A Year of Bandcamp, Part 2
Hauntology, ambient, experimental, folk, and Indigenous American indie rock
Continuing the journey through a year’s worth of purchases on Bandcamp. Check out part one if you missed it or just want to relive the excitement. Part two wanders down strange lanes and then back to the space in which I so often find myself—dreamy, melancholy indie rock.
Haunted Landscapes
I mentioned the website A Year in the Country when I wrote about hauntology. That site is a substantial influence on me, and earlier this year I read the first of a few volumes compiling the site’s posts into a book. One thing led to another, and because AYitC also releases music, it was inevitable that I ended up buying rather a lot of it in one wild night characterized by far-away stares and a total lack of self-control. Eleven add-to-carts later, I had more experimental, ambient, folk, and hauntological music than I could realistically consume between the date of purchase and the end of the year.
Each release deserves a more thorough investigation (remember me writing this when we get to Folklore Tapes below, because the same thing happened) than I am able here to provide, so let’s leave it at I am very excited about spending the winter months exploring these strange and hypnotic audio landscapes. Between now and then, if you wanted to overwhelm yourself the same way I did, here’s the lineup: Fractures, From The Furthest Signals, The Quietened Bunker, Echoes And Reverberations, Audio Albion, The Restless Field, The Quietened Dream Palace, The Quietened Journey, The Quietened Village, The Quietened Mechanisms, and The Quietened Cosmologists.
Further Hauntological and Synth Studies
From The Heartwood Institute, I got three albums: Secret Rites, Land Of The Lakes, and Witchcraft Murders. All three are inspired by sources such as creepy British children’s series such as The Changes and Children of the Stones, apocalyptic science fiction with a disco vibe (Logan’s Run, I’m looking at you and your pink smoke groove), the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, and ambient soundscapes. Lots of synths and analog (or at least analog-sounding) electronics, with occasional dancier beats sneaking in here and there. Maybe even a whiff of industrial dance bands. There’s a pretty good chance that, between finishing and sending this issue of Suburban Pagans, I’ll also have bought three more (they’re pricing is inexpensive): Witchseason, Tomorrow’s People, and Ringstone Round.
Thorsten Schmidt’s Hereford Wakes is the soundtrack to a supernatural Welsh children’s series that never existed but probably should have. Drawing heavily on the experimental synth-laden sound of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, it weaves an eerie, ethereal mood that, like the television programs that inspired it, can veer into wildly unexpected territory, here pastoral and quaint, there menacing, sinister, and unnerving. Rest assured everything is fine in Hereford Wakes…but something is not quite right.
Led to Klaus Morlock by way of purchasing music from Thorsten Schmidt, I grabbed two albums: The Three Faces of Janice and The Memory Chamber. The latter sounds like the soundtrack to a particularly disturbing 1970s science fiction film, an ambitious tale of memory manipulation and the intersection of science and the occult. Overdrawn at the Memory Bank meets Wir, bleeding into more recent films such as Beyond the Black Rainbow. The Three Faces of Janice, while still making heavy use of synths, is a groovier, dancier affair, influenced it sounds by the Italian movie soundtracks of the 1960s ‘70s. The Pieros, Piccioni and Umiliani. Edwige Fenech in knee-high boots and a miniskirt investigating a murder that leads her into the dubious arms of a drugged-out witch cult full of skyclad swingers.
The Blackheath Tapes, released under the band name The Unseen but representing work once again by Klaus Morlock, is another atmospheric experiment. As the (fictional) backstory goes, two musicians in the 1970s wanted to record an album inspired by either alien abductions or the role of hallucination in ritual magic. Klaus Morlock’s releases are all “name your own price,” and the ones I’ve purchased so far have all been fantastic. It’s inevitable more will be acquired.
Sedna Chronicles, by a group of the same name, also conjures up an atmosphere of gatherings in the deep dark woods, ritual magic, and mind-altering transcendence to unknown planes. It was conceived as a guide to supernatural and occult places in Scotland and makes use of dark, droning ambient music, narration that sounds like you’re overhearing snippets of something you weren’t meant to know, and forays into more structured, but no less sinister, electronica. One of the two people behind this release is Andy Sharp, author of The English Heretic, one of the books that inspired such a flurry of experimental and hauntological purchases in 2022.
The Hare and the Moon features the other half of Sedna Chronicles, Grey Malkin. The album I bought, Wood Witch, traverses kindred Pagan landscapes. It approaches things from a more folk music frame of reference, drawing inspiration from unsettling children’s rhymes and folk tales.
Scarred For Life was my final hauntological purchase of the year (well, so far—there are still a few days left). It’s a compilation of a lot of artists I didn’t know, and a few I’ve come to know since. As is the pattern, most of them take inspiration from the weird, often unsettling music of British children’s supernatural shows and public safety commercials from the 1970s, which often confronted their young viewers with difficult, complex concepts and imagery that, well, scarred them for life. Proceeds from the album are donated to Cancer Research UK.
Folklore and Furrows
To fully experience the releases issued by Folklore Tapes, one needs to have the money and timing to acquire their physical releases, which are made in incredibly small quantities and include additional ephemera and notes to properly frame the music. Alas, I’m not one who has been able to enjoy this more enriched experience, but I’m pretty pleased with what I can get. Each release, sometimes by specific artists and sometimes a compilation, explores a different facet of British folklore and folk horror or a different feature of the British landscape so essential to giving rise to so many supernatural and occult tales. The musical styles are as diverse as the folk tales they encompass, from ambient drone to acoustic folk to BBC Radiophonic Workshop-inspired synth, and a fair number of tracks that blithely defy classification, even among music that is often difficult to classify.
My collection was spotty, so I took the opportunity to flesh it out considerably, and, as I did with the A Year in the Country releases, exercised no self-restraint and bought more than I could possibly finish listening to by the end of the year: Devon Folklore Tapes Volume III - Inland Water, Devon Folklore Tapes Vol.VII - Two Ruins, Lancashire Folklore Tapes Vol.IV - Memories of Hurstwood, Somerset Folklore Tapes Vol.I - The Lost Village of Clicket, Industrial Folklore Tapes Vol.IV - The Langley Linnet, The Art of Magic Book, and Ethereal Transects: The Lore of Celestial Objects.
By Way of Reservation Dogs
If you haven’t watched the two seasons of Reservation Dogs currently available, ditch reading this issue and get to them. It’s fantastic. It’s a frequently hilarious, at times heartbreaking, always inspiring show about a group of semi-aimless Muscogee Nation teens and the people around them.
Among other things it’s done for me is direct me toward a lot of great indigenous musicians, like Black Belt Eagle Scout and the artist that represents a good chunk of my Bandcamp buys this year, Samantha Crain. All it took was the song “Bloomsday” to send me on a frenzy that only calmed once I’d picked up I Guess We Live Here Now, You Had Me At Goodbye, Songs In the Night, Under Branch & Thorn & Tree, and A Small Death. Beautiful, inventive (the saxophone sneaking in some places reminds me of X-Ray Spex and Rip Rig + Panic) indie rock, sometimes dreamy and sometimes angry (and sometimes both), driven by soulful acoustic guitar and infused with influence from the traditional singing and music around which Crain grew up.