Widdershins

Widdershins is the follow-up album to Child of the Hollow Way, due for release in March 2025.  It has some similarities and references to its older sibling, and has emerged via a similar process, drawing on our collective unconscious, but is a self-contained piece of work that ventures further into the world of "progressive" music and away from its predecessor's more folk-orientated roots.

Tracks on the album range from explorations of some of the darker, more challenging spaces around us, to a homage to "Bedlam" (Border Morris) and one of its major contributors in the last 35 years, the late George Speller.  However, the entire project is glued together by an awareness of liminal spaces, fairies, ghosts and memories; and transformative events.

The album is again created, arranged, pre-produced and performed by me and arranged, produced, engineered and mixed by Steve Paine at Myrddin Studio in South Wales.  It also includes contributions from Debbie Chapman (vocals), Lucy Speller (flute) and Tali Paine (guitar).

This is what Andrew has to say about Widdershins...

"For as long as I can remember, music has formed a significant part of my life and is responsible for creating who I am.  From Hildegard of Bingen to Zero 7,  the harp tunes of Turlough O’Carolan to Japanese neo-punk, Arthur Lee and Love to Rage Against the Machine, Singing in the Rain to Berlin era Bowie, R Vaughan Williams to Capercaillie, Buddy Holly to Robert Wyatt,  I’ve listened to everything I can lay my ears on.  It has made for a life full of experiences and memories but has also created “issues” for me when I’ve tried to position myself within a genre to avoid “rattling cages” by breaking boundaries or challenging preconceptions. Those days are over now.

Running alongside that experience has been an acceptance, again from a very early age, that there is something more out there than that which we take for granted in our everyday lives.  “Other” spaces, magical places, shared memories and things that make the back of your neck tingle.  I slowly became aware of the pathways, the thresholds and the subliminal moments through which you can gain access to, or at least some greater understanding of, these places.  How you need to turn against the tide, go back around yourself again, and look in another direction – but you must always tread carefully or you may slip on the dusty stairs or fall into an icy puddle!

My previous album, Child of the Hollow Way, was started during Covid and developed in the long, often dark, hours via streams of consciousness and quite a lot of research, and was finally pulled together by my good friend, Steve Paine, into a coherent, if very diverse, piece of work. 

Widdershins is different.  I now know (to some degree at least) where I need to go to seek out the stories and the narrative that binds me into those other places.  I’ve discovered a world similar to that found in the Norse or Old English sagas, where truth and myth, reality and dream, and then and now, converge and become indistinct from each other.  So within Widdershins you’ll find stories of faeries, cunning folk, elemental spirits and residual hauntings that lurk in the corner of your eye, entwined with recollections of real people, events, personal experiences and emotions.  Sometimes in separate songs but occasionally within the same one (even the same verse) – it’s up to you to decide which is which.

It also reflects my love of old tunes and customs, drones and soundscapes, and mixing genres.  Widdershins is a teller of tales but the tales can be what you want them to be.  I just hope that you enjoy it in whatever way suits you at the time. 

The genre?  Music!"