Bleep

Folklore Tapes mark out their place within the lineage of England’s hidden reverse by drawing out the first volumes of the Industrial Folklore Tapes series. Sounding not a million miles away from something you may expect to discover harvesting within the archives of Nurse With Wound’s legendary United Dairies imprint or a lost Coil’s DAT from their time exploring an extensive interest in the lost rivers of London.

Despite having been cemented with a deep knowledge of the outer reaches of Devon's rich folklore heritage, 1 ½ of the labels head research duo David Chatton Barker started the imprint while based within the confines of the Lower Ormond Street Mill, South of the city centre of Manchester. An area rich with historical buildings that stand still strong from intervening centuries since the industrial revolution. Perhaps these mills and canals were the starting point for the Folklore Tapes Industrial interest? The imprint put forth the knowledge that Hannah Leighton-Boyce’s Instruments of Industry “approaches the tool as an extension of ourselves; our contact, relationship to and being in the world. It draws on the connection between Touchstones Museum’s collection of trade tools and their resting place, Thomas Robinson and Son’s, a former engineering works which now houses the archive” while Fred Helliwell’s Springs “commemorates the veiled labour and voice of the spring. The first side reveals the workshop of B.P.S Springs, featuring the men and the machines that have inhabited the space for thirty-eight years. The second side is a soundscape of tones from over ninety collected helical springs, handmade at B.P.S workshop and mounted in a circular arrangement atop a piece of wood, amplified and either plucked or oscillated with a motor.”. Yet what is most striking is the way the ghosts of the very first Folklore Tapes musical research by David Orphan & Ian Humberstone, Anworth Kirk, Sam Mcloughlin & Paper Dollhouse has seemingly returned

By going back to find a new way forward, Instruments of Industry and Spring capture some of the now long revered magik that led to the creation of the label, and in doing so reveal the influence of the vast web of haunted mills and rusty mechanical machinery that ground away slowly, endlessly churning out the spell bound sounds that fed into the imprints original formation within the cold, desolate hallways of the mills that churned out the century old spellbound echoes late at night within the unmanned hours.