I'm Faye Hield, and I'm Caroline Larrington. This is episode two in the second Modern Fairies and Loathley Ladies podcast series, Fairy Time and Space.
And this seemed to be the topic that really sees the artist's imaginations most, don't you think?
I'm partly perhaps because it was just so open ended.
I think the musicians really, really went to town with this one, with the space and the timings of music and the ideas.
We were talking a lot about belief and what fairies meant and what the magic was.
And there was a lot about when you've undergone a fairy encounter, how it changes the person.
So I think that's the bit that struck the artists. How do you make somebody feel in a really visceral experience?
And music seemed a very key part of that. Yeah. And the stories suggest that the world of the fairies is a world that is very much parallel to ours.
It's one that you can enter through all worlds at very subtle points where the
two worlds kind of touch each other and the worlds are going on in parallel.
And one of the themes that really came up quite a lot in the course of the project was the sense of the fairies,
the thing you can just see out of the corner of your eyes sometimes. And that's when you have a sense of what the unseen space is.
But it was also quite important in the stories that once you slide into that other world, time moves very differently.
Definitely. So they were trying to represent that from the stories.
But I think they were also trying to find a way for us to do it, to experience it and to create a gateway into fairy.
Not just not just representing it or show it, but to make it.
So let's talk now about some of the things that the artists actually produced here.
And let's start with parallel worlds. Jim's extraordinary film to which Bonnie produced that great cello music.
So I think the music came first.
Bonnie was playing with the idea of what it's like to see things from the corner of your eye or to hear footsteps on the edges of your sound.
But when you turned to look that they've gone,
the idea that there is this parallel world that we can glimpse and sense but can't completely grab a hold of.
And so he played with cello through electronic manipulation to create this sonic world,
positioning the listener within their sonic landscape, which is inaccessible.
Let's hear some upon his music now, then. So that was Barney Moore sprains cello piece.
Parallel worlds. And when Jim was thinking about his part in the project, not just recording the performance in the sharing in the seat,
but actually his own creative work, he got a bit stuck, didn't he?
I think he found the whole idea of fairies rather peculiar. He found it very difficult.
So in those early days, we had this discussion about where we stood on the belief, the spectrum of fairies.
And Jim was firmly on the edge of, oh, my God, I'm locked in a room full of weirdos.
And he I think ecstatically he really struggled as to what he would be able to produce,
that he would stand by as an artist and be proud of within this topic that he found quite ridiculous and quite weird.
But in the end, he latched on to the tale of a little.
And that's something that we talked about in the last series.
It was interesting with all the artists, you could see a moment where the penny dropped or the switch clicked or something,
and they they actually found something that resonated with them in the stories.
And yet that moment happened with Jim.
With that tale and also hearing Barney's work, which is incredibly contemporary and feel maybe we can give you some sense of what was in the film,
even though it's not as good seeing the film itself on The Modern Fairy, its website.
So Jim starts with this room of very stark, architecturally minimalist space with lots of rectangles and playing grey walls and a child around,
I don't know, eight to 10, maybe sitting on a chair staring at this blank wall, then using some new fancy, incredibly exciting video technology.
Jim creates a weird black shape that is represents this portal that the child is fascinated by and walks up to and tries to explore.
It is so moving incredibly slowly. You get a sense of trying to feel what the child must be experiencing from this very lack of sensory
data in this room to facing this bizarre thing of the way this kind of pulses and its black,
its gleaming, it's like kind of tangled knot, but it's also sort of very dense.
And then you can see how it it pulls the boy in. So he walks all the way down that long space up to where this strange, pulsating painting is.
And then something happens and becomes transported into a world of nature and beauty and sunshine and a hazy summer day, idyllic environment.
Yes, he's in a woodland and he's with somebody who looks very much like him.
It's as if he's met his double, though. In fact, it's actually his brother.
And there's a very strange late afternoon kind of light that they're walking along with the light slanting through the trees by hedgerow.
And one boy has his arm running out the one's neck and everything looks wonderful and kind of timelessly beautiful.
How does this fit with the story of at all? Well, in it all, the boy gets shut out forever.
When the portal closes, well, what's happening in this film is that back in that hole,
back in that kind of gallery space, that twisty painting, it's gradually shrinking.
It's losing its design and then eventually it becomes blank.
So the portal to the other world has closed. And the boy can't ever get back.
Very enigmatic isn't enough. I think that's that's not a narrative that you can just tell the story of the video.
You could make your own meanings out of the film and where you sit with it.
Is it that the child has been released from a world of blindness into its idyllic haven and reunited with a happier self?
Or is it that it's been lured into a magical world through the promise of
mystery and beauty and is then trapped to not able to return to the real world?
Maybe he doesn't want to come back.
But I think there's something about the way the camera's position that and also our knowledge on the project that the two boys are Jim Zohn,
two sons, that the camera and Jim then remain outside.
And the children have vanished into this world, perhaps forever.
And there's certainly something about being a father and seeing your children in the innocence and beauty of childhood in childhood that
sort of characterised by that summer afternoon light and maybe having a sense that that's not a stage in human life that can last forever.
But it does. I think this film gave us a very strong sense that there is another place and maybe even a better place that we can't quite see.
And it's a nostalgic world of childhood innocence, maybe, that we get kind of shut out of.
You don't have to go through a magic portal in a mysterious. Gallery to reach share of the wealth.
And at times you can be aware that it is always there just hovering at the edge of your vision.
Ewan was inspired by a photograph that he took on a sleeper train going up to Scotland.
He was looking across at his companion in late slanting afternoon light,
and suddenly her shadow looked like a weird human figure in silhouette with an oddly pointed nose.
Very different from her. And he had this strange sense that the person that he thought he knew wasn't familiar
at all and that the shadow was slipping away somewhere else into another space.
And he composed this song, Sleeper. Summer sleep.
Echoes from the higher Webberley.
Link us with catching the train and is on this.
Ice and sea ice.
As the day. And this was shed.
And Santos. Just like.
Dusky size and strength, that means.
Flowing. And dusty, slightly stretch, sleepy stretch.
Break away. Smell.
Send. Nazi ice.
Shoot, shoot, beat ya, slay the trees, no crazy.
Go on. They don't happen, such as Don.
Marri loves traditional stories.
And one of the tales that particularly caught her imagination was the tale of King Hayler King Hayler with the legendary
king who went on a visit to the world of the fairies and found that he'd stayed there for 300 years on leaving.
He was given the present political talk and was told he could dismount from his
horse only when the dog jumped down from the horse and he hasn't jumped down yet.
So Hala and his men and their horses and dogs are still riding.
The king hurlers caught in space. There is no space and he's got to keep moving.
But he also moves in a different and internal time, sometimes connected with the wild hunt.
Man horses and dogs that rampaged through the skies, particularly when there's crisis.
It's part of a larger musical project on hurler that Barry began to work on.
And she connected the journeying to the Gabrial hounds as they called in her part of Yorkshire.
A pack of phantom dogs heard barking in the sky. A sign of ill omen.
Could midnight Lisa swanned and less lonely walks on Chernow's moons.
Sky No storms in the winter.
Seven wiseness. And this goes to nose.
No swatting flies. So huge.
Was this. So.
Doomed to a. Try this.
And like hurlers little dog that still hasn't jumped down.
That's a very dark idea of being stuck in a place where there's no rest, no way out.
And there's the pack of dogs that are accompanying you through the night. Similarly to Barney's playing with space and sound,
Ingar created some music that opens up possibilities of moving into a different, unseen dimension through music.
She stretched sound, speed and time up and slowing it down, given the listener a visceral sensation of being moved in a piece called Tieing Squint.
Susan. Not destroying the natural habitat.
Way you've been always interested in how to make mediæval stories into new songs, and one of your earlier songs was Sir Orfeo,
A Tale of a Woman Snatched Away by the King of the Fairies and how her husband got her back.
And in some ways, that was a kind of forerunner to this project. But still thinking about the way in which the fairy world can erupt into this one.
You turn another mediaeval romance into a song. So the knight meets his very mischiefs.
But when he breaks the taboo that he must never, ever speak of her, she vanishes and he is in real danger of being executed for insulting the queen.
And the poem opens up the question of whether the fairy lover can ever forgive him and whether she'll come back to save him.
So what made you decide to make a new song out of this very long romance, Faith?
Well, we were looking at that initial set of materials. It really struck me.
There's this huge rich seam of stories that and how few with them actually moved over into the traditional music realm.
And I thought, you know, there's been some amazing contemporary music being made here,
some really experimental sounds and some very modern interpretations of these stories.
But my background is in traditional music. And I I was interested in the idea of trying to create a fake focus on, I suppose is one way to put it,
but to create singable ballads out of this material in quite a traditional forms.
I just went for one of the big stories and set myself the task of getting my head around it and making it smaller.
I picked this song So Long Fall and I kind of had a vague gist of what it was about, but I didn't have a deep relationship with it.
And part of the whole process of turning into a song was to develop that relationship and realise what it
is in the song that needs to be kept and preserved and how you distil that into something that singable.
This was a six thousand word story written in middle English, and it ended up as a 800 plus word song.
So it had to be really reduced down,
but and translated as well into something that I could understand and wasn't just a case of reducing everything equally.
It was a case of finding the strands of passion in the song and trying to develop
a new narrative or decide what the narrative was and build it up from there.
So the whole process of reducing it down took several layers, acknowledging what I was doing at different points as well.
It's a really fascinating process to undertake, actually. And what did you think in the end was the most important thing about the song?
What did what? Could you not get rid of it? Well, there were some things that confused me in it.
So you've got this knight who's very loyal and generous and an all around good egg and you got this fairy who loves him.
And then he is seduced by the queen, but he turns her down.
And in his defence, he says, well, I love this other woman.
He was supposed to not tell anybody that this other woman existed. So he defied the fairies.
And in fairy lore, you're not supposed to go against what fairy soldiers to do or you will be punished.
And he is punished. He loses all his bicycle that he's been given and he doesn't see his true love that in the end he's going to be home for this.
But he hasn't actually done anything wrong.
He was using it in defence of his morality rather than for personal gain, although it was going to gain is keeping his head, I suppose.
So it took me a while to work out how to excuse the way it goes against what is supposed to happen with fairies.
Again, like the calling on song to soften off the edges and every line, I think in a song has to make sense to you.
Otherwise, you're going through the motions. And yet the story really, really distilled down something that made sense.
So the key themes for me were about loyalty and trust and honesty and dignity and integrity,
and that those things ultimately are rewarded and recognised. Should we hear some of the song now?
So long ball he was. I guess so.
So they're sending Broi to Squires and loads the game so free when a long ball had his father passed him by as he rode straight home to help.
And by sharing his wealth most generously, he gave so free.
He Rubin, as Paul Noble brought with his pride.
He rode away, worn, rigid and cried and saw Rose soar in the shade of a tree.
He turned in the halls hole where he found pure.
She lay like fresh, fallen snow on a cold winter's day.
She grows red. Eyes glass shong grey. She said long ball, but I kind hearted love all the notes that you play so you can see why you're okay.
La la, la, la. I should be tired. Always want to buy it here by your side profile or June choppering.
Oh, she's so kind. Oh, let's see.
Shall I see. But make not the most rewarding.
Oh my baby. Oh most. They wear this sports.
Why is this great state. That so.
Well, parole to a man strolls. At the end of the song Long Island, his lady banished to the ferry will not ever to be seen again at this point.
So a bit like in Jim's film, the ferry world may be a better place where you can find a kind of enduring happiness.
And you can escape from all the mess and corruption of this world. And indeed, you get away from the effects of time.
So in some ways, questions about time and space were easier for the musicians to seise on their imaginations were
given lots of scope when they tell us about these huge concepts that are hard to put into words,
but maybe they're somehow easier to express in music.
Music strongly linked to Time's sound passes through time in a way that visual images or the written word doesn't really evoke.
And musicians are aware of time in their playing very heavily.
And I think the ability for different sounds to change how that time is perceived is something on the periphery of every musician's conception,
whatever work they're producing. But placing it centre stage like Ingram Barny have done here is really interesting.
There's also the visceral physical element.
In the early days we were talking about how we wanted the audience to undergo a transformation and to have a physical change.
And I think the absence of literal words or imagery, the more abstract use of sound, can connect with those deeper senses in an audience.
The stories are wonderful and the words make us think in new ways. But I think the music helps us feel in new ways.
Marion Banas treatment of her life, I think especially manages to do both.
So in the next pope costs, we'll be looking at some more unsettling material from the modern ferret's project.
The theme of what happens when fairies and children come into contact with one another.
Yes, and dangerous and strange stuff. In the next episode.
So do have a listen. And don't forget to take a look at the Modern Fairies Web site,
where you can find more of our work with illustrations and a film with a
performance with lots of interesting blog posts from our office about the process.