Bleep

Fae Transit is an expedition into a realm of faerie music Sam McLoughlin introduced us to in his contribution to Folklore Tapes’ Swifter than the Moon’s Sphere. If Green and Brown was a sighting of a faerie parade, Fae Transit is a full abduction, a journey through a woodland inhabited by spirits and haunted by the living.

The album is written entirely for harmonium, nylon guitar, hand percussion and dictaphone, with harmonium and finger-plucked guitar continually exchanging roles as melodic and chordal instruments. The interweaving dialogue between these instruments has a chamber-like intensity, though the music flows with simple, rustic tunes singing above any complexity.

If you have ideas in your mind of what faerie sounds like, this probably isn’t it. The full-throated harmonium drones, triplet rhythms and meandering melodies are more McKenna’s machine elves than Tinker Bell. But it’s calm. An air of nostalgia and melancholy pervades the carnivalesque music, which is wistful, and occasionally menacing, but never violent.

Then there’s the anomalous clicks, pops and whirrs of the dictaphone, seemingly rewinding or fast-forwarding time itself, curiously framing the pastoral musings of pipe and string. Is it the listener’s ear, or is the music searching for itself from beyond some unfathomable rift? This is deeply personal music that is at once a unique utterance and, unmistakably, Sam Mcloughlin’s work.