This is an unusual and ambiguous artefact. An idiomatic collection of research materials, something like a scrapbook of notes and images. A palimpsest that veers from historical records through artistic representations and on towards occult invocation.
Producer U is a mysterious figure, picking through archives, assembling his carefully arranged collages and allowing them to stand by themselves. He remains in the shadows yet, while hardly revealing, Archenfield may be his most personal release yet. As a reasonable sounding woman observes at the end of ‘Half Moon’, “I think when you’re young, you know, the past is the past, and I’m sure it’s as you get older you start thinking back. That’s the time when you start looking for your roots and finding out about them”.
Some version of this curiosity appears to be driving what’s happening here. Archenfield is an old name for part of Herefordshire, west of the river Wye to the Welsh borders, indeed it was once in Wales. Archenfield the album is a long walk through the territory that wanders off the path and gets agreeably lost therein. A charity shop rummage unearthing local folklore, weird histories and superstitions. These are threaded through uneasy compositions of piano loops, vinyl hiss and odd drones. It feels faded and half remembered, evocative of dust and the hint of damp in old books. If at first it seems slight a closer listen reveals it to be dense but elegantly constructed.
There are specific stories here that are mostly only hinted towards alongside a more general sense of small town constants; school, church, the war memorial on the green and the pub. ‘The Bitter Withy’ sets a version of a dark old folk song in a ghostly haze, ‘Cold Lazarus’ features a garbled recounting of scripture over a church organ loop. Named for an odd practice at the crossover of folk magic and religious observance ‘Sin Eater’ has funereal drones under heavy sighs, the piano loops receding beneath a girl doubting those taking confirmation as more an act of tradition rather than faith. At its close a short and breathless sample addresses the question of whether we are in Wales or not.
Slightly hogging the limelight, the carefully chosen vocal samples do most of the heavy lifting for the album’s psychogeographic concerns, but they are often brief and its sustained mood comes from its haunted sonics. Translucent layers of faded sound alternate with the murk and crackle of time, piano in an empty hall, brass and woodwind loops so worn and discoloured their identity begins to dissolve. A decent chunk of the album is instrumental. Despite the all caps and exclamation title ‘SPOOKS!’ sounds like the sorrowful wheezing of an animated skeleton band. ‘In Flanders, Again’ is even more desolate, soft loops of brass sinking into the mud. ‘Avenbury Organist’ conjurs a ghost that haunts the church organ in Bromyard.
Album highpoint ‘Black Vaughan’ finds the music at it’s most grandly cinematic to evoke a legendarily unquiet spirit, perhaps unfairly maligned for any number of supernatural goings on. Opening on distant drums that give way once again to piano loops it becomes much richer as strings and brass arrive. Its closing vocal snippet a move from recorded speech to dramatisation as the tales recede further into the past.
Broadly, this shift follows the album’s most awkwardly modern moment. Drawn from a youtube clip ‘He’s Found It’ explores the unexplained appearance of a spectral voice in a piece of video. The discovery of which is related in the perfectly flat nasal tones common to the Great British enthusiast/bore. Winningly he concludes “I don’t believe ghosts are the souls of dead people, I don’t know what they are, possibly holes through time or something…”. Holes through time? Yeah, maybe that’s a way to look at what’s happening here.
