Thomas Ragsdale - Honley Civic Archives, Vol. 1 (2018)

Delving deep into a ghostly landscape, Thomas Ragsdale deconstructs an archive of improvised string ensembles guided by intimate field recordings and distant piano etudes to introduce the first in his new series ‘Honley Civic Archives’. It arrives via his new imprint Soundtracking The Void.

Stark woodlands and memories long forgotten are brought to existence through the tender piano arpeggios of ‘Hawthorn’, anchored down by a simple, restrained string, reducing it’s tone to a warm sustain with a brittle texture. It’s a sound that is present throughout the album as strings are performed in a loose, improvised manner.

This deep and introspective album touches on modern folk horror themes and the natural surroundings of nearby Yorkshire villages, drawing as much influence from William S. Burroughs and Aleister Crowley as it does William Basinski and Fennesz. Ragsdale leaves his customary electronic instrumentation behind, though still makes use of the mellotron bass of ‘Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow’ and beating TB-303 acidic bass of ‘The Craft’. Tracks were run multiple times through a reel-to-reel tape machine leaving much to pure chance and self proclaimed “machine luck”. Ragsdale says of the process ”this unpredictable method of making music yielded certain results I couldn’t control, but took full advantage of. I allowed sounds to manipulate themselves by driving them through a space echo unit over and over until it began to escape me”.

‘Honley Civic Archives Volume 1’ is accompanied by a limited addition run of reel-to-reel tapes with an improvised piece of music specifically recorded live and only once onto each tape with a movie file of the individual performance.