#artist: James Chatton

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Tracklist:

Yu-Gi-Oh! Theme • Time 2 Duel • I'm Back • Summon the Dragon • Your Move • Duel Madness • No Matter What • Exodia • Ahead of the Game • We'll Be There • Face Up Face Down • Millennium Battle • Heart of the Cards • World of Yu-Gi-Oh!

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Hannah Leighton-Boyce — Industrial Folklore Tapes Vol. I: Instruments of Industry (Folklore Tapes) / Fred Helliwell — Industrial Folklore Tapes Vol. II: Springs (Folklore Tapes) / Various Artists — The Folklore of Plants Vol.I (Folklore Tapes) / Ian Humberstone & Jorden Ogg — Wester Ross Folklore Tapes Vol.I - Sacred Island: The Legend and Magic of Isle Maree (Folklore Tapes)

Wester Ross Scotland

In the UK — and perhaps to an extent in the USA —  notions of folk music and folklore tend to be tied up with the countryside. It’s hard indeed not to see Fairport Convention’s seminal masterpiece Liege & Lief as a celebration of Britain’s rural past, and even the more recent waves of British folk music, from Current 93 to Mumford & Sons, have drawn from this same arcadian well of inspiration. Yet as Hannah Leighton-Boyce and Fred Helliwell demonstrate on these fantastic new releases from the Folklore Tapes research project and label, there is as much folk tradition to be found in our urban spaces as among the fens and glens of our countryside.  

Recently, at a concert in London’s Café Oto, I was lucky to witness a demonstration by dancer and singer Caroline Radcliffe of Lancashire clog dancing (Lancashire is in Northwest England for non-Brit readers). This metronomic, hypnotic form of dance was developed during the Industrial Revolution by women who worked in the factories that were popping up across the county. As people converged on the cities and towns from the countryside in search of work, so they brought with them folk traditions that they adapted, consciously or subconsciously, to their new, noisier and grimier surroundings. Lancashire is also the home of these two sound artists, Helen Leighton-Boyce and Fred Helliwell, and both set about trying to recapture the spirit of industrial folklore in the very spaces it would have been created. 

Leighton-Boyce’s creations draw on a collection of trade tools housed at Touchstones Museum in Rochdale, Lancashire. The first piece is an installation work recorded in the museum, with Leighton-Boyce tracing lilting melodic patterns by ringing the tools, carefully crafting a beautiful, minimal musical suite out of previously only functional objects. In comparison, her second piece, “Instrument Archive” sees the artist citing the name and catalogue references of individual tools before ringing them, with each different tone sounding like an echo from history. By reshaping the tools into sources of lyricism and museum curios, she deftly accentuates just how far we have moved as a society in a relatively short period. Somehow, these tools feel as distant to the present as the mythological figures of a Steeleye Span song. 

Fred Helliwell’s recreation of Rochdale industrial life is altogether earthier, in a way. He takes the listener into the heart of a spring-making factory, BPS Ltd, which makes all manner of springs for all uses. The beautiful photographs that accompany the liner notes emphasise the sheer intricacy of this dying industry, whilst the track features interviews with three workers in the noisy, yet somehow intimate, space they work in. Pete, one of the workers, is a particularly informative witness to the change he has seen in nearly forty years of working at the factory, and his lament of the loss of jobs and the impact that has had on the local community feels especially poignant. On side two, Helliwell rings and twangs the different springs, creating a droning, clanking sound that echoes the futurists and avant-garde composers such as Michael Snow. It’s an enthralling listen, and I would have loved to have seen the three workers’ reactions when he played it to them. The LP also comes with a small spring hand-crafted (Pete and his colleagues coil their springs by hand!) by the three men, a beautiful, somehow melancholic memento.<o:p></o:p>

Folklore Tapes return to the country for The Folklore of Plants vol.I, a series of 31 songs or instrumentals, none of which exceeds two minutes in duration. FT founders Ian Humberstone and David Chatton Barker feature, as do label regulars Paper Dollhouse, Magpahi, Dean McPhee and David Jaycock. Hannah Leighton Boyce even crops up again, and there’s a big name in the form of Ghost Box’s Belbury Poly. Given the diversity of performers, The Folklore of Plants vol.I traverses a number of styles but it is a testament to the label’s keen ear for coherence and expert curation that it remains consistent throughout. Several of the performers, such as Leighton-Boyce, Jaycock and Sam McLoughlin, are field recordists, while others like Paper Dollhouse and Magpahi, like to record in the environment they’re drawing inspiration from, and by dropping the tracks by these artists amid the others at regular intervals, it feels to the listener like he or she is being taken on a journey that’s as much geographical as it is musical, stopping to sniff the plants and flowers as he or she goes.  

With each track named after a specific plant, one could expect something either a bit, well, flowery, or overly scientific. Instead, most tracks, from t/e/u’s “Balm” to David Chatton Barker’s “Elder” via the doomy spoken word of Kelly Jayne Jones’ “Chasteberry” are imbued with a sense of mystery and enigma that borders on the phantasmagorical. James Green’s “False Shamrock,�� for example, driven by moody accordion and organ, wouldn’t sound amiss on a mid-1990s Current 93 album. Only the often playful Jim “Belbury Poly” Jupp offers anything approaching cheerful or jaunty with “Hawthorn”, and even that is deceptive, whilst Dean McPhee’s “Valerian” achieve the impressive feat of being almost epic using only an electric guitar and in under 90 seconds. The album ends fittingly with a track dedicated to that most emblematic of trees, the willow, and Eva Bowen’s lilting, distant vocals and mournful string drones, over a background of croaking frogs and babbling water. The Lady of Shalott springs to mind, and with its beauty and quiet tension, The Folklore of Plants vol.I is guaranteed to make you look differently at plants in the future.

In a flurry of activity, Folklore Tapes also bring us the brief, but enthralling Wester Ross Folklore Tapes Vol.I —  Sacred Island: The Legend and Magic of Isle Maree (quite a mouthful), a series of compositions blending library music-like horror synth workouts with expertly deployed field recordings, snippets of interviews with a local historian, water drums and tape-manipulated chimes. The accompanying booklet offers extensive liner notes and gorgeous photos, and though the flexi-disc lasts less than ten minutes in total, it’s impossible not to get an evocative and haunting picture of this strange Scottish island.

Joseph Burnett