Below is a short video of me recording ‘The Past Has a Life in the Forest’ in Epping Forest’s Queen Elizabeth’s Hunting Lodge. This work is track 6 on the album/sound installation and is inspired by the Iron Age hillfort Loughton Camp. (See my blog post about the history of Loughton Camp).
You can order the album and the graphic score that we are performing from on my Bandcamp page.
Many thanks to cellist Jo Quail for helping me bring this work to life, and to Ryan Pearce (videographer) and Thom Ashworth (recording engineer).
The Loughton Camp map, drawn by BH Cowper in the late 19th century was a graphic score waiting to happen, and the forest location is perfect for a bit of psychogeographic pondering. The hillfort has distinct archaeological features; the earthwork ditches and banks are still prominent, as are the entrances. Silt can be found in the soil where a spring used to be. Then there’s the folklore: the supposed location of Turpin’s cave and the strange form of old pollarded trees, lopped by the billhooks of 19th century ‘commoners’. All these layers of the past add to the spirit of the place today.
There’s a magical, hazy light that appears through the trees on the east side of the camp, and long shadows of branches that stretch claw-like along the forest floor. The colour palette is silver, bronze, brown and green, and the sounds are of aeroplanes, birds, children playing on their bikes and the distant hum of the M25. All of these things have been absorbed into Part II Ancient Earthworks. The graphic score is split into eight sections (From the ground – Shadow claws – Hazy light – Streamlet – Pollarded trees – Forest floor – Turpin – Into the ground) each with a different sound world that relates to a particular area of the camp.
There are two song extracts, no. 5 ‘Pollarded trees’ is a fragment taken from The Lopper and the Landgrabber and for Turpin’s Cave I’ve used the melody from folk song Turpin Hero. The work is written for electric violin and electric cello plus effects, and was recorded live in Epping Forest’s Queen Elizabeth’s Hunting Lodge in 2019.