THE WALNEYEAR SOUND CALENDAR

Supported by Natural England and Steve Benn, their Warden on North Walney, this has been a real pleasure all year long. A Sound Calendar made with the boys and Girls of South Walney Infants..at the time of typing I'm waiting for them to send a recording for December..

http://walneyeear.blogspot.co.uk/

SEMI DETACHED SUBURBAN M.R.JAMES

A tangent perhaps, not part of the original project, 
but certainly relevant; three nights of Ghost Stories read in one of Ulverstons' most loved but rarely accessed buildings. The 18th Cottage has recently been restored by Ulverston Town Council and a team of Conservation Architects, and has been opened weekly during the warmer weather by historians Iain McNicol and Karen Mason.  Evenings like this though are best suited to the darker nights; sad tales are best for winter. 

Alongside excellent readings of James, Edith Nesbit and Jerome K. Jerome by Karen and Iain ,I contributed three original stories written over the last few years and relating to  the archive work in Seasoning and a previous project. The characters in the stories are themselves collectors, archivists or biographers  each occupying  a small space, which occasionally shifts to reveal a larger, stranger parallel world.  

 
A truant schoolboy becomes an  aerial, a  receiver for submerged energies summoned from abandoned ROC stations. 

Buildings grow over each other like plants, defending themselves against further development. 

A biographer's illumination of the dark corners  of a photographer's life leads to paranoia and flight. 



The language and structure imitates that of James' work. Their brevity refers to the condensed versions that I first came across on television, and the role of radio, TV and James himself in maintaining a tradition of oral, communal story telling. The characters and situations described aim to reflect the endless mutability of archetypes manifest  in the imagination and day to day life of this battered, drifting and increasingly -willfully- isolated land. 
Our individual and collective imaginations may turn out to be the last resource open to us. Whatever else we squander, let's at least maintain and nurture them.

Thanks to Iain and Karen , to Green Lane Archaeology, Ulverston Town Council and to our audience.

NOVEMBERISM: SEASONING AT THE LAUREL AND HARDY MUSEUM

NOVEMBERISM  was our final presentation. Here are some comments on the evening and on other aspects of the project, and after that the programme notes for the evening and links to some of the a/v pieces.

Thanks on the night to 

Jennie Dennett (vocals,fur) 

Ste Tyson (decks)

Martin (Transport) 

Mark and Matthew (venue).

"The evening has stayed with me and continues to inspire new reflections... Wonderful that art can have that effect and to be able to experience this kind of art in a rural area so far from the cultural hubs!"

".I saw and heard an evocation of our local hill. I watched a piece of film of George Butterworth and Cecil sharp dancing (a film I have personally watched many times) but saw it through very different eyes. I Heard the words of a poet from Dalton’s 19th Century industrial history singing out here and now. A dusty fragment of 60’s vinyl recording history fascinated us and turned into an imagined world of the dense ordinariness of making pop music in the form of a written story read to us in a dimly lit room. 

 All involving, evolving and experiential leading to a performance of sound effects, voices and vinyl. Could it be all the voices and writings from the past, the sounds of here and now all emerging from hundreds of record crates? All of this is moving and emerging and offering an insight into a year’s worth of thoughts, exploration and glimpses of the bones of bigger projects and pieces in development."

 

"I particularly enjoyed the video pieces - the rediscovery and dusting off of the song from the castle, the footage of folk dance with beautifully poignant song to accompany. The story was fab - great fun to imagine the back story behind those relics of musical history - a little window on another world that may or may not reflect the reality - in a world where we are fed so many ready made experiences that the imagination could become redundant. And the use of the sound effects to DJ nicely playful too - almost like a musical zoo - who'd have thought that those sounds from such diverse locations and sources would be brought together!"

"An artist living and working in a small market town can be virtually invisible, perhaps showing a small selection of work once in a while only lightly marking their place in the community. John however has brought us a way of seeing and being some way invited into what he has been thinking, developing and working with through the year, offering a feeling of sharing and inviting an involvement. It becomes clearer to see and understand his relevance to the fabric of our community and draws us into involvement."

" a very mesmerising sonic collage"

"Really enjoyed listening.   Interested to know how the Indian (?) music was connected and the story behind the sneezing man!?  Loved the different uses and textures of the horns, and when it merged into the music : ) (TRH)

"a really lovely yet subtly disquieting piece" (TRH) 

 "Excellent work! Great to see the development and direction of travel." 

"brilliant, arresting and fun" 

 "Loved your performance" 

 
"..it was something entirely unique and totally mesmerising.."

 "(we enjoyed) particularly the simplicity of it, which spoke for itself; each sound or track being really ‘clean.’ ( TRH)

 "Thank you for giving us such a great musical accompaniment!"  (Street theatre group on the Human Organs at Ulverston Lantern Procession)

I think these guys were possibly my favourite act of the weekend, loved watching them today! #weirdlygenius  ( Human Organs at Dickfest)

"Valuable projects like the Walney Sound Calendar enable us to provide a different perspective from which to work with the environment, and allows us to work at length with young people from within our community while reaching beyond it through the use of an online platform."  (Natural England)

The programme notes for Novemberism, our show presenting a selection of new work from Seasoning.

Seasoning has looked at seasonal rituals and celebrations, , the shapeshifting nature of the folk process, the blurs and echoes of folk and vernacular arts in what we do today.
 Research and collaborations have involved musicians, sound recordists, a DJ, crate digging, writers and archivists, local collections and venues, more crate digging...I visited folk and social history archivist Doc Rowe in Whitby and he brought his film "Parted Friends" to the Hope. At Cecil Sharp House Mike Willoughby and me found songs from this area which we are  feeding back into the tradition and the local repertoire.

A couple of performing units have emerged...Ste, Damo and me devised two pieces for radio and performance.The Human Organs have taken to the streets and the woods with our elbow-driven techno.

 We have a 4-piece core and a strong "bench" to play our backpack mounted pipes, donated by Mark Latimer and built by Alex Blackmore

Novemberism: the ritual and ceremony of what we used to call the blood month. Sacrifices of all kinds, bargains and observances made with a eye on getting through the
 winter.

The video pieces include documentation of a piece made for the Sir John Barrow Monument, one of a couple of days out at the Merzbarn with the Human Organs, and a recording made with Mike one november morning in the Hope of a song from 1889 discovered in Dalton Castle, and oddly relevant.

An there's a shot at linking the pantheist pastoral side of english psychedelia with the romanticism of composers Ralph Vaughn Williams and George Butterworth. Artists looking beyond the territory of rock n roll and european classicism to folk tunes, songs, nursery rhymes and seeing parallell worlds moving at different speeds, unaware of each other. Recorded on Armistice Day.

The last piece is a patchwork of sounds and images from the year, a lens and a mic largely pointed away from the action to quiet spots and, again, to worlds unaware of each other and moving at different speeds.

Serves Twelve is built around a narrative and a recipie for the Alls Soul's night delicacy Soul Cakes. You'll hear the the BBC's SFX vinyl, Field Recordings, a nursery song of slaughter and  narration from Jennie Dennett..a recording was featured in the Radiophrenia festival this November in Glasgow

Piccadilly Sunshine is set in 1967-68, the dark nights are coming in after the summer of love. Two smaller and less idealistic players are wondering what kind of deals they'll have to make if they're get to the next era without starving or having to leave the game,whichever is worse. The story draws on the information available within and around these 2 slices of paisley-exploitation vinyl from 1967-68. 

Mike Willoughby sings Charade  by J Myers

https://vimeo.com/245557163

George Butterworth

https://vimeo.com/245558890

To Every Thing

https://vimeo.com/245557646

Charade is available via this blog on a short-run
DVD edition.

 Piccadilly Sunshine is available as a softback illustrated book from

http://www.bifocals2013.com/bifocals-library-shop/4589880526

from bifocalsmultiples on Etsy, and from Sutton's Bookshop, Ulverston.

Thanks to everyone who has supported this project, either by turning up, joining in , or having something to say.
Stay tuned, there is more to come.

John Hall November 2017

   

RADIOPHRENIA and A NEW OLYMPIA AT SCARBOROUGH MUSEUM

A great month for collaborations...
"Ingredients Serves Twelve" our piece for Radiophrenia goes out on Nov 16..

http://radiophrenia.scot/schedule/november-16th/

updating with a link for those who missed it...

https://soundcloud.com/user-628037322/ingredients-serves-12


..and here's a link to whatever's on now...the whole festival will be archived but there's no  substitute for a live listen..http://radiophrenia.scot/listen/

And Scarborough Museums Trust presents 
A New Olympia. An interesting look at Scarborough and Art Deco, with sound from the Arcades on the website from me and Bill Bartlett.


http://www.scarboroughmuseumstrust.com/a-new-olympia-designs-on-scarborough/the-sounds-of-olympia/

BBC RADIO CUMBRIA: LIVE ORGAN DUET

A mornings' debate on Radio Cumbria, beginning with producer James Leather interrogating some milk bottles. We then go into a conversation with Val Armstrong about musical instrument / sound sources and the theory and practice of the Human Organs, blurring into a duet from me and Alex and ending with an unashamed plug for an appearance at the Ulverston Dickfest late november...

https://soundcloud.com/user-628037322/human-organs-radio-cumbria

HALLOWE'EN : MOSS AND SHADOWS

Much of the contemporary visual 
language of the supernatural comes from cinema.

  Countless Demeters have loosed their cargo on the shores of our imaginations in recent years and as a result Hallowe'en is infused with suburban dread; the glint of metal under streetlights,neighborhoods 
under lockdown, houses not quite big enough to hide in. 

Fears of the Other, traceable back to the Eisenhower years side with  techno savvy folk devils 
of northern Europe and Japan.  

These are just the ripples on the surface of a deeper, shared vocabulary; a dark pool of  imagery to draw from in order to confront and deflect fear. For all their current prominence, cinema, tv and netflix are newcomers. What floats on the surface is only the most recent manifestation of what occupies the depths. 

Ben Wheatley has begun the temporal re-wilding of Brit horror by reintroducing  the  landscape  to the cast-list. For the suburban lawns of John Carpenter's USA, read Barrett Estates and Fields In England. The endless  forests of Witchfinder General which seemed to stretch from the 16^th century to the early 1970's (actually M.O.D. Land at the time of filming) are now  Reservations recast and ripe for the horror of boredom, routine and the managed visitor experience.

Ulverstons' Candlelit Walk began 7 years ago as a slow and gentle 
flicker down the length of a river. 
Established by the unfettered and much missed Geoff Dellow, (street musician, potter, cobble repairer), the first were  redolent of coffin walks and thick with the musk of moss and leafmould. Flood defence work and increasing numbers led to a move to a larger and less confining setting. (photo:Lyndsay Ward)

It's a community effort: there's a committee, a roster of performers, artists and volunteers that run the making sessions, raise funds, do the books, put the event up and take it down. Undeniably something has been lost since the move, but a lot has been retained and built on; the moss has been allowed to grow. The trail of candles and flares is still best taken slowly; smoke doubles as marsh gas and the trees hang with homemade charms, shadowscreens, eyes (photo: Iain Raven) and phosphorescent fruit and veg.
(photo:Lindsay Ward) 

The scale of the event is important. Adults turn up in elaborate home made costume;  teenagers spin off to enact their own timeless rituals;  smaller kids who last year backed away when faced with some foul apparition now announce "it's just a bloke" and reach out for confirmation, inching further forward each year. 

I usually make some a/v; for the sake of continuity there's usually the sounds and images of running water and unspecified nighttime gatherings. This year a volunteer cast met in the woods and at other familiar sites. Under  Hammer and Tigon greenery and grey skies, we placed daemon children and Silent Observers by the river that runs along the original route. A macabre domestic scene with echoes of Beatrix Potter played out under low ancient ceilings. 

For the Walk, we project the results onto an open-air screen hung against a wall of ivy. An eldritch usherette points to seats and offers dubious snacks. Slowly, the focus of the evening changes from the procession into a series of clusters around storytellers, a clairvoyant, musicians, an aerialist, installations, stalls and tableaux. Our seats fill and others watch from around an Arbor where vinyl DJ Ste Tyson  fuses tweedy BBC cabbage-stabbing SFX with  clammy fogbank synths. 

"CHARADE" : HARD TIMES IN OLD ENGLAND

My continuing digging at Dalton Castle has turned up a song. The Dalton News of 1886 ran a  column of games, riddles and poems called Charades, and this comes from a John Myers, a regular contributor of state-of-the-nation verse..this one is in the vein of Hard Times Of Old England, but it's references are very specific...a snapshot of a moment.

The News is a pretty good paper. The national and overseas news is thorough, there's lots of sport, local court reports and waspish colour stories .  A fair bit of it looks like syndicated material, and the "Charades" column  has no local references so I wondered if J Myers was a stringer, a pseudonym or a committee.  But Myers is a local name and there was a J Myers and family in Dalton at around this time...
First port of call is the Vaughan Williams Library at Cecil Sharp House, where me and Mike found a wealth of local material earlier in the year...

Nick  at CSH tells us.."Thank you for your email.  We don’t know anything about the song but could it have been by the same John Myers who was Secretary of the Dalton and District United Workmen’s Association, part of the Cumberland Miners’ Association?  Incidentally, trawling through local newspaper archives seems to be a good way of finding old songs, especially where things have been digitised.  Anyway, I hope that your recording goes well and we would be delighted to receive a copy once it hits the shops.

Best wishes.."

An excellent lead. Nick also points us towards his source.. "Lake Counties from 1830 to the Mid-twentieth Century: A Study in Regional Change" by J.D. Marshall and J.K. Walton, I've now got a copy, it's a good read although of the 17 local newspapers listed,  the one it doesn't mention is the Dalton News... Meanwhile I've set Mr Myers' words to a suitably austere dulcimer tune...here it is...just the tune...6 verses worth.

https://soundcloud.com/user-628037322/charade

And here on the right are  the words. Sing along why dont you? Watch this space for Mike's version.

In the meantime I'll keep digging through the Dalton News...next installment concerns the Slonk club, Hobble-de-hoys and ne'er do wells.