An Angelystor Companion

I’d like to share a few pieces of music that I feel either resonate with or otherwise influenced Angelystor.

Katharine Norman – Bells and Gargoyles (1996)

St. Michael and All Angels Church, Hathersage, Derbyshire, Panaramio, coljay72 (CC-A-NC-ND)

Bells and Gargoyles is an electroacoustic piece which processes a rather rough field recording made by Katharine Norman at St. Michael and All Angels Church, Hathersage (a location also used in the cult classic The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue). The piece begins and ends with unprocessed recordings, between which she uses various sonic transformations to suggest the blending of the imagination with the environment. You can listen to it in full at Katharine Norman’s website. In Angelystor, nearly all the non-instrumental and non-vocal sounds were also abstracted from the original field recording, although using a narrower palette of techniques.

Musical Interlude: David Dunn

I’ve recently been spending some time exploring work of the American composer David Dunn. It’s pretty stunning to discover a body of work with themes that overlap so broadly with my own – although often approached from somewhat different angles – themes such as: landscapes/environments, field recording, FFT synthesis, graphic scores, the structure of language and vocalisation, ‘the sacred’, the art of listening, and so on.

My interest in Dunn’s work was first piqued when I discovered his piece Tabula Bonorum Angelorum 49 (1991). The source material for this piece are a series of human voices, speaking phonemes taken from the table (tabula) of angelic names found in John Dee‘s De Heptarchia Mystica (1582-3). These voices were then arranged and subjected to time expansion using a computer algorithm – the results are pleasingly otherworldly.

The first seven names that appeared on Dee’s Tabula Angelorum Bonorum (from Add.36674, f.182v)

The first seven names as arranged by David Dunn.

Angelystor

Angelystor is now available to stream and download at Bandcamp. This is a 39-minute piece of music inspired by Layla’s photography and recording at St. Digain’s Church, Llangernyw.

Folklore tells us that at this church every July and October 31st, the spirit Angelystor, or The Recording Angel, speaks the names of those that will shortly die in the parish. The churchyard is home to an ancient yew tree, said to be one the oldest living things in the world. It seems appropriate for an angel of death to haunt the locale of a deathless tree. Angelystor imagines a night in the churchyard, from dusk through to dawn.

The music of Angelystor is often heavy, Saturnine and melancholic – as befits the month of the recording (October) and the nature of the yew tree. The scale used in the piece was abstracted from the partials found in two utterances of a crow (a Saturnine bird) on the original field recording (more info here). It’s not all gloom, though – the more luminescent music of ‘dawn’ begins at 25 minutes, which also includes the chant adol-hrwng-fa – said by the Welsh psychic Charubel to be the invocation of the yew, and a ‘soul remedy’.

Cello was played by Briony Yorke, who also joined Layla and myself in the chanting section. I have also compiled a series of Layla’s photographs into an accompanying booket, available in the download package at Bandcamp, and also online at Issuu. It’s a long piece, and not quite in the style of XETB (hence releasing it under my own name), but I personally feel it is one of my most substantial pieces of work and hope you enjoy it. Listening on headphones is recommended, in a relaxed, receptive state… possibly in a rural churchyard at dusk.

From the accompanying booklet.

A locative app version of Angelystor is still in preparation, but should be finished in late summer.