I always liked the wrong music for the countryside. It’s not that I dislike the guitar and the mandolin, haunting vocals, phrasing from yesteryear, the tabor or the flute: it’s more that the feeling I get when I look into the Peak District – the Dales, the night sky, the towering clouds that are higher than skyscrapers – is brought to life more completely by synthesizer. For reasons I can’t explain, a slow sweep through the frequencies on a Jupiter or an expanding, fizzing pad from a Juno interlocks more finely with the roll of the hills, with the effects of loving and living and dying on the planet’s surface and with the portions of life that it’s a pleasure to remember.
When we’re looking at the land, folk music is usually the soundtrack that comes to us and folk music has a great way with stories. It’s easy to fall into history when you’re listening to someone tell you a tale over the tea chest and it’s always people you visualise and what they do and who they kill and where they go… And why not? The landscape is full of old stories about murder and drinking and myths and history that may or may not be real, and that make existence richer just by being there and entering into your imaginative worlds. Black Dogs, the King Of The Wind and Jenny Greenteeth are all characters I’d hate to evict.
Dance music vocals don’t lend themselves to stories and I would even say that they can be antithetical to traditional storytelling. I think moody, minor key dance music without vocals is the best kind of music for evoking the Peak District landscapes and the space left by absent vocals is a space that you can use to inject your own myths and stories, to build your own history in a swirl of warm pads and strings.
Often, when I grab people’s lapels and rattle on about this subject, I’m thinking of the Circulation album, Colours. It’s an easy-to-find example of electronic music that enhances the ebb and syncs with the flow of the landscape and within its’ moods, you can feel the roil and tilt of the Peak District’s surface and the way that life is both bad and good, sad and happy all at the same time. The ideal listening time is in the car, at night or the early morning, somewhere in the Derbyshire deeps. Each track is named after a colour and after a while, the land and the music interlock and make something bigger and new and on good days, from somewhere in the spaces between things, a tiny reflection of heaven seems to glimmer.
In Nottingham, many years ago, there was a guy called Wilf. He was a music guy through and through who went to techno meet-ups (not just club nights – places to talk about and discuss techno) and believed that people should be given the option of new music and new experiences and he loved the opportunity to play his records to strangers because someone might find something new that they loved. He was murdered in a botched robbery and at his funeral, we played Strings Of Life in the church and there were too many people to fit into it so they spilled out into the city streets and beyond. And while Derrick May’s early work rattled through the church’s dome, over Wilf’s coffin and between the cloisters it was clear to me that the richness of instrumental electronics – the deep, warm and temperamentally ambiguous wash of synth pads and chords – gifts the right listener with a feeling that is the same as the one that comes from contemplating hillsides, lifespans, skies that reach to space and feelings that don’t really have a name.
Wilf positioned the sound of Circulation as a descendent of Detroit techno and I agree with him. It will always be fascinating to me that people making music in industrial Detroit in the 80’s and 90’s found a formula that evokes the English countryside – can you imagine working in a cavernous factory, between stamping machines and glowing sparks and hearing sounds in your head that other people will love, copy and use to make sense of their own world thousands of miles away? Personally, I suspect there are a few people here in Sheffield who can.
One time, I heard The Pogues’ medley version of Rocky Road To Dublin as I crested a wave of rocks on top of Derwent Edge while I was running the 9 Edges. It was hot and the air was hazy and there were tiny things floating in it that could have been insects, plant debris, something from a film or just the product of an exhausted and happy mind. The sun hurt my eyes, the fiddle-line swept through my skull and my sense of the world collapsed into joy and a sense of forever. Something in me knew that the vocals (the lyrics to Galway Races are what comes after that section) would puncture my dream and replace it with someone else’s, so I let the instrumental section loop a while until my id replaced it with Polygon Window instead.
I think Carl Craig’s remix of Domina, played on the stereo while the car bleeds into a summer evening – that congeals and gets thick around Winnat’s Pass as you drive over it towards home – makes you feel like you’re made of the same thing as the night.