Myth & Ritual: Music of the Rites
A playlist to accompany our Myth & Ritual season by our Projectionist, Matt Pinder
Matt Pinder
“...to reverence the music and the drama and the rituals of the old gods...”
Lord Summerisle
It is well known amongst fae folk; for the old magic to be efficacious you have to feel it in your bones and your guts and your blood. So, I, a projectionist, a fool, and of my own free will, have been crowned King of the Playlists for a season.
The challenge is to raise the animal spirits of the Picture House, set the scene and get you in the mood for each of our fantastic folkloric screenings. What follows is our choice pick of sounds for before each screening, and then just a few of the artists we will play around the entire venue for the duration of the season, or until our venue coordinators and volunteers are cast into a raving delirium, whichever be the sooner...
The Blood on Satan’s Claw
English folk, haunting and rambunctious by turns, so we’re going with the period-appropriate Silly Wizard:
The Wicker Man
Title says it all:
Kill List
Soundtrack is spooky, so we’re going out to our favourite abandoned cabin in the woods, playing the old cassette tape we found under the floorboards and summoning the big daddy with the horns:
The Night of The Demon
While Kate Bush uses a sample from the film on the Hounds of Love album, and as much as I'm a fan, it's not quite the right vibe for the function. Instead, we’re going with the spooky chthonic ambience of Lustmord to set the scene for The Evolution of Horror podcast team, and it starts with a titular sample from the film:
The Lighthouse
Sea Shanties or Coastal Ambience? It's a tough choice but as we’ve got a mixer, we are combining them into an ambient seascape. I’ll give you the ingredients so you can recreate the recipe for yourself at home. Goes great with lobster, so I'm told...
We will return to Ewan again, but for now, here are some salty songs of the sea folk (content warning for a bad word in song 8, which we won’t be including on the day. At least you know it’s historically accurate...):
The Lost Okoroshi
With an Afro-funk-heavy soundtrack, we agree with the soundtrack composer's Shay Who’s inspiration and have given some well-deserved airtime to Nigerian genius William Onyeabor:
The White Reindeer
Sami traditional songs are called Joiks, which are vocal sketches or semi-improvised poetry about the singers' experiences. They can describe people, places and events, and are highly personal and personalised compositions, with each Sami having their own joiks they like to sing to and for themselves. On Ean máššan, Professor Áslak A. Somby sing the joiks of his parents, which detail caricatures of friends and family, tales of reindeer herding and other facets of life in the far north:
Celia
This is a toughie; white Australia owes much of its folk heritage to Merrie Olde England so there’s less to call authentically ‘straya. Fortunately, Burl has us covered:
Song of The Sea
Grab your fiddle and your flute, it’s time for some traditional Irish Folk in the Sliabh Luachra style:
Celestial Wives of the Meadow Mari
Only a fraction of Mari culture survived the forced conversion processes of Ivan the Terrible's Christianity and, later, Soviet Atheism, and whilst oral traditions kept the old ways alive, there are few recordings from that period. Instead, there are a slew of '90s eurobeat pop covers, and only latterly has a more traditional Mari sound begun to find its way onto the internet as music festivals and cultural foundations rebuild and recover from what remains:
The Outcasts
We return to the Emerald Isle with this six-time Grammy Award-winning band of instrumentalists:
A month is a long time to fill with music for a venue. Fortunately, the gods have smiled and the harvest has been bountiful:
You ate a funny mushroom but it’s going ok, so far...
You can hear why he was picked as a soundtrack contributor to the piracy and parkour game Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag:
To call Bert the Pentangle guitarist is to somewhat undersell his impact and influence on modern folk music. Whilst his output was prolific – 21 solo albums plus countless collaborations besides Pentangle - Avocet was his personal favourite:
Gentle like a breeze, effortless like the passing of the summer days:
Acid folk inspired by The Wicker Man, warm and welcoming at first, then darkening like the dying day as it progresses. Also one of our prior pre-show picks for recent roaming rights documentary Our Land:
Another strong contender for The Wicker Man pre-show music. Feels like something playing in the background of a Scarfolk pub:
I can't help returning to this one over and over again, it’s just so perfect:
(Debate rages over whether the Muppet version goes harder. In a nod to our forthcoming No Strings On Me: Cinema's Living Puppet season, you decide:
Top comment: music to listen to whilst treating open wounds with figs and onions:
Björk-like quirkiness, but swapping out the volcanic landscapes of Iceland for the dark and ancient glades of an English woodland:
Every blossom must die to make way for the fruit. The fruit must rot to make way for the seed. The seed must break for the shoot to spring forth. So it must be, sad songs make way for joy...
The Staves – Dead and Born and Grown:
A favourite of Mike, our head of projection, Jackson C. Frank had the kind of career blues legends are made of: released one groundbreaking album, followed by a descent into madness and an early death by his own hand. Classic. Ed Sheeran, take note!
Joshua Burnside got a lot of play during May of 2024 for our screenings of That They May Face The Sun Rising. The playlist is still available here on our YouTube page.
Ewan MacColl And Peggy Seeger – Traditional Songs and Ballads
And now we come full circle, because the songs on this album were drawn from the collection of premier archivist and historian of British folk music, Frank Kidson. Born in Leeds and living most of his life in a house in Chapeltown, Frank’s former home is now adorned with a blue plaque in commemoration of his life and work. And I know this because it’s on my street and I pass it every day:
The wheel turns, the ritual is complete, and now this part of our journey is at its end. I certainly didn’t expect it would lead back to my very own street and home, certainly there’s magic in that. Hopefully you’ve made some new musical companions along the way and are now feeling the magic in the air. I’m off to climb into a giant wicker projector, it’s the only way to ensure sell-out screenings, so I'm told...
Blessed be,
Matt
