Rapunzel & Sedayne : WINTERFLORA 2011

 
WINTERFLORA is an annexe to to main Rapunzel and Sedayne Soundcloud Page on which we're going to feature Songs of Light for the Dark Season, both from the archives and as we record them by way of session and rehearsal over the next few weeks.We'll be featuring them in our up coming gigs so there'll be some cross overs along the way, but as ever in different versions, all brightly shining and dusted down to bring a bit of sparkle to the proceedings...


There will be a WINTERFLORA CD-R featuring different versions of some of the material featured here.We'll be selling these at gigs, but if you'd like a copy message us at: winterflora@sedayne.co.uk

W I N T E R F L O R A  2 0 1 1

Rapunzel & Sedayne : Three New Songs on Soundcloud

Child #38 : The Wee Wee Man

Recorded as during rehearsals for our Ballad gig at the Morpeth Northumbrian Gathering 2011, for which we were graced by pipe tunes by Matt Seattle and a very enthusiastic audience.  Some of the gig was filmed, hopefully soon it might make its way onto YouTube - for now here's a new version of Sedayne's very old setting of The Wee Wee Man by way of redux and renewal.  Picture courtesy of Ross Campbell, Rylands Library, Manchester, though the credit goes to Ann Breadin for having the idea in the first place...

The Old Grye Song (Poor Old Horse)

Rapunzel & I were singing this together long before we actually spoke, circa 1994, and I'd been singing it since hearing Jim Eldon sing it a few years before that.  As with the Wee Wee Man this is by way of redux and renewal because it never comes out quite the same way either, being a vehicle for further invention, arrangement and improvisation.  Here Rapunzel uses her electro acoustic guitar, and Sedayne plays his wee Black Sea Fiddle, complete with real-time loopy drones from the Kaossilator as all dissolves into a dreamy haze, although this was December 2011, from rehearsals for our Sheffield gig, so the winter winds are suitably chill (as they were in snow-bound Sheffield).  The picture comes from earlier that Autumn, along the River Wyre by Skippool Creek which is one of our favourite haunts, tides permitting.  There's a version of this on Songs from the Barley Temple which will be released on Folk Police later in the year; similar but different; change being the heart and soul of the broader continuities what we still might call Folk Music...

 

Mother Carey's Chicks

Last but not least, is Rapunzel's setting of a Ron Baxter piece concerning the more supernatural beliefs of the Fleetwood fishing industry; the cares and concerns of life we might all share.  We do this as part of Demdyke, and it features in The Golden Dream as well, but here it's just the two of us in the Barley Temple with Rapunzel on her Daisy Rock Purple Heart electric guitar and me trying to be sentive on the crwth.  Quite different from our other stuff really as she lets her more contempory sensibilities come to the fore in this quite emotive wee piece of love, loss and enduring hope in the face of an all too bitter reality...

 

Sedayne : Headland (Over the Hills) : April 21st 2011

This started as a version of Over the Hills and Far Away, but I dropped the vocal track and let the vistas open out into pure ambient revellry.  As it stands it becomes a piece of sea-side ambience inspired by lazing around the beach of late on tranquil sunny days looking over to Black Combe & Barrow-in-Furness from Cleveleys (click on above picture for the bigger view).  Essentially an improvisation on 5-string violin (C-string tuned up to D) with electric bass ostinato and various ambient drones & bleeps on the Kaossilator, the piece becomes a hommage to minimalism with obvious debts to be acknowledged to the Penguin Cafe, the Soft Machine, Gong and the Third Ear Band...

SEDAYNE : HEADLAND (OVER THE HILLS) : APRIL 2011  

Medieval Spring - Rapunzel & Sedayne on Soundcloud

We've got six songs up there just now, all studio demos, exquisitely crafted and fully downloadable reflecting various aspects of what we do with more to follow.  There's even the reworked version of Harp Song of the Dane Women, very different to that which features on OAK ASH THORN, and our 2009 version of VERIS DULCIS IN TEMPORE which celebrates the hornier aspects of Medieval secular verse...

http://soundcloud.com/rapunzel-and-sedayne

An Oblique Parallax of English Speaking Folk Song - Part One

This is the first of what will be an ongoing series in which I'll be approaching Folk Songs from the English Speaking Tradition in a way that might be unfamiliar to those used the orthodox approach to such things but which nevertheless reflects a lifetime of singing, researching, loving & living the songs themselves.  That said, the inner-aesthetic here reflects not only the overall modality of the Traditional Idiom from which these songs arose, but the rusticity that was their natural habitat which distorts and obscures as an essential aspect of the hoary patina such material has acquired over the ages.

With that in mind, each piece will be accompanied by suitable imagery drawn from the vernacular idioms of medieval English Woodcarving which survives in our churches & cathedrals in the form of misericords, each tableau echoing analogous narrative concerns to those expressed in the songs.  Whilst such resonances are entirely intuitive they are nevertheless deserving of a wider consideration.

The link for each song is the title itself which will take you a free MP3 download via Rapidshare.

Sedayne, 22nd February 2011

The Sheep Stealer 

Recorded : Friday 18th February 2011 - kaossilator / microcube / accursed viol & singing

Realised : Tuesday 22nd February 2011 - filters / Ableton Live

Photography : The Stalls of Manchester Cathedral, Saturday 12th February 2011

This is an improvisation recorded entirely live using 4 large diaphragm condensers - two for the amplifier & two for the viol & voice.  As with the initial improvisation, the secondary processing occured in real-time using the various filters & vinyl distortions of Ableton 3.  The piece is extended over a duration of 16 minutes, the first 11.40 of which are entirely instrumental, after which the song is intoned to an improvised melody  in approximation of the given (traditional?) melody.

I am a brisk lad but my fortune is bad and I am most wonderful poor.
Oh, indeed I intend my life for to mend and to build a house down on the moor, me brave boys
And to build a house down on the moor.

The farmer he do keep fat oxen and sheep in a neat little nag on the downs.
In the middle of the night when the moon do shine bright, there's a number of work to be done, me brave boys. There's a number of work to be done.

Then I'll roam all around in another man's ground and I'll take a fat sheep for my own.
Oh, I'll end his life by the aid of my knife and then I will carry him home, me brave boys,
And then I will carry him home.

And my children will pull the skin from the ewe and I'll be in a place where there's none.
When the constable do come, I'll stand with my gun and swear all I have is my own, me brave boys.
And swear all I have is my own.

(Source: Various, including A L Lloyd, Folk Song in England; presumably, therefore, traditional)

Dark Season

DARK SEASON

Sedayne : January 2011 : accursed viol / electric bass / kaossilator / filters

Sedayne on Soundcloud

There's a few Sedayne tracks up at Soundcloud to listen or free-download with more to follow in due course. Including:

Dragon's Den (Ragas & Pastourelles, 2010) - kaossilator driven Third Ear Band tribute with pocket trumpet, accursed viol & doromb.

Folk Fusion Tumour (Ragas & Pastourelles, 2010) - real-time ambient electronica for two kaossilators & Ableton Live.

Acres of Self-Regarding Wank (AKA Death Masque) (Sonatas & Ostinatos, 2010) - extended Gothica improv for violin, bass guitar & kaossilator continuo; gets good after the 11-minute mark.

Eventyr (Unreleased) - bucolic domus improv on a home-made overtone flute.

Winter Pastoral (Winter in Purgatory, 2010) - old style acoustic modal raga & free-form hedge-laying by way of Auld Lang Syne, with citera, violin, overtone flute, birds, pocket trumpet, bells, fowler calls, frame drum etc. etc.

Check them out at the link below:

Sedayne at Soundcloud

The Music of Erich Zann

I keep coming back to The Music of Erich Zann, chiefly in the January dark, picking up my viola and speculating on the sort of thing Lovecraft might have had in mind back in 1922 when he wrote of '...the ghoulish howling of that accursed viol...' - or even what sort of viol he might have had in mind. Here's my latest take on it, freely improvised on one of these ornate 5-string violin / violas you can buy cheaply on Ebay from China.  And whilst the drone is most certainly gratuitous (the ubiquitous electronic shruti box, also off Ebay) I am wary of silence - day or night, it makes little difference - thus the rooted tonic earths the meandering amodality of the thing in such a way as to determine the inner aesthetic of a music that might be considered Folk Horror...  and all that implies.

The YouTube film is a visual record of this improvisation, though what you hear on the soundtrack is altered by the inclusion of extraneous real-time modifications (filters, reverb, delay, distortion) realised using Ableton Live, the full-length audio of which is available as an MP3 by clicking the link below:

Sedayne : The Music of Erich Zann : January 2011 

This post dedicated to Lord Loomis, Sir Ashliegh Grove and the various other Gentlemen of the No. 9 Club.

Two Ballads : Lord Thomas & Child Owlet

Lord Thomas : AKA Fair Ellender / The Brown Girl : Child #73
 (From the singing of Mrs Pearl Brewer of Pocahantas, Arkensas as collected by Max Hunter in 1958.)

 

Child Owlet : AKA Childe Owlet : Child #291
(From the singing of Sally Bee / In Our Lady's Name, April 2010, though where she got it from I've no idea.)

Ballads have always held a certain fascination for me - a darker sense of narrative drama akin to that found in Soap Opera albeit reduced to its more immediate inter-personal essence, such as #73 which features a plotline worthy of EastEnders where the Nut-Brown girl knifes her rival having realised she's been wed out of fiscal convenience - confirmed when her husband cuts of her head and smashes it against a wall.   In such a setting his repentant suicide seems a tuch mawkish , unlike #291  which has our eponymous hero being offed in fine old style to preserve the good name of his entirely unrepentant randy aunt. Word is Prof Child had his doubts about its authenticity though conceded there was merit in the last two verses. Seems even the good Professor was of the opinion these things grew on trees and were gathered from the hedgerows by witless peasants entirely innocent of the sort of cunning that could free-style such a thing at the drop of a hat. In this, of course, my belief is that he was sorely mistaken. Although these things are pretty fixed now (in point of collected reference or revival arrangement) they seem to have been quite fluid in their natural habitat, both as an overall objective tradition and with respect of the subjective performer many whom would never sing a song the same way twice.  The knack of free-styling such stuff is lost to us today, but these performances are free enough to embody that spirit if only in a musical sense.  In both I improvise an ostinato using the Kaossilator (a hand held phrase looping synth which does away with the tyranny of the keyboard with an X-Y pad) thus creating an ambient wash over which to sing the ballad.  The swinging fiddle stunt is simply to provide visual appeal fore & aft to save me the bother of editing the things. Maybe I'll start doing this in future performances, providing landlords don't object to me fixing a hook in their bending beams....

Sedayne, The Fylde, UK, Thursday 20th January 2011