Nice to be reminded that I have this. My database shows I bought it at Cecil Sharp House in 2005, at the same time as Lieder für Kaspar Hauser and You Need Not Braid Your Hair For Me, I Have Not Come A-Wooing.
Strange to be reminded, too, that I was already saying "I want everything that [Appendix Out band leader, Alasdair] Roberts has ever recorded" back in 2006. Strange, that is, bearing in mind that my fanaticism took a step up in 2007 with the release of The Amber Gatherers, and another in 2009 with his astonishing live performances and new songs.
And yet I'm only slowly absorbing the Appendix Out catalogue (which counts for the majority of Alasdair's recordings up to 2002), hence remaining unfamiliar with this 30-minute EP.
If I'd come across Travels in Constants first, instead of A Warm and Yeasty Corner, the ensemble's other EP, I might never have given Appendix Out or Alasdair Roberts another listen. But since I now know the broader context, I approach this one with special relish. Because it lets its freak flag fly!
That freaky avant-garde element is never far away in Alasdair's work, as Stewart Lee notes in this review of Alasdair's interpretation of traditional songs. Like one of those parasitic beings in an early Cronenberg film, it makes its presence felt just under the skin, threatening to burst out when you least want it to. Except, like the viewer whose latent perversity Cronenberg exposes, I'd actually like to see more of it.
Last December Alasdair played as part of the Barbican's Twisted Christmas revue show. From my entirely impartial perspective, he stole the show. Accompanied by piper Donald Lindsay, and dressed in heavy druidic robes, Alasdair treated us to an incantation of The Twelve Days of Yule, which he credited to Robert Graves, Sir James Frazer and Mircea Eliade.
To exhibit my ignorance further, I'd failed to recognise until now that all these strands were fully present in Alasdair's work nearly ten years previously.
Track 2 on this EP, Speech is basically a drone accompanying Gareth Eggie reading an extract from Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough. The extract in question refers to a Beltane custom "in the parish of Callander" (where Roberts was brought up), involving human sacrifices to Baal.
I'm tempted to say that Track 3, Ritual Ingestion of a Yellow Rhizome is unique in its blending of Donald Lindsey's piping and krautrock beats. But this is the Internet, and somewhere some bright spark will be googling "pibroch krautrock" for the explicit purpose of outing dullards like me. (So, compounding my foolishness, I try to anticipate this and find, indeed, there are whole albums of this stuff.)
Oh, yes, I'm lapping this up. And I can never be happy until I've heard that song about "Theodor Adorno descending from the firmament in the guise of Orion to save the protagonist from entanglement in a hawthorn (wherein he's ventured to try to win a red ruby) with the magical power of his fiddling, before sewing him some new clothes and disappearing." Now that you know it exists — at least in the imagination — neither, I think, can you.
| Buy via discogs.com |
 MusicBrainz entry for this albumRate Your Music entry for this album Some metadata about this album at Last.fm |
Comments