Ditchfield Plus

A few months ago I spent a week in Ditchfield UK producing a friends album. We stayed in an ancient blacksmiths cottage, surrounded by layers and layers of Historical Sediment. Old beams, the stone garden wall, a sainsburys bag, bookshelves with faded penguin paperbacks...like a geological cocoon of Britishness. If i'm being honest, this was the first time I've really enjoyed being in the UK. The weather was predictably crappy, damp, cold but...it didn't seem to bother me as much as it usually does. I was ensourcelled by the town and the fireplace and going out to the pub every other night. Something else was there too: "Ditchfield" is a mashed modernization of the Olde English "dic" (dyke) and "feld" (meadow/field). The TOWN Ditchfield is also home to a topographical phenomenon known as "Devils Dyke". Apparently the site of the last stand of paganism in the UK before everything succommed to the Cross. Ley Lines, standing stones, a ritual to summon the Devil and a Devil Proof Cairn...all in this one place. I wandered around between recording takes and captured the meadow, the forest, some high voltage lines hoping to trap some of that energy. I used a device called The Box Of Uncertainty (made by Hugh, just up the road from the blacksmiths cottage) to pull the sounds apart. The Box is a delay/glitch/granular unit and it's beautiful. What The Box really does is decouple sound from linear time. I wanted to be able to hear these things through the centuries like the layer of odds and ends and architecture i felt around me in that place. I played some guitar and synths over the results. The last piece is a recording of the Blitz, October 1940, in the very same place. I fed that into the Box and heard the bombers buzzing over a small army of pagan holdouts and then again over deer and badgers hundreds of hears before that. I'm not exactly sure why I made this or what drove me to work so much on it. I think maybe it's because I want to translate these almost spiritual, deep time feelings into sound, something I can freeze in place and share. I hope you guys enjoy the experiment and thank you....

❤️🫡🐺