Manchester Folk Horror Festival VI

The Sixth Annual Manchester Folk Horror Festival, continues our steady, controlled (?) descent into the labyrinth. In a time when radical or so called ‘insane’ ideas must be considered and re/discovered (with the stakes being nothing less than the survival of life upon Earth), the Manchester Folk Horror Festival cannot be a celebration of images and meanings fetishised by academics and pop culture addicts. It must be a process, or praxis. We are severed from the earth and from a deeper truth that extends beyond the merely mechanical. And coming back into that relationship, is a terrifying experience.

Contained in this occurrence of the Festival, is a reaching for something like magic in action. Terrifying? Yes. Fun? Also yes. And hopefully, dare we say, a very Mancunian occurrence.

As usual, we’ve stirred up a series of adjectives and nouns to form something approaching a theme. This year, it’s ‘True Hallucinations & The Myth Of History’, almost referencing Terence McKenna and almost referencing Hauntology. (Whaddya think we are, professionals?) We put forward the idea that multiple realities sit upon one and with one another, all true simultaneously, requiring only a shift in perspective to enter places at once, utterly new and utterly familiar. Not a multiverse conceived to even out the books, but a wider, more impossible world, wherein miracles are a matter of relation. What indeed, is the city to the bee?

History and the unreachable now, remain ghostly images, memories or stories which conjure images. An increasingly devastated British landscape of bound hills; smog horizoned cityscapes; landfills; quarries encroaching upon the sacred; skeletal pylons and incongruous wind turbines, leads us to a kind of spiritual desolation. And yet, in spite of this ravaging, an opportunity is presented, for as this process continues unabated, we de-couple from the image of things as we have come to know them. The careful illusion of time and place is shattered and new histories and new liminal realities begin to emerge. Our relationship changes and we become like new born exotic moths, native to a fractal apocalypse. Can we come to terms with our responsibility and our capability to imagine and indeed, be imagined?

FEATURING

ANGELINE MORRISON- Angeline Morrison is a singer, multi-instrumentalist and songwriter who explores traditional song with a deep love, respect and curiosity. Angeline mostly makes music
in the genres of wyrd folk and psych folk, her work infused with elements of soul music, literature, ‘60s beat pop sounds, folklore, myth and the supernatural.

With a feral approach, a handmade sonic aesthetic and a belief in the importance of tenderness, Angeline’s original compositions and re-stitchings of traditional songs focus on storytelling and the small things that often go unnoticed. Sounds like solitude, memory, nostalgia, a rainy walk amongst trees…

In July 2022, Angeline was announced as the fourth winner of the prestigious Christian Raphael Prize at Cambridge Folk Festival, which generously supports the development of emerging talent in the folk genre. In December 2022 The Sorrow Songs: Folk Songs of Black British Experience was voted No 1 Folk album of the year in The Guardian.

You can also hear Angeline as part of alt-folk duo We Are Muffy with Nick Duffy (of The Lilac Time), and psych-folk duo Rowan : Morrison with The Rowan Amber Mill.

The Sorrow Songs: Folk Songs of Black British Experience (released October 2022, Topic Records) is a work of re-storying. The historic Black presence in the UK dates back to at least Roman times, yet is often hidden, forgotten or unacknowledged. The populations of enslaved African people and their descendants in the USA have their bodies of folk song, which are vitally important for containing histories, expressing feelings, giving voice and claiming presence… but the Black ancestors of the UK have no equivalent body of song. The Sorrow Songs begins to address this. It is a gift to the forgotten Black ancestors of these islands, and to the folk community here today. The album uses history and imagination to tell stories of UK Black ancestors in the sonic style of UK traditional and folk music.

SHE THE THRONE- She The Throne is a profound mediation between noise and music, soundscape and soundtrack, and abrasion and sublimity, imbuing meaning in each, absent from either alone. Immersive, compelling, disjointed and in harmony, they present one of Manchester’s finest portals into the other – a place of dreadful immanence and beauty.

BURD ELLEN is a project featuring Debbie Armour (Alasdair Roberts, Green Ribbons) and Gayle Brogan (Pefkin, Electroscope). The group uses traditional song to explore and evoke dark landscapes and deep stories. Innovative instrumentation, drone and sound-wash support detailed vocal work to create a unique sonic atmosphere.

A Tarot Of The Green Wood is their third studio album, released Oct 2022. Debbie Armour says “I’m a long time collector and lover of tarot, and I’ve recently become drawn to the idea of finding parallels between interpretation of traditional song and the art of divination. Gayle and I have brought together a new collection of songs that reflect the ideas, archetypes and imagery of the Major Arcana.” Developed on residency at Sage Gateshead, the album also features guest appearances from Irish piper Ian Lynch (Fire Draw Near, Lankum) and Newcastle-based composer Mark Wardlaw (Kenosist, The Old Police House)

A Tarot Of The Green Wood entered the Official UK Folk Album charts at number 17. It was number 5 in The Guardian’s Best Folk Albums 2022, and also made Best of Year lists from Folk Radio UK, Concrete Islands, Record Crates United and more. Songlines magazine gave it a coveted Top Of The World spot and the singles received regular plays on BBC6 Music, BBC Radio3 and BBC Radio Scotland.

Burd Ellen have appeared at Cambridge Folk Festival, Celtic Connections, Fanø Free Folk Festival, Cafe Oto, The Glad Cafe and many other stages in the UK and Europe. They are carving out a sonically adventurous niche, but one that is informed by a deep love and respect for traditional song.
​
“The most innovative duo in folk” – Folk Radio UK. (Best Albums of 2020 & 2022)
“Magnificent” – 8/10, Uncut Magazine
“One of the finest folk explorers” – The Wire Magazine
“Wonderful!” – Cerys Matthews, BBC Radio 6 Music
“Dripping with strangeness and unease” – The Guardian (Top 10 Folk Albums 2020 & 2022)

WOODEN TAPES-In May 2023, musician and writer, Tim Maycox’s Wooden Tape project delivered the album ‘Music From Another Place’ … a timeless collection of music that recalls pastoral lands, summer months and folk rituals.
Having played in various bands, supporting acts such as Teeth of the Sea and Mainliner and playing Liverpool International Festival of Psychedelia, Tim has recently turned his attention to writing a set of pieces based on his memories of children’s television themes coupled with flashes of acid folk and classic OST music of the 1970’s & 80’s. Sonically the album is awash with picked acoustic guitars, percussive adornments, warm synth pads and organ. The titles themselves, suggest lost soundtracks or memories of forgotten TV themes.

FUTURES WE LOST is the dark post-industrial, cinematic techno soundscape of electronic artist and producer Doug Gordon. Rising from the ashes of 2020’s grief and inspired by the artist’s ancestral roots under the crumbling mills and industrial scars of the northern English landscape; the self-titled upcoming debut album explores these post-industrial graveyards and dystopian future visions through the lens of our present day neo technological horrors. Sometimes a brutalist techno monolith to this mechanised slavery nightmare, sometimes a dark ambient soundtrack to the distortion and living death of our dreams. A sonic memorial to all those futures we lost…

THE MANIFESTATION GROUP- Described as unique, timeless and devastating, The Manifestation Group explore the world of songs as living entities and the audience as lightning rod for the miraculaous. Folky, psychedelic, DIY, hauntological strangeness and beauty.

BACK OF THE BRAIN-These proto-primordial sonic adventurers made a big impact on the people in attendance at their first gig last October. Drawing upon the artistic talents of some of the most talented and idiosyncratic artists in Manchester, a genuine sense of the evocation of the unknown is palpably present.

STEVE NINER Driving force behind Moelyci, his principal areas of work are environmental and cultural,with a particular emphasis on exploring the roots of the Northern European peoples ancestral trauma and disconnection from the other than human world and the ongoing repercussions of that around the world. He possesses a deep love of what’s known as folk religion, spirituality and magic from all around the world and it is in the long term study of that , which informs his inspirational work.

MAYA BRAKNELL-WATSON is an interdisciplinary artist, poet and researcher.

Her work over the past 8 years has been informed by her shamanic studies, work with the Wixarika (Huichol) and Mazatec tribes in Mexico, and her work as a psychedelic parapsychology researcher in the study of N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT), entity encounters, and ‘other worlds’ with Dr David Luke at Greenwich University.

She has performed and exhibited at Breaking Convention and the Tate Britain, and is the host of Psychedelicacies, an online lecture series. She is currently working with Second Sight Healing, a neoshamanic organisation dedicated to the rediscovery of the animistic traditions of our land here in the UK, and is a lecturer on the Semantrix Sessions, a course on the intersection between Language and Psychedelics.

Walking between the worlds of the arts, science and the occult, she combines media and investigative techniques from each to inform and articulate one another in the investigation of ontology, consciousness and altered states, interconnectivity, the human condition and its relation to the environment, otherness and mortality.

She describes her practise and research as contemporary Memento Mori (‘remember you will die’), and explores what that means in a
time of mass ecocide, destruction and extinction.

ADRIAN REYNOLDS is a writer, film maker, tarot deck designer, artist and life coach, whose current Untraditional Stories project, is finding increasing traction in an increasingly fracture world. These are tales for today, shaped by myth, pop culture, planet and place.

‘AVANT TERROR presents: Häxan and the Horror of the Witch Hunts’ Ana K Miller

In Ana’s own words “An audiovisual exploration. Avant-terror presents a sound collage of music, film, fairytales and plays where witches and pagans are represented as evil/ depraved. Over the top I play music/film clips/soundtracks/plays that reveal the violence of the witch hunts. Towards the end, I weave in musical explorations of modern forms of violence against women, situating the witch-hunts within a wider history. This is played as a soundtrack to large parts of Benjamin Christenson’s classic film Häxan, which I have collaged together to fit the music”

MORE FILMS BY

Sian Williams
Harri Shanahan & Anne Louise Kershaw
Alena Lake
Whitney Bluzma

ALSO:

Scary tales- Interactive Red Riding Hood With Pied Piper – Traë England-Shortt

Stage:

Sam Collinge
Alice Godliman
Rosie Logosi
Jess Coulson
Performances by scary tales folk