Much music is steeped in the history of the place where it was made, and here Jonathan Sharp, the musician behind this project, trawls the borderlands of fiction, imagination, and the real places written about in the Plague Dogs where he went to collect sounds for the album.
A perfect project for delving into the hauntology of the past
If you’ve ever gone on a music hunting binge looking for works that relate to the ideas of psychogeography and hauntology, all while in an electronic vein, chances are you’ve stumbled upon the mysterious Heartwood Institute. Heartwood Institute even has a special name for their efforts in the field: hauntronica.
This record does take us into the field on a trip with recorder in hand. Also it takes us into the fictional world of Richard Adam’s 1977 novel, the Plagues Dogs. It explores the boundaries between the very real place where the novel is set, in Cumbria, one of the counties of northern England on the border of Scotland, and the imagined world of the novel.
I love field recordings, and I love listening to music with a sense of place. Much music is steeped in the history of the place where it was made, and here Jonathan Sharp, the musician behind this project, trawls the borderlands of fiction, imagination, and the real places written about in the Plague Dogs where he went to collect sounds for the album. It helps that Sharp is based there, and this is a perfect project for delving into the hauntology of the past, by taking Plague Dogs as a theme, and the psychogeography of the place, by going out into the landscape.
Most casual readers, at least on this side of the pond, remember Richard Adams for Watership Down. As well, they should. It was his first and most famous novel, but he followed it up with Shardik, an imaginative fantasy novel where a bear is a man character, and the worship of the bear is central to the plot.
Plague Dogs followed and follows the friendship between two dogs, Rowf and Snitter, who escape from an animal research station and are pursued both by the government and the media. Adam’s later novels include Maia, a prequel to Shardik, and a historical novel about the American Civil War called Traveller.
Into the realms of pulsing hauntronic music ::
“Jonathan focused on a series of key locations and events from the book, aiming to encapsulate these with the music. He spent several afternoons out and about in the Lake District doing location recordings. Some of these were used as they were, others were heavily manipulated and turned into synth and sampler patches. Many of the synth sounds were made from scratch: Jonathan describes his process as building the noises he wants to use from the ground up.”
The idea of using the recordings and building them into patches in the studio is a fascinating way of further refracting and working with the material, of extending the visionary words of Adams into the realms of pulsing hauntronic music.
The music itself is like listening to the after effects of a bad trip, or the breakdown into psychosis of someone who has been experimented upon, and their subsequent journey through the chaos of escape and into the aftermath of freedom, but always on the run to safety. The canine synthesizer covers everything in loud swashes of analog technicolor. A sibilant gurgling hiss hides below the surface as the album soundtracks its way through rural perambulations. Oldschool bleep-bleep sequencers squeal over a hazy atmosphere of half-remembered dream vapor. Eerie effects are used to create a spookadelic bed of sound that changes as the dog’s journey across the soundscape of fells and hills.
It’s a record for a good cause, too. All profits are donated to Animal Rescue Cumbria. “This feels particularly apt, given that the fellwalker, author and illustrator Alfred Wainwright, who drew the original illustrations for The Plague Dogs, was closely involved with Animal Rescue Cumbria and donated the royalties from many of his books to them.”
The glorious electronic synaesthesia is full display on this phantasmagoric concoction of studio wizardry.
Plague Dogs is available on Fold Police Recordings. [Bandcamp]
