Label: Folklore Tapes

当店激推しレーベル英Folklore Tapesの音源!!英国のディープな民俗学を探究、長年に渡り広く収集されてきた歴史のイメージをアブストラクトな音楽と実験的ビジュアルで作品化する、まさにインディペンデントな活動を行っているFolklore Tapes。このレーベルの最初期からリリースを重ね、主に妖精の音楽を研究する人物Sam McLoughlinの2023年作。本作は"精霊に取り憑かれた人間が森を旅する"という情景を音像化したものであり、ハルモニウム、ナイロンギター、自家製パーカッション、ディクタフォンを駆使しユニークな牧歌サウンドを紡いだ面白物件。リトグラフプリント・ジャケ、手描きの地図が記された非常に美しいパッケージデザイン。



Fae Transit is an expedition into a realm of faerie music Sam McLoughlin introduced us to in his contribution to Folklore Tapes’ Swifter than the Moon’s Sphere. If Green and Brown was a sighting of a faerie parade, Fae Transit is a full abduction, a journey through a woodland inhabited by spirits and haunted by the living.

The album is written entirely for harmonium, nylon guitar, hand percussion and dictaphone, with harmonium and finger-plucked guitar continually exchanging roles as melodic and chordal instruments. The interweaving dialogue between these instruments has a chamber-like intensity, though the music flows with simple, rustic tunes singing above any complexity. If you have ideas in your mind of what faerie sounds like, this probably isn’t it. The full-throated harmonium drones, triplet rhythms and meandering melodies are more McKenna’s machine elves than Tinker Bell. But it’s calm. An air of nostalgia and melancholy pervades the carnivalesque music, which is wistful, and occasionally menacing, but never violent.

Then there’s the anomalous clicks, pops and whirrs of the dictaphone, seemingly rewinding or fast-forwarding time itself, curiously framing the pastoral musings of pipe and string. Is it the listener’s ear, or is the music searching for itself from beyond some unfathomable rift? This is deeply personal music that is at once a unique utterance and, unmistakably, Sam Mcloughlin’s work.