Album: Ceremonial County Series Vol.XV – Leicester | Northumberland
Artist: Steve Watts | Grey Malkin
Year: 2025
Genre: Soundtrack / drone / experimental
We used to try to keep children from the woods. Now we beckon them into the gingerbread house ourselves. The other day, my daughter was playing in a mall playground. The centerpiece is a dinosaur egg that can only fit one child at a time. Naturally my child wanted in, but what did she find? A kid slumped inside, staring vacantly into a phone – unmoving, unmoved (to be clear – the kid was six, so it’s as if she gave herself the phone.)
I seem to remember a past where we protected kids, sometimes by scaring them with stories. “Black Annis” is just such a tale, and is the first of two tracks on the fifteenth entry in Folklore Tapes’ excellent Ceremonial Counties Series. The project is commendable – exploring the folklore of each of England’s ceremonial counties via a roughly fifteen-minute compositions.
Real or not, the story of Black Annis served to warn kids from playing in the woods of Leicester. So, when the track starts with the faint sound of children playing, the vibe is the same as a horror movie beginning with a child on a swing-set. You know things aren’t going to end well.
True to form, a few minutes into it, we are hit with the song’s core – a descending five-note synth theme that hammers away for nearly the rest of the song. It’s unclear whether the repetition is the soundtrack to the unhinged mental state of Black Annis or the tormented children. The result is the same. The motif overwhelms and gives the unmistakeable feeling of being trapped. Around the margins of the theme, the piece features percussive noises, and bizarre vocalizations. The composer, Steve Watts, cites the influence of horror soundtracks on this track. He must mean the era before horror scores devolved into the occasional dissonant violin shriek. The in-song repetition may slightly cap the replay value – but the piece is exciting and works.
While not geographically related, the second track Duddo Stones is a thematic sequel to horror, the tragic aftermath. The composer, Grey Malkin, is, perhaps, most well known for the supremely creepy folk music of the Hare and the Moon. Given that pedigree, Malkin surprises here with melancholy mourning rather than haunting violence we might expect.
Malkin graces us with his own voice to tell the story of the stones, unlike the mostly instrumental first track. The refrain will stick in your mind “Once we counted seven, now we are but five.” For someone who rarely shares his voice, he gives special emotion to that line, portraying a deeply felt sense of loss.
The composition is more electronic leaning than his usual work – with synth pads undergirding occasional bursts of wind instruments. Over the span of fifteen minutes, we are anchored by vocal passages, but in between we wander. There are lonesome vistas, and then near the end, a moment of almost celestial clarity. One gets the sense that Malkin is trying to portray the passing of eons from the stones’ perspective.
Ultimately, the symbiosis of these pieces makes this among the best in the ceremonial counties series. Intentional or not, these two pieces form a narrative through line – protect your loved ones from the terrors that await them or mourn them as time passes you by. Without doubt, the world was more dangerous when children feared ‘Black Annis.’ But it’s a poorer one now that they don’t. In a time when adults model being lost in the woods, our children may never even know monsters still lurk there.
