The Delaware Road

Buried Treasure

The slick satin soft-back cover – a sense of luxury housed in a warm bakelite grey, that Festival of Britain motif fanning out in ’50s spirographics. This is a beautiful artefact, a labour of love from Alan Gubby’s Buried Treasure label, an ode to those pioneering pre-digital days and more.

The story starts in the searchlights of May 1941 in the basement of Delaware Studios, the scene of a possible weapon against the Luftwaffe’s shadow. Droning transmissions and writhing bodies — an occultist ritual cut dangerously short, the recorded evidence sealed away…

Written like a stage play, each chapter is more intriguing than the last, radiating dots from this mysterious ritual. Dolly Dolly’s (David Yates’s artistic persona) poems on each chapter’s end creeping like a crack of light from behind an opening doorway. The story drifts into the swinging ’60s, echoes of Radiophonic re-invention unfold (the parallels to Delia Derbyshire and John Baker in plain sight) in quarter-inch tape and cigarette smoke, rows of spliced loops hanging from the walls, the perfect incubator for that unfinished wartime ritual to be re-awakened. The story’s a good one, loose but vivid, as the all controlling Big Brother corporation attempts to snuff things out, consequently feeding the future insurrection that would follow.

Reading through, something seeps between the lines, your imagination leaking into the many further lines of enquiry listed. An opportunity to dig that little bit deeper into the flesh of the story, and maybe invent your own. After all, things like this should inspire, and this inspires by the bucket load, mines a sense of Englishness far removed from all that Brexit rubbish that’s mired our sense of self recently.

The double-page collages (reminiscent of DIY cassette art) that herald each chapter would make a great series of A1 posters in their own right, particularly the dynamics of the Sound Mirrors one. The illustrators involved have done a great job, given the words plenty of breathing space, graphical slivers bubbling your eyeballs like an overcooked Michael Moorcock cover.

The cross-hatched illustrations accompanying the written word giving people of a certain age (me included) the hauntological pangs. The postcards and mini-posters of the deluxe version giving things a valuable splash of colour, plus a tiny clear vinyl audio surprise that lifts the lid on that wartime dark magick that serpents these pages.

The scrapbook-like mood boards of the latter pages feed back on The Delaware Road‘s creation, full of alternative artworks and concepting, then moving into photographic montages of Buried Treasures’s sonic gatherings, including two pages of my own snaps taken at that unforgettable festival of riches that was Ritual And Resistance on Salisbury Plain a few years back.

The Delaware Road is a taste of wyrd Britannia that I’ll keep retuning to again and again.

-Michael Rodham-Heaps-

Read more about The Delaware Road here.