Folklore Tapes - Larksong / Brown Wardle Hill

A Closer Listen

Two new LPs from the ever-reliable Folklore Tapes connect music, history and landscape.  One is a sonic collage that includes the score to a film; the other is a celebration of local legends played by a brass band.

Larksong (pictured above) features contributions from an all-star cast: Mary Stark, Bridget Hayden, Sam McLoughlin, David Chatton Barker & Emily Oldfield.  The package includes a link to Nick Jordan and Jacob Cartwright movie, filmed in and around the Baptist Goodshaw Chapel, “established by textile workers and farm labourers in 1760.”  The collage begins with the happy larks outside the chapel; and then the music begins to play.  The mood is reverent, yet light; as flutes give way to spinning wheels, one can peer back through the centuries to encounter the original congregants.  Film projectors, although anachronistic, add to the sense of nostalgia.  Notes fall like droplets; the piano plucks a melody from the woods.  And then the notes of the first local gravestone are read: cheerful, as if the deceased is safe on the other side of the veil.  Water flows, notes sparkle and birds respond.  Now it is time for human singing: fragments based on ancient manuscripts, sailing above the feathered air.  Improvisations alternate with epitaphs and songs.  These newly-sewn compositions grace the long-gone textile workers with dignity and respect, clothed in melodies of gentle kindness, retracting ever so often to reveal the landscape.  In the closing piece, Emily Oldfield recites a poem in the chapel, making hidden connections clear, imagining the rich history of Goodshaw through the perspective of a pew.

Now we turn to Brown Wardle Hill, from David Chatton Barker and The Whitworth and Healey Vale Brass Band.  This record also launches with birdsong, although the brass band enters swiftly in.  Stark and McLoughlin contribute one composition, Barker ten.  The pieces reflect the lore and legends of Lancashire Vale, which Barker collects in his book Lorelines.  Again the tone is upbeat; it’s difficult to sustain melancholy through a brass band, although a touch visits the early part of “Treacle Sanderson,” inspired by England’s fastest fell runner.  By the end, he’s running full speed again.  And yet there is great sorrow hidden beneath the veneer.  “The Famine Tower” remembers the pointless construction of a tower during a time of starvation; “The Lady of the Barrow” memorializes a charred corpse in a burial chamber.  The percussive cadence recalls a funeral procession.  Real life is far more harrowing than haunted tales, although these are found here as well; “The Baum Rabbit” is a folk tale with a historical subject, the descent of the Black Plague.  The album ends with a lonely, forsaken wind.

The brass band bears witness to kings and queens, fairies and naiads, forests and fields; once again, the local avian populace bears witness to them.  The combination of brass and birdsong keeps the mood from dipping, transforming the album into a celebration of history in all of its facets, heroic and horrific.  Folklore Tapes presents the past as fascinating, relevant and new. (Richard Allen)