What’s that squawling? The birth of a musical genre? No. Don’t worry. …Although, if one was so minded, this second work by the unnamed music collective responsible for 2009’s Boy Inkwell would be a good candidate for ushering in, what, Naturepunk? Chirpdrone? Flensegaze?
Apologies: Invent A Scene is an old game. Whether or not this goes down as a classic is moot, of course, history’s judgement being questionable, but it deserves to. It is an astonishing piece of work. A coagulum of deconstructed animal calls and nerd-pleasing reference: here is Bubba Sparxxx’s scandalously underrated Deliverance; there aTelecine’s alt-fi output; Kathleen Ferrier; Steeleye Span; Ben Frost; Arrested Development (though this last more, it feels like, for rurality’s than aurality’s sake). And the bingo does not stop there. But if you haven’t been distracted pretty fast, through listening, if you’re still playing by track three, your soul is dead.
The opener, ‘Where to Begin? (Fucking Sunup)’, starts with (uncredited) singing, in the notorious nasal register of traditional folk, then has those voices go through the most grotesque and occult distortions, taking them apart and repeating refrains track-to-track, sometimes a sound-anatomy lesson, sometimes a hex. In ‘Barn Door’ and ‘Bolted’ both, the sampled vocals engage in call-and-response with themselves, in the first over disturbingly stochastic clapping, in the latter to a lick finally identifiable as from Al Green’s ‘Take Me to the River’. And basses are bickering. And a surpeti broods. And so on.
This is a short album, crammed with short tracks. Four in a row, though, share a single unbroken rhythm, making them quartets of a single, larger, unnamed piece. The beat starts seconds before the first chords of ‘This Boscage, 1’, continues unbroken through ‘This Boscage, 2’, ‘Sedate/Shun’, and on through, and outlasting, ‘I Dig Deep with My Gnarled Claws’. This is the standout track on The Lightship and the Birds, a truly beautiful (and surprisingly danceable) sequence of plucked cello, muffled ululation and machine drone. The sleeve notes (for so, even in these download days, they are labelled) make it clear that this last is constructed from agricultural engines at work in the fields. This is not industrial but agro-industrial music.
Aggro? The pun at first seems misplaced: that underlying beat, the soft-shoe-shuffle-like breathy rhythm, sounds if anything joyful. But slowly, slowly, certain repeated louder-than-other thumps stand out. The noise is not some lightly brushed drum, the listener realises, but air-filled feathers, hitting something. Attention creeps back to the album’s cover art, and there grows a horrible suspicion that we have been bobbing our heads, have been getting down, to recordings of confused birds slamming into glass, disoriented by light shed from behind it, at night.
The two last tracks underline this suppressed violence of this post-rural funk. The penultimate, and the only one in which lyrics are discernible, is a thundering arrangement of Sydney Carter’s dissident hymn ‘Standing in The Rain’, surely the only piece of religious music written in a voice the hymn itself despises for its simpering articulation of Christian hypocrisy. The last is called, with simultaneous scorn and appropriateness, ‘Harvest Festival’. You can’t not nod to its baleful, catchy, ripped-up snips of autumnal folksongs and animal barks, but you won’t like yourself for doing so. And there will be no more country walks for you when you’ve metabolised this.
