Bleep

The Wizard Of Wardle’s The Queen Of The Well (A Faerie Tale) gets a vinyl pressing having previously emerged as a cassette on Lancashire Folklore Tapes. Even before you get to the music this edition of The Queen of The Well is a gorgeous piece of work - a 10” vinyl in a gold-painted woodcut sleeve, cut and numbered by hand and containing a sixteen-page booklet. But just you wait until you put this thing on…

Mystery surrounds The Wizard Of Wardle’s identity, but what we can say for sure is that The Queen Of The Well is a radio play that weaves together folkloric myths, legends and tales native to Lancashire. The cast includes a brass band, a school choir and Lancastrian sonic historians like Sam McLoughlin (N.Racker) and Alison Cooper (Magpahi, though here she features as ‘The Naiad’). A diverse set indeed, and unsurprisingly the listening experience is far stranger than your average audiobook. Musically the record draws on various native folk styles - groaning medieval drones, percussion group jigs and hallucinatory electronic soundscapes all set the scene at different points. Laced throughout the record we get the incantatory story telling. It’s a heady brew, one that joins the dots between the north’s traditional musics and contemporaries like Richard Dawson, James Leyland Kirby and the Ghost Box Records roster.

The Queen Of The Well (A Faerie Tale) is one for fans of the wyrd and eerie - and any budding folk historians out there.