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

Asinaria Festa (Xmas 2010)

download link:
SEDAYNE : EVT : ASTINARIA FESTA

Here's some music for the season as realised by Sedayne & Eleanor's Visceral Tomb 23-25th December 2010 in celebration of the Primal Dark Heart of Winter; freely gifted until January 1st 2011.  Two levels of inspiration here - the first is the Medieval Feast of Ass (Asinaria Festa) in which clerics inverted the sacred scheme by way of Ritual Reversal in a veneration of general Misrule, and the second is Eddie Waring, the 15-minute Help Yourself classic from the legendary Christmas at the Patti album as realised by The Manband & Friends at The Patti Pavilion, Swansea, on 19 December 1972.

Have a good one. Sedayne. 25th December 2010.

Rapunzel & Sedayne : Four Songs for a Happy New Year

Sheffield, 11th December 2010

Rapunzel & Sedayne (aka Venereum Arvum)
~ Purveyors of Songs & Ballads from the English Popular Tradition ~

Rachel McCarron : singing, electric & acoustic guitars & frame-drum

Sean Breadin : singing, kemence, citera, crwth & drones**

(download link: 31st December 2010 - January 7th 2011)
Owld Grye & Harp Song 

(download link: 31st December 2010 - January 7th 2011)
Gower Wassail & Robin Redbreast's Testament

We recorded these in the Barley Temple on 1st & 6th December 2010 by way of rehearsal sessions for our gig in Sheffield Robber's Dog Folk Cub on the 11th.  So, four songs as two medleys :

The Owld Grye Song (Poor Old Horse) - from the singing of Jim Eldon, as collected at the Appleby Horse Fair.  We were singing this together before we ever spoke to each other, so it carries a special charge  for us- the very cornerstone of our repertoire these past 11 years and still yielding fresh fruits each time we do it; always different always the same.  Harp Song of the Dane Women - Peter Bellamy's setting of the Rudyard Kipling poem which we recorded for the forthcoming  The Oak Ash & Thorn Project CD on Folk Police Recordings though we've elvolved it a good deal since, largely on account of ongoing harmonium problems, necessitating that Rachel use her new guitar which gives it a very different feel.

The Gower Wassail - which is well known, finding its way into the revival from the singing of the legendary Phil Tanner, aka The Gower Nightingale; we've tried to go for the traditional al-di choruses, but the revival fol-di creeps in there too - all part of the Folk Process no doubt.  Robin Redbreast's Testament - this is less well known, existing in various versions  (a fine one is to be found in The Faber Book of Popular Verse which no bookshelf should be without) ; what the source is here I couldn't say although the version here is somewhat edited*.  The melodic setting is Rapunzel's and the arrangement fluid enough that it never comes out the same way twice.  The instrumental dance interludes are improvised according to the rhymthic modality of the songs; and whilst the crwth is a Northern European bowed-lyre associated with Wales, we're not making any claims to  traditional Welshness in using it on The Gower Wassail.

Sedayne, Bill Leader & Rapunzel, Woodbine & Ivy Session, Fairfield Studio, 27th November 2010

* For a complete rendering of this song, check out our album A Pentacle of Pips (2009) available as a download from Folk Police Recordings, and on CD-R from Reverb Worship.  Another version features on our forthcoming Folk Police album Songs from the Barley Temple.

** The drones here are an electronic shruti box and a Korg Kaossilator heard ambiently with respect of the music; all was realised in real time, such as the random twittering towards the end using setting S71 on the Kaossilator.

Sheffield, 11th December

*

And whilst we're on here's last year's version of Gower Wassail with the visuals:

and Sedayne's solo rendering of Harp Song from a couple of years ago: