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haptalaonI've assembled an easy-accessible playlist of some of the best spoken-word meditation tracks I've found in my journeys so far. These are, hands down, some of my best discoveries during my Reading and the sorts of non-pagan-yet-deeply-pagan beauty I want to bring into the community as essential, sacred texts. They are the sounds of this sort of thing.
It should be stressed that you take these one at a time, and they are not background music
, but for using in some way as a focus or meditative tool. Additionally, youtube sonic quality sucks - I've added links to where you can buy uncompressed versions of the albums for ones you especially like, because headphone music or a real turntable is a blessing for this kind of "lose yourself in sonic strangeness" practice.
What's on the list?
On Vanishing Land
Stellar/land
I actually think the other half of this is missing on youtube atm, so it's well worth getting a full copy if you can. Astonishingly, it's still available on vinyl, and I cannot believe my luck in having one. The first time I heard it I was alone in the house and easily slipped into a motion trance as the clouds rolled down the mountains in the greyness of the day.
The sea, the beach, the land, the ghostliness of radar, hidden Viking burials, memory, the eerie and sleep, all rooted around a walk that the artists took one day.
If you enjoy it, your next steps are Mark Fisher's The Weird and the Eerie
and Justin Barton's Hidden Valleys
.
Chanctonbury Rings
Solar-Stellar/land
Absolutely essential listening, and again, inexplicably still available on vinyl as well as a download - which I recommend, because the youtube version is nothing on how astonishingly beautiful the textures of it are.
Combining words from Julian Hopper's Old Weird Albion
, with the folk music of Sharron Krauss, with the hauntological spookiness of Belbury Poly, this is a story of Hopper's relationship with the Rings - a place on the South Downs - where time has gone soft at the crossroads
. Childhood memories, dead friends, morris dancers, the ancientness of the soil. Wonderful stuff.
If you enjoy it, you can get Old Weird Albion
as a book, or look into Krauss or the Ghost Box label for more music with a similar mood. Both Krauss and Hopper have a podcast about landscapes.
Inventions for Radio
Stellar
The next section are a lot of tracks by Delia Derbyshire/Barry Bermange - electronic ambient with voices. Covering moods such as a belief in god, dreaming and the sea, this is pure Stellar dissociative grey, a dissolution of the self into other words and the subconscious, brooding and cold-against-the-skin like wet rain and dry yellow cloud.
There are a lot of these, and they're broken down into 3 sets: The Dreams
, Amor Dei
, and The Afterlife
. I would recommend taking one of these at a time, and plan for aftercare.
The Seasons
Something of a darling of the haunted generation set, this is actual vintage 70s weird. It was written for Music and Movement classes in primary schools: the teacher would put it on, and then you would have to dance to it and try and convey the shapes of the story. The past is a weird place, and as Bob Fischer - haunted generation guru - says If it came within a country mile of a primary school in 2018, it would be surrounded by police marksmen and destroyed with a controlled explosion.
Anyway, I think the whole album all at once is a Bit Much. However, taking one of these to incorporate into ritual or as a visionary exercise has been effective for me. And besides, this is the only one on the playlist that was literally written
for you to listen to, and perform interpretive dance to - so why not try? If you would like the text of the poems, DM me - as I got the CD specifically for the lyric insert.
The Seasons
was revived and championed by Trunk Records, who re-release forgotten gems; if you ever find an original, it is Worth Something, but not nearly as much as it could be worth to you.
