Papal Bull - I Played the Bronze Ball/Wasdale Head. A 7” lathe cut. No indication which side you’re putting down. But I got it first time.

It starts with a voice and a clatter. Or it starts with a hiss. Pick your side. It holds back. Voices repeat and chatter. Voices barely understood or not at all. A sense of dissolution, but fully formed.

And I’m in places. I’m in the city. Specifically a house or apartment, or maybe a venue - a pub or a gallery. I’m in the countryside where I grew up. Hills and limestone. The shifting light. Shapes and noises you can’t make sense of. Your brain jumps to conclusions. Pareidolia.

If I wanted to troll you I’d mention New Weird Britain, or Folk Horror, or Hauntology or some other simplified journalistic label signifying nothing.

If I were even more of a tosser than I actually am I’d say urban folk, or electric primitives. Because we all know a neat label is a substitute for real engagement.

If I wanted to flesh out a little more with the first associations that crossed my transom I’d mention the atmosphere of Tall Dwarfs’ Paul’s Place - an actual song a world away from these tracks, but with echoes. The percussive rattle throttled back. Or I’d mention the lingering echoes of Jeanette Winterson’s The Daylight Gate - from inside the lives of those victimised by the Pendle Witch Trials.

But these mislead. It starts with a voice and a clatter. Or it starts with a hiss. Pick your side. It holds back. Voices repeat and chatter. Voices barely understood or not at all. A sense of dissolution, but fully formed.

And I’m in places. I’m in the city. Specifically a house or apartment, or maybe a venue - a pub or a gallery. I’m in the countryside where I grew up. Hills and limestone. The shifting light. Shapes and noises you can’t make sense of. Your brain jumps to conclusions. Pareidolia.

There’s a tug to these tracks. A sense they’re being pulled back. I Played the Bronze Ball is most propulsive, the most musical, though it has the least music. Chatter and clatter and moans and wails. Sound poetry. Words rearranged. Seeing eye, the thinking I.

The seeing eye enters memory and shutters between here - this room, the streets outside, my work, gigs I’ve been to, houses, apartments. And then North Yorkshire, back home then. The Three Peaks, cliffs and limestone pavements variously white, black or grey depending on the weather, the rain. Invisible in mist.

Displaced. Liminal. Push and pull. Disquieting sounds in the dark. Or through the walls. Or in your head walking down the pavement. You know this. You’ve heard it before. Not this track, but the sensations. It ends too soon.

Wasdale Head slows and quiets. Restrained but no less uneasy for it. Where does it start? When does it start? It’s always been here. The hiss in your ears. The pulse in your ears. Lying awake in the dark confused between the placeless heres of your dreams and the physical now.

Voice and language again. A subterranean broadcast. I keep losing the sense. Muttering, animal sounds. Breath and rumbles. Restrained. Insidious. The shifting light. Yellow storms, shining fog, dark days and rain, hammering sun.

It’s less familiar. Less easily apprehended. Crepuscular. The sense of movement is blurred. And the sound, the hiss creeps under your scalp.

Disjointed, dissociative, melancholy. Elements that don’t quite fit together. This is good though. I don’t know the process here - composition, improvisation, assembled from elements after recording - but it feel like a painting. Non-representational, allusive. Colours and contours half-seen through subsequent layers. Blues and blacks and greys and purples.

Listen. Get it and listen. Make up your own stories

Matt Dalby/Tear Fet, Santiago’s Dead Wasp

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Rogue despatches from the rustle and gargle territories. Who’s that knocking at the door? Morse clumps batter gruff chants on pub tables. I PLAYED THE BRONZE BALL. Shove ha’penny in Peak District caverns. THE BALL PLAYED BRONZE I. Tag team dippers in the subterranean lakes. U get me? From Soho to Brighton. Perception stymied by Greg Corso fiddling with the voice app on his phone. THE BRONZE I BALL PLAYED. Dunno about that fellah, but that hi score’s gonna take some beating. PLAYED I BALL BRONZE THE. Just not in the right order.

Wake up, fix up. Runny eggs unspooling in the hot plate. Fat griddle sizzle. Squished moo-cow vamps on the stuck orchestra. This is the voice of long ago. Can you tell who it is yet. Scrub through smoke. Supple wrist. Dogs crawl through hedgerows of memory. Pitter. Patter. Fog nostrils, tar in the throat. Bump. Slurred stuff bundled up. Good boy. Stroke strings, oil the chain. What do you mean you still don’t know. What do you mean you still don’t know. What do you mean you still don’t know.

Paul Margree, We Need No Swords