Flesh soon yields, but stone is greater; the works of man survive the maker,
Yet, given time, new flesh brings breath; and fastens song to stone’s unrest.
Stone ruins prick the Devon map like starlight in the night sky. Each one reaches us as a distorted image of a bygone age: a past-pulse, rippling out through time to meet us in the present, beaten and ragged from a long journey.
Devon Folklore Tapes marks its seventh iteration with sound-investigations into two such time-travellers: Frithelstock Priory and Okehampton Castle. The former was once the home of an Augustinian fraternity, but since its dissolution in 1536 has continued to shelter monks of the spectral kind in its slow decay. The latter is a Norman motte and bailey castle, situated in a leafy valley on the edge of Dartmoor, where a revenant spirit wanders the byways in her carriage of bones.
The movements featured on this cassette tune in to these tales and others, informed by fieldwork and automatic improvisations conducted on location in 2017. The cassette comes housed in a hand-stamped and numbered presentation box including an inlay booklet detailing the folklore of each site.
The works were executed by R.D. Kirdiv and S.V. Skirling – two longstanding members of the Folklore Tapes ensemble who, with this release, are finally stepping out from the shadows and into the ferric.
More information can be found here.
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