are intoned (Blue Peter with Val, John and Peter, the Vision On gallery music), along with the more conservative end of the pop spectrum (Elvis, Mary Hopkins and Smokey Robinson). But rather than a prompt for nostalgia, these are used more to suggest stultifying routine and narrow limitations. This counter-nostalgia is re-enforced by the simultaneous citation of news stories about Vietnam, Biafra and Northern Ireland. The mention of the Mexico 70 World Cup also summons up retrospective feelings of disappointment, an ‘end of the 60s’ come down. Newspaper Heart demonstrates just how multi-layered and complex the short story form can be, with a dense pattern of allusion, metaphor and symbolism combining to crate potently suggestive and multivalent meanings. Importantly for a horror story, it’s also very scary, with a few of those moments of chill frisson which masters of the supernatural expertly engender. This is undoubtedly one of the highlights of the collection, and I can see why it was chosen as the closing story.

Two authors provide variations on the theme of the performer becoming confused with their signature stage or screen role, either in their own minds or that of their fans. Brian Hodge’s Cures for a Sickened World is a third story of warped and delusory rock dreaming, of the spurious power which its self-mythologisation confers, to add to Ramsey Campbell’s On the Tour and Conrad Williams’ The Devil’s Interval. It begins as a sick revenge on the critic tale, with a snide, destructively negative online reviewer’s hyperbolic figures of speech, used comparatively to delineate what he’d prefer to do rather than listen to the music of a costumed shock metal band called Balrog, taken at face value by its lead singer, Ghast (aka Tomas Lundvall). Cue Saw-like punishments designed s morally corrective lessons. The story develops beyond such limited, mechanical parameters, however, going on to explore notions of moral culpability, the relative nature of evil, the delicate balance between a performer’s stage persona and his or her real self, and the corrupting effect of the urge to use shock-tactics to gain attention in a media-saturated world.

The disjuncture between real and media selves is also the subject of Lisa Tuttle’s alliteratively titled Something Sinister in Sunlight. It features an English actor, Anson, who has become shackled to the role of a serial killer called Cassius Crittender, a character who has become increasingly charismatic as his popularity flourishes, gradually completing the transformation from cold-blooded psychopath to agonised romantic. It’s a moral metamorphosis which many fictional monsters undergo as they become familiar to the point of becoming de-fanged and -clawed. Now it’s the turn of the mythologised serial killer, that very modern monster, to be romanticised, as we have seen in the later Hannibal films and the TV series Dexter; the good serial killer thwarting the bad. Tuttle’s story plays upon this romanticisation and all that it implies – the old connection between sex and death familiar from Freud and French decadent writers and poets. The fact that Cassius’ attraction is mainly felt by women whereas Anson is gay adds another level of play-acting complication between performer, role and obsessive viewer. When Anson accepts an invitation to dinner at a female fan’s house, the tensions which these layers of illusion create come to the surface, with alarming results. Tuttle’s stranding of an English actor in LA in this role is a wry comment on the way that British stage gravitas translates into villainy in Hollywood. There’s another allusion to the weakness of the English sun. But whilst it was a symbol of provincial dullness in Alison Moore’s story Eastmouth, a dim spot from which the main character dreamed of escaping, heading for the bright lights of America, for Anson the opposite is the case. He yearns to return home to his partner, to fly away from limiting fame and from the bleached out light of California to get back to the grey, rain-heavy skies of Blighty. It’s a neat reversal of the more common location of Hollywood as the locus of dreams of escape.

Two stories make play with language to create narrative perspectives removed from the norm. The first person narrative of The Slista by Stephen Laws is written in a phonetic language whose stunted words suggest a devolved version of our world. The basement dwelling family hints at first at a post-apocalyptic scenario, with the simplified spelling similar to that in Russell Hoban’s novel Riddley Walker. But is soon becomes apparent that whoever is speaking in this strange, slurred tongue is part of a group of shadowy wainscot dwellers looking out on the contemporary world from the spaces in between. The Book and the Ring by Reggie Oliver is written in formal Elizabethan English, the language conveying historical antiquity with first person immediacy. It reminded me of the 16th century narrative of David I Masson’s 1965 tale A Two Timer, first published in New Worlds. The Book and the Ring is an M.R.Jamesian tale of ancient books uncovered during scholastic researches in ecclesiastical surrounds which bring to light strange and troubling stories of long-buried occult encounters. The devil which is summoned by the Elizabethan composer Jeremiah Starcky from the usual tome of dangerous lore acquired from a local witch takes the standard passive aggressive Satanic approach of giving human greed, lust and attendant paranoia space to fashion their own irrevocable damnation. It’s a tale told with great gusto, taking particular delight in period cursing and swearing. With its full panoply of witches, devils, books of the damned and souls in mortal supernatural peril, this is one of the most purely pleasurable stories in the collection.

Oliver’s story is atypical in its traditionalism. The Spectral Book of Horror withholds many of the traditional pleasures of the genre. The classic gothic bestiary is extinct here, perhaps because it currently thrives in terrain purists disdain. There are few manifestations of the supernatural or intrusions of the exobiological (ghosts and monsters). And what devils do appear are at least partly demons of the mind. The writers mine the dark caverns of the human spirit for their fears and terrors. Newborn monsters are present at the edges of some tales, however. The torturous, vampiric relationship between rock star and journalistic parasite in Cures for a Sickened World gives birth to a new breed of demon, waiting in the shadows to be fully defined by human appetites. And the title creature of Steve Rasnic Tem’s The Night Doctor is a spectral figure with an inhuman, faceless head and a dark, leathery bag who appears when you are sleeping to offer dubious cures which may ultimately be worse than the illness itself. It’s an embodiment of fears of aging, physical decline and death, either of oneself or of those one loves.

Older forces are summoned up in Angela Slatter’s The October Widow and Rio Youers’ Outside Heavenly. Slatter’s tale is a piece of modern Pagan horror, bringing sesasonal sacrifices into the contemporary world. Inevitably, there are some echoes of The Wicker Man here. Very faint ones, though, perhaps more from its endless citation as a point of comparison. Outside Heavenly is a piece of Midwestern gothic which also incorporates elements of the police procedural. Police Chief John Peck is an inadvertent occult cop, as opposed to the more traditional occult detectives such as Algernon Blackwood’s John Silence and William Hope Hodgson’s Thomas Carnacki. Demonic energies have destroyed a monstrous father with grim thoroughness. The devil here is a wish fulfilling avenger, but one which also represents the psychological (or even spiritual) damage the abused offspring inherits from the abuser, even (or especially) after they are caught and punished. It’s to Youers’ credit that he doesn’t pander to the easy release of the revenge fantasy here. The evidence which the Police Chief eventually uncovers is akin to the folktales of Lucifer over Lancashire – burning hoofprints left in a huge striding trail across the landscape.

This is a fine start for the Spectral Book of Horror. The stories tend towards the darker end of the spectrum, and the moral certainties of older gothic horror forms have totally disappeared. It makes for an uneasy read at times, perhaps even connecting with personal anxieties to disconcerting effect. This is not horror as escapist fantasy, but horror facing the fears and uncertainties of the modern age, and of the modern, embattled psyche. By thus confronting them, we can go some way towards dispelling, or at least controlling them. Let us hope that Mark Morris’ and Spectral’s plans for further volumes come to fruition, and that we are offered further caustic, homeopathic balms for our unconscious terrors.

Ben and Winifred Nicholson: Art and Life 1920-1931 at Ways With Words, Dartington.

Jovan Nicholson gave a talk about his grandparents Winifred and Ben Nicholson as part of the Dartington Ways With Words Festival in July this year. He has curated an exhibition of their work, Art and Life 1920-1931, which is currently on display at the Dulwich Pictuer Gallery in London. The show also incorporates three other artists with whom the Nicholsons were close in the 1920s and early 30s: Christopher Wood, Alfred Wallis and William State Murray. Nicholson was particularly enthusiastic about his inclusion of the latter. He hopes that this renewed exposure will go some way towards reviving the reputation of a potter whom he feels was one of the finest exponents of the art in Britain in the twentieth century, quite the equal of his contemporary Bernard Leach.

Ben and Winifred Nicholson in 1923

Nicholson’s approach to his subjects in the exhibition and the accompanying book is a comparitive one, and this was the approach he took in the talk as well. He set particular works alongside each other, and thereby illustrated ho the artists influenced and inspired one another. They sometimes painted or drew the same landscapes in their own individual manner, initial similarities gradually diverging significantly as they established their signature styles and outlooks. Ben’s pencil sketch and Winifred’s watercolour of a rural hillside scene at Tippacott in Devon, where they went in 1920 just before their marriage (in fact, they got engaged during this trip), show a congruent, straightforwardly representational approach to the view. Trees, hedgerows and hillcrest contours are all present and relatively proportional in both pictures. At this formative point in their artistic development, their way of seeing the world was largely convergent. Later, and speaking in a broadly general sense. Jovan outlined the way in which their work would diverge: Winifred would concentrate more on colour, and Ben on form.

Winifred found her metier early on, painting some of her first threshold flowers in 1921, the painting Polyanthus and Cineraria being a good example. Its bright contrasts pointed to her future explorations of colour combinations, whilst the undulant brushstroke of blues above the brown flowers on the left side of the vase anticipates in abbreviated form the exuberant, canvas wide waves of her 1928 St Ives painting Boat on a Stormy Sea. Jovan drew attention to the metaphysical and symbolic elements of Winifred’s principal subject matter. The division between domestic interior and exterior landscape, with the nurtured blend of floral colours (and the stable forms of the vases, jugs or glasses from which they emerge) placed in between, represent the conscious act of seeing, of intense, aware vision.

Winifred's Chelsea roofscape on the cover of Christopher Andreae's book

Ben took longer to explore and develop his feel for austere, simplified form, which eventually led him towards total abstraction. An early abstract painting from 1924 was shown here, but it was a tentative experiment which didn’t immediately lead anywhere. It was held back and worked on over a long period of time. It derived from a collage, and the ragged edges and superimposed rectilinear shapes were faithfully reproduced; in its own way, a piece of representational art. Jovan’s comparison with Winifred’s window-framed 1925 roofscape, Kings Road, Chelsea, painted from the same Chelsea studio in which this work was created, led you to see a similar arrangement of chimneys, brickwork, sloping roofs and squares of sky in Ben’s abstract.

Slides were shown in carefully chosen pairs, projected onto the white plaster wall of Dartington Hall, above the large mouth of the fireplace. This provided an interesting and generally highly appropriate additional element of medieval texture. Ben Nicholson’s 1925 still life Jamaique was shown alongside Winifred’s Flowers in a Glass Jar from the same year. It amply served to demonstrate how far they had diverged in their approaches by this point. But Jovan pointed out the clear correlation between the pink pentagonal base on which Ben set his flattened objects and the pink which Winifred used for the principal flowers in her composition. William Staite Murray’s elegantly shaped bowls, pots and vases with their boldly imaginative patterning and painted designs, and the unconventionally shaped boards which Alfred Wallis used, which often guided the compositional form of his paintings, were shown to have inspired Ben to be daring and intuitive in his own explorations of form. His instinct towards reduction, a preference for simplicity and a stripping away of extraneous detail, was encouraged by his exposure to Wallis’ work. The extent to which he began following through on this instinct was seen in the two drawings of the same Cumberland landscape made by Ben and Christopher Wood on a sketching trip they made together in 1928. Wood’s depiction of the scene is full, depicting all the elements he saw before him: outlined trees, a farmhouse, a river, a shaded hillside horizon line and a chimney smoke haze. It pointed to a richly detailed landscape which might later be produced. Ben, on the other hand, leaves wide expanses of empty space, with a few boldly outlined trees scattered singly or in tight clusters and the outline of the River Irthing sharply curving across the flattened foreground. The horizon is marked by a single lollipop-shaped tree, a darkly shaded marker beacon. The farmhouse has completely vanished, surplus to compositional requirements. Ben was now transforming what he saw to conform with his own rigorous artistic vision.

Jake and Kate on the Isle of Wight - Winifred Nicholson

Jovan talked about the work rather than the lives of his grandparents. Personal touches did come through, however. He confessed that he found it almost impossible to rad the recriminating letters they wrote to each other when the marriage was falling apart in the early 30s. Winifred’s 1931-2 painting Jake and Kate on the Isle of Wight, depicting two of their three children sitting at the table of the house she had rented at Fishbourne for the winter, dates from the period of their separation, after Ben had gone to live with Barbara Hepworth. Jake and Kate wear party hats, which suggests it might be Christmas. But as Jovan pointed out, they look bewildered and lost rather than excited. The disjuncture between the light colours and carnival hats and the children’s sombre faces is very poignant. Jovan evidently felt an empathetic connection with them as he described their expressions. ‘The one on the left is my father’ he added, almost incidentally.

He also showed his steel when a questioner at the end implied that there might have been an element of exploitation in Ben’s relationship with Alfred Wallis, and that he made a healthy profit from selling his paintings on to London dealers. Jovan took a deep breath before replying, paused significantly and acidly thanked the person in question for giving him the opportunity to put such myths to rest, which he proceeded to do with thoroughness and conviction. His grandfather’s honour was vigorously defended, and Wallis depicted as a sharp, highly self-aware individual. Not the sort to allow themselves to be exploited by anyone. He firmly stated that he had found no evidence of Ben ever selling any of the Wallis paintings that he had bought. Rather, he donated a good many to a wide variety of galleries and museums. This, together with his tireless promotion of Wallis’ work, raised (and indeed initially created) Wallis’ profile in the eyes of the metropolitan art world, and brought people to his door in St Ives, generating many commissions. For this, he was vocally grateful, and Jovan told us that he loved the attention which he received as a result.

He also countered the general perception that Ben could be doctrinaire and hardline in his promulgation of the artistic school of thought he happened to favour, his work ascetic and forbidding as a result. He emphasised the humour he found in his work. The trompe l’oeil play with perspective in his 1925 Still Life With Jug, Mugs, Cup and Goblet, for example, the white goblet on the left being simultaneously in front of and behind the adjacent slate grey vase. His animals display a certain childlike delight, too. Jovan found this sense of ‘fun’ in Wallis’ work, as well. The parallel array of pyramidal sails and icebergs in Schooner and Icebergs (1928) was highlighted as an example of Wallis’ lightness and humour.

Poster for the Kettle's Yard showing of Art and Life, with Ben Nicholson's Jamaique

He was also fulsome in his praise for Jim Ede, the former Tate Gallery curator who set up home in four converted cottages in Kettles Yard, Cambridge in the 50s. He was also a long-term supporter of Wallis, and of Ben and Winifred. Kettles Yard housed a good number of their works which he had bought for his own collection. It still does to this day, as a wonderfully atmospheric house and gallery, the paintings and drawings taking their place amongst aesthetically arranged domestic objects and fittings (Wallises in the bathroom, Nicholsons above the bed). His use of the familiar diminutive ‘Kit’ when referring to Christopher Wood suggested a feeling of personal connection here, too.

Wood’s ravishingly sensual portrait of the aristocratic Russian émigré Frosca Munster, The Blue Necklace (1928) paints a picture of an emotionally complex man, as Jovan explained. Letters between the two, and from Winifred to Frosca, made the depths of Kit’s feeling for her plain. Her departure from Cornwall, and the British Isles, was almost certainly precipitated by her becoming pregnant by him, and he was left bereft by her sudden absence from his life. His primarily gay sexuality was frankly expressed in the 1930 interior Nude Boy in a Bedroom, which Jovan also showed us. It has a casual, relaxed sense of intimacy, with the subject half-turned away from our (and the artist’s) view as he dries himself with a towel. Picture cards are scattered on the bed as if they’d just been studied (the boy is looking at another small reproduction on the wall) and the shutters are half closed, letting in light whilst maintaining a sense of a private domestic world.

Christopher Wood - Zebra and Parachute

Jovan showed us the last painting Wood finished before his suicide in 1930, Zebra and Parachute. The stark, white lines and masses of the modernist architecture in front of which the passive body of the zebra is posed have echoes of the white reliefs which Ben would produce in the mid-30s. They also anticipate Berthold Lubetkin’s introduction of European International Style modernism to London Zoo (and England) in 1933-4 via the gorilla house and penguin pool he designed for Tecton. But the hanged man limply suspended beneath the bright colours of the parachute in the background, along with the incongruously exotic creature in the foreground, hint at a possible turn towards surrealism belying the ascetic modernist backdrop. This would certainly have put him at artistic odds with Ben, widening the personal rift which his heavy use of opium had already opened up.

The period whose end was so tragically and drastically underlined by Wood’s death, and soon after by the break up of the Nicholsons’ marriage, saw the group of friends and compatriots who had been so close in the 1920s drift apart both personally and in terms of artistic style and intent. But during that intense decade during which they shared each other’s thoughts, homes and paints, they left a lasting mark on each other which continued to make itself felt in their work. The 20s were the years in which the seeds were sown, and the enriching cross-fertilisation took place. Jovan Nicholson’s talk, his book and the exhibition which he has curated ably and definitively traces the streams of influence and inspiration which flowed between them, and which kept them invisibly connected throughout their lives, no matter how far their outlook diverged, or how strongly their opinions were expressed. Some things just can’t be broken.

Theo Brown and the Folklore of Dartmoor - Devon Folklore Tapes Live at the Phoenix, Exeter

The Devon Folklore Tapes VI release Theo Brown and the Folklore of Dartmoor was brought to life in the Phoenix, Exeter last week, not far away from the terrain from which it drew visual, aural and even biological material. The sounds on the DVD, CD, vinyl singles or cassette (the Folklore Tapes folk are catholic in their use of media) are often ambiguous, both spatially and in terms of identifiable sources. The prospect of discovering how they went about building this soundscape, which invokes both the Dartmoor environment and the haunted spectres, legendary beasts and fey creatures which are conjured from it, and how they would go about projecting it into a small hall rather than a living room or headphone-space was an intriguing and enticing one.

N.Racker - with cover image taken from Juraj Herz's 1969 film The Cremator

First up was N.Racker, aka Sam McLoughlin of Sam and the Plants renown, an old Folklore Tapes compatriot. I’d previously come across him at the late lamented LLAMA (Lynton and Lynmouth Arts and Music Association) festival, where he was utterly absorbed in striking coiled springs suspended from the frame of the small marquee tent which canopied his antediluvian electronic equipment. There seemed to be a good deal of wooded casing, and it looked as if it might have been salvaged from a WW2 radio communications HQ in the post-war period. This produced a pleasing visual analogue to the springy, metallically glinting radiophonic sounds he coaxed from his hands-on box of tricks. It was music for crackling campfires or starlit summer skies streaked with the occasional meteorite trail.

Tonight, he explored darker realms, and kept the lights down low. He sat in the midst of a modest array of small synths, electronic circuitry and home-made or modified instrumentation, lit only by the green glow which casts its heart of the oakwood radiance through a hexagonal box (a defunct bass drum?) at the front of which a dessicated frond of bracken was silhouetted. Sam scraped and struck and plucked whatever came to hand: zithers, lyres whose strings were metallic rods embedded in a length of wood (Les Sculptures Sonores and Harry Bertoia came to mind here), and an electric hand fan whose blades served as whirling, whirring plectrums. Everything seemed to be mic’d, so an object dropped to the ground produced a clangourous thump. This could then be looped and incorporated into the organically expanding soundmass.

There was a definite improvisatory, aleatoric feel to the proceedings, with chance and accident welcomed as cues and ideas for intuitively exploring new directions. The vaguely ominous ambience suggested supernatural scenarios, with synth lines brewing up John Carpenteresque Fogs. Sam even essayed the dextrous Rick Wakeman stunt of playing two instruments simultaneously, arms bridging the right-angled span between keyboards (or synth and zither in this case). Conspicuous virtuosity was not at issue here, however. The instrument banks were many degrees smaller than Wakeman’s monumental podium-mounted edifices, and far from requiring their own articulated lorry to transport them, could probably comfortably fit in a hatchback boot. Besides, Sam wore a self-effacing white t-shirt rather than a glittering cape, making his lack of interest in such showmanship quite plain. This was more a question of contrasting textures, the plucked string electro-acoustically transformed and the synthesised sine-wave.

The music came to the end of its natural lifespan, expiring after Sam had looked around for the next object to pick up and decided that, no, he had nothing further to add. He modestly suggested that we could repair to the bar now if we wanted, while he embarked upon a further sonic expedition. Perhaps it was a friendly warning. Because he proceeded to unleash a howling jungle of sound from his synth, harsh hissing, stridulent screeching and squelchy croaking. Several people did indeed decided it was time to refresh their glasses. I found it an exhilarating storm of noise, however. It reminded me of Henning Christiansen’s Symphony Natura, which I heard as part of the At the Moment of Being Heard sound art exhibition in the South London Gallery in Peckham last year, and whose sounds were recorded in Rome Zoo. It also brought to mind Bernard Parmegiani’s De Natura Sonorum and Pauline Oliveros’ early 1967 electronic piece Alien Bog. The latter is a marvellous title which could equally have lent itself to this unleashing of the untamed forces at the wilder edges of the synth spectrum.

David Chatton-Barker and Ian Humberstone commune with the spirits of Dartmoor

The two artists behind Devon Folklore Tapes VI (and the whole Folklore Tapes project), David Chatton-Barker and Ian Humberstone, came on to introduce their performance. Besides being musicians and sound artists, Barker is a visual artist and graphic designer and Humberstone a writer and librarian. These professions and talents combined in the first half of their programme, as words and images were harmoniously combined. They told us of the life and remarkable work of the folklorist Theo Brown, who was herself a talented visual artist. Photographic portraits and examples of her striking, dramatic woodcuts were shown on a small screen to the right of the stage. After this eulogy, they took it in turns to read out a selection of the tales which Theo told. We heard of the Sow of Merripit and its pitiful plaint; of the siren call of Jan Coo and the dangerously capricious moods of the Piskies; of the demonic invasion of the church at Widecombe-in-the-Moor by hovering and prowling ball lightning; the hunting down and eradication of the last wolves in the Dartmoor forests; the grimly humorous anecdote about the death of the Warren House Inn publican and winter preservation techniques in the remote heartland of the moor; and of the sad isolation of Dolly Copplestone in her lonely moorland stone cottage. All of these legends were told in David and Ian’s soft, mellifluous Mancunian and Edinburgian tones, which gave them a storyteller’s distance from their source. There was a delightful air of Jackanory about the whole thing. A zither provided the odd emphatic flourish, underlying a dramatic moment or bringing things to a conclusion, as if turning a page or firmly closing a cover. It was a touch which made a connection with older oral storytelling performance traditions; traditions superbly brought to life by Benjamin Bagby in his wonderfully atmospheric telling of the Beowulf tales, his cradled lyre providing the dramatic musical interjections.

The young Theo

The reading were lent an accompanying visual poetry by projections cast onto an adjacent screen. Whoever had ceded the storyteller’s chair crouched down over an Overhead Projector laid on the floor to the rear of the stage and sifted through a jumble of transparencies. These were slid onto the illuminated table and the sometimes rapid progression of images making their momentary appearance on the screen gave an impression of basic yet evocative and effective animation. They offered prompts for the imagination. It was somewhat reminiscent of the Eastern and Central European animations of the mid 20th century, with their cut-outs and silhouettes. This was the kind of hands-on device (and hands were indeed visible on the screen from time to time) which the duo favour. An OHP is an old-fashioned and readily graspable mechanical apparatus which you can manipulate and tinker with, a more personal level of technology than that which we are confronted with in every aspect of life today. One noticeable advantage of using an OHP rather than some modern digital affair is the absence of the lengthy prelude during which a procession of people try to figure out just how you magic your meticulously prepared and catalogued laptop pictures onto the projector screen. Here we’re back to the old days of simply pressing the on switch. There was a certain element of randomness and the chance moment to the rough order from which images were selected; an openness to the happy accident similar to the musical approach taken by Sam in the first half.

Simple means were ingeniously employed to create OHP special effects. A semi-opaque circle within a black square of masking card framed a picture of the Widecombe-in-the-Moor church tower, enveloping it in a sulphurous brimstone haze. Moorland matter – leaves and twigs and bracken – was scattered onto landscape photos to produce branching, brachiate silhouettes which invoked the Matter of the Moor. Red sweetwrapper cellophane smoothed out over the Warren House Inn sign cast it in a hellish glow. Dark inkdrops splashed onto a woodcut of a wolf were smeared out to reveal their blood red pigmentation. It could almost have been an homage to the ominously portentous opening scenes of Nicolas Roeg’s film Don’t Look Now, in which Donald Sutherland’s characters spills something on a slide of a church he is studying, causing a red stain to spread across it like an expanding pool of blood. It was a very effective moment. There was something inherently refreshing and involving in watching the performers busily sorting through and playing with the images in the background. The process was made transparent. It re-connected us with the materiality of art, with the palpable feel for the way in which images are created. There seemed to be a deliberate rejection of the kind of digital sophistication which can remove us from any sense of human agency or individual artistic signature. Long the defiantly Luddite amateur, the inspired tinkerer, their actions silently cried.

Such an ehos was carried through into the second half, when they picked up their instruments, and were joined by Sam, who returned to the stage. This trio provided a soundtrack to the super 8 film they had made on their travels through the Dartmoor landscapes and villages. The film itself veered towards flickering ochre abstraction, its bracken, heather and granite colours partly the result of the biochemical processes of decay caused by its burial for a period in soil and organic matter brought back from the moor .The film material itself embodied time and erosion. As images of tors, ponies and rivers, churches, bridges and inns manifested from the kinetic play of transformative colour and nebulous form, memory (personal and cultural) and the elusive spirit of place was poetically evoked. The music incorporate field recordings, along with effects-blurred guitars, bowed objects, electroacoustic zithers and home-made instruments and electronic wizardry and gimcrack inventions of diverse and mysterious variety.

It formed a continuous, evolving suite, with moods shifting from the haunted and sinister through the devilishly playful to the plaintive and melancholy. Hints of Radiophonic soundtracks to supernatural children’s TV series came through – think the Moon Stallion and The Changes (out this month on DVD!!) There was a touch of spacy dub to the Widecombe section, tracking the floating balls of lightning across the pews, and a Ghost Boxy ambience to some of the more melodic passages. There was also a good deal of abstract soundscaping, which suited the constant transformations hypnotically flickering and flaming across the screen. It was a highly effective translation of the atmosphere of the DFTVI recordings into a live context. For a short period of time, the spirit of Dartmoor’s landscape was raised in the Phoenix. And who knows, a part of it may remain there still.