The Witching Tale – The Witching Tale

Bellissima

It was only a matter of time until Katharine Blake (Miranda Sex Garden and The Mediæval Bæbes) and Michael J York (Téléplasmiste, The Utopia Strong, Current 93 and Coil) would conjoin a bewitching whole, gather a few musical friends into the equation to produce this haunting debut that gathers the periphery around you in a stretchy equilibrium.

A sensitivity to subject matter, “The Beckoning” serpents in flute and sitar and tanpura, lust-filled perspectives from a twelfth-century Arabian poetess flowing through a dribbling confetti of electronics as the Siamese-sliver of “Voila” ignites each short sentence in a petroleum plume of vocal.

As introductions go, it’s a brilliant starting point that denotes the crafted sensibilities at play here. A vitality that flows into the slumbering colours of “Roundelay”, Katharine’s vocals glowing within a cross-hatch of dancing light, a soft old-style patina of electronics complemented by an earthy ethnicity. It’s a track full of doubling rumination and the odd nursery rhyme that give me echoes of The Mediæval Bæbes’ “Salva Nos” and beyond.

Hers is a voice that burns with a richness removed from that bluesy warble most of the world seems so aimlessly fixated on. A plaintive pleasure that salts “Dahna”‘s strange unison, illumined in sliding detunes and pattering percussives, throws unnatural light over “The Queen Rides Alone” as its repeated lines celeste in miraged apparition puckered in satelliting space-age.

The way “The City In the Sea”, born from a verse by the emperor of Gothic sensibilities, Edgar Allan Poe, takes your breath away in a slow-cooked tease of ghostly bagpipes and / or hurdy-gurdy. A sluicing solstice, backgrounding a spoken narrative (as if plucked from Current 93’s Of Ruine Or Some Blazing Starre) drawing you down the forest’s path, unfolding into a potent punch that has Katharine angeling the architecture to a growing medieval rub.

Really liking the overpowering warmth of this release, the way the instrumentation seems to pebble your consciousness in outward ripples, its songs lit from within its saw-seeing tonals like trapped phantoms. A feeling effectively clinging to that loose anchorage of glinting frets on “The Web Is Broken”, seancing the aura-arrowed contours, those dissipating vocals that amber your head in shifting multiples. A sense of sorcery far removed from the Hammer House scream, silvering a promise of light’s return in the encroaching mid-winter gloom.

The gyrating colour of “Where The Sea Snakes Curl” (another of this album’s many high points) teetering to a pulsing Téléplasmiste-like telegram that babels a brilliant focus, saturated in tangerine-dreamed æthers and leaf-falling echo. A flow that attentively desert-shores the narrative, its edges elsewhere flying to return-ticket a strange waltz with the words, vividly hooking its demise to hissing shingle. A labour of love that gazelles “The Falling Garden” in whistling lullaby and zithered fall, leaving the fragile finality of the title track to seal the deal with a magic that you struggle to keep hold of, but ultimately want to possess.

The Witching Tale is a beautiful thing, reanimating the past to enlighten the future.

-Michael Rodham-Heaps-

(The Witching Tale is available to download and order at Bandcamp).