Bleep

Two Ruins, the seventh release in the endlessly imaginative Devon Folklore Tapes series, features a pair of side-long sonic explorations from R.D. Kirdiv and S.V. Skirling, both of whom are long-term members of the Folklore Tapes ensemble. The pair combine on-site improvisations, exploratory fieldwork, drone techniques and electronic processing to conjure in sound the decaying buildings of the record’s title.

Frithelstock Priory, a former Augustinian fraternity that has been abandoned for hundreds of years, is the inspiration for Two Ruins’ A-side. Kirdiv and Skirling create a strange and unsettling work here, one whose shadowy samples and spectral drones invoke the eeriness of the priory ruins. The hauntological aesthetic of The Caretaker and Ghost Box Records can be felt strongly, as are Nurse With Wound’s occult concrete collages and Prurient’s doomy industrialism.

Subsequent track ‘Okehampton Castle’ is possibly even more ghoulish than ‘Frithelstock Priory’. And so it should be - the castle itself is said to be haunted by a spirit who rides in a carriage constructed from the bones of her supposed victims. Kirdiv and Skirling render this nightmarish vision with vivid intensity, the rattling, screeching soundscapes which they construct from both organic and electronic tones making it seem as if they have summoned the spectre themselves. ‘Okehampton Castle’ is not one to listen to if you’re afraid of the dark.

Two Ruins is another eerie masterpiece of hauntological composition from the wonderful Folklore Tapes.