Manchester Folk Horror Festival V

Once again, a year passes with impossible swiftness and we find ourselves again upon the short path towards the Manchester Folk Horror Festival. As we’re quick to point out the festival has become somewhat broader in scope since it’s first iteration, shifting from an amateur film gathering (in the name of folk horror), towards a more amorphous esoterica (and a hopefully useful exploration of relationality).

This year, we’re still neck deep in the bloody shoals of the imminent. The apocalypse— all of them—are not swift. And whatever form the ‘doom of the world’ takes, it has it roots in the severance of connection…with the land and with time itself. However, this is no death cult! Thus we present ‘Becoming The Transmission: Re-enchanting The Apocalypse’ as this years battle cry. We cannot be destroyed… instead we transform, becoming an emanation that pulses into new arrangements, even as the horror swirls around us. This field is ours to be.

This year we present magic, discussion, music (of course—and what music) film and theatre, all compressed into the basement men call The Black Stage, the very bowels of The Peer Hat! And of course, we look to you, the visionary seekers of Manchester and further abroad. For only in finding and making those organic connections, will we flourish.

Guest Speaker CAVAN MCLAUGHLIN is a filmmaker, creative media practitioner and Senior Lecturer, with his primary research interests being the role and function of ‘occulture’. He is a practicing freelance filmmaker, graphic designer, editor, producer and director. As a media professional of over 20 years, he has been involved in almost all aspects of audiovisual production, specialising in promotional music videos and album-sleeve artwork.
He is the founder of Trans- States (www.trans-states.org), a transdisciplinary conference series and network exploring occultism, mysticism, shamanism and other esoteric and spiritual practices in contemporary occulture. He is also director of Trans- States Media, their sibling media production unit.

Music from

SQUARE THE CIRCLE “On her debut album, Ether, Irina Shtreis, originally from St. Petersburg and now based in Reykjavik, has tapped into some of the baseline mysticism of her current home, using the album as an exercise in world building. Choosing organs and keyboards as her primary instruments, she creates a musical palette that nods at being intentionally out of step with our reality, bringing to mind old fashioned ideas of fantasy worlds.”

THOUGHT UNIVERSE Since 1994, Tnought Universe EMS is a studio in Manchester (UK) producing electroacoustic music and sound-art. Thought Universe EMS is run as an independent organisation. The studio is available to produce electroacoustic music and sound-art. Thought Universe EMS aim is to support artistic development of electroacoustic music and its integration within other artistic areas. TU’s resident boffin, Mark Pilkington returns to MFH with a UFO abduction deep dive.

CHELSEA HARE is the only artist we’ve been happy to return five times to the festival, if only because of the staggering diversity of music he has on offer and a determinedly demented spin that catapults us repeatedly into his orbit. Tom is a vision scarred artist, for whom sound is a tool for the expression of otherness. We cajole him once more unto the Black Stage! “Disarming, uncanny moments of theatricality sit comfortably alongside more downbeat moments of introspection. Tom’s incredibly funny and poetic lyrics provide a tremendous thread through the blizzard of fairly schizophrenic musical styles… but Tom’s voice is unmistakably his own.” NARC magazine.

THE MANIFESTATION GROUP are a music based spiritual science project, revolving around the exhumation of various thought forms and ‘ghosts’ in the form of resonance and music. They promise ‘A thorough exploration of the power of ritualisation and relational beautification, within the context of the contemporary song book.’ And a sing-a-long.

DEAD SPACE CHAMBER MUSIC “A beating dark heart of pure dream-drama and past rituals – easily one of the best live acts Bristol has to offer” RwdFwd
“Fresh, ancient and relentlessly innovative, Dead Space Chamber Music embody the transportive power of music with each understated release.” Louder Than War

ATTRITION “Inside a cage of sound, writhes a human soul. Cold waves of electronics are juxtaposed against voices that seep through cracks in the walls of machinery and wires. Lyrics dart out in bullets from soundscapes peppered in sharp vocals and sound bites. A viola plays in the distance, giving life to this inorganic mass…

Such is the imagery that spawns Attrition, who, with its marriage of the classic and modern, has brought to music the equivalent of a surrealist painting. From its earlier sparse and stark soundscapes, to a more expansive palette of orchestral work, Attrition has successfully melded several genres into one. The music flows – from gothic to industrial to experimental to classical – so smoothly, they might as well be making their own category.

With more than twenty albums of constant variety, and an ever-expanding sound, they remain one of music’s darker and fascinating lights.”

SHARON KRAUSS We’re over the moon to welcome Sharon to Folk Horror V. Over the years Sharron Kraus’ musical career has pulled her in many directions and seen her collaborate with artists, poets, writers and researchers, creating soundtracks, podcasts, musical accompaniments and responses. She is an intuitive improviser, a compelling performer and a weaver of musical spells.
The spine supporting this body of work is songwriting, though, and it is to this most natural combination of words and music that she always returns. If prose writing is a tool for analysis and working out what we think, because of the emotional dimension music introduces, songwriting is a tool for working out how we feel.

K I N , her newest album, is a collection of songs written during and partly in response to the pandemic and the relative isolation it plunged us into. Kraus dives into deep explorations of themes of kinship with other humans as well as the natural world, and of what happens when those kinship bonds are severed or abused. Sonically the album is on a continuum with her previous solo album, Joy’s Reflection is Sorrow, with its layered synths and recorders, and sits somewhere in the space between Jane Weaver’s electronica and the psych/folk of bands like The Left Outsides, Modern Studies.

FINALLY and with great pride, we will be performing a late show of Paul A Green’s play THE MAGUS OF KLOOK’S KLEEK (Recently published by Scarlet Imprint in a collection entitled BABLON & OTHER PLAYS) . Paul Green grew up in London and studied at Oxford and the University of British Columbia. Magickal techniques are central to his writing practice, which is ultimately an exploratory process. Thus his pursuit of the arcana of magic and the enigmas of esoterica is exemplified not only in Babalon and Other Plays but in poetry, as in his collection The Gestaltbunker (Shearsman 2012) and in such novels as The Qliphoth (Libros Libertad 2007) and Beneath the Pleasure Zones (Mandrake of Oxford 2014).

He has made radio documentaries on aspects of the occult and paranormal featuring Colin Wilson, Francis X. King, and Iain Sinclair, among others; while the plays have been broadcast on BBC Radio 3, CBC Canada, RTE Ireland and Resonance FM and have been staged by Travesty Theatre and New Theatre Works. He has performed or presented at many venues, most recently at the Final Academy, Magickal Arte Bristol, the Moot with No Name, the Electric Palace Hastings and St Augustine’s Tower in Hackney. He has especially enjoyed collaborations whether with musicians like the late Vincent Crane or with the artist Jeremy Welsh, creating video poems like The Slow Learning and Radial City. He now lives in Hastings.

FILMS HAPPILY RECEIVED AND SHOWN. GET IN TOUCH WITH nick@thepeerhat.com AS SOON AS POSSIBLE!