Music and landscape have always had a kinetic
relationship, as essayed in my post Songs like the grass are
evergreen. Perhaps
this is a constant well-spring, but there seems to currently be a strong riple of creativity - a particular shout out here to Roman Roads IV-XI by Land Observations and Richard Skelton.
Pastoral punk is not a sub-genre I have come across before, but this is the musical credo of Way Through, as exemplified by their invigorating and highly original forthcoming album Clapper Is Still.
In
their own words the band are "informed by the field as much as the
flyover, Way Through write songs which phase in and out with guitar, tapes,
damaged drums and vocals. Using wrong-footed repetition, rapid interplay and
free-looping happenstance the band create a ragged yet intuitive tapestry of
sound. Their songs walk the streets of market towns, wait forever at bus stops
and lose themselves in edgelands." Contemporary folk in fact.
Each
song on the new album is concerned with mythical and marginal pieces of English
landscape, and 'the vast array of elegiac components Way Through have
discovered locked within the English landscape'. Each track is recorded in the
place in question with an accompanying image of said place (examples pictured here).
As a
sampler to the album have a listen to Roughting Linn which is about a
hidden slab of prehistoric rock in Northumberland: https://soundcloud.com/upset-the-rhythm/way-through-roughting-linn
