After pretty much thoroughly enjoying Temple Music’s recent Volume II release (also reviewed for Judas Kiss), I was very happy to receive this nifty little item from Polish label Shining Day Records. Green Man Alpha is the first in a projected series of seven Temple Music releases (running, presumably, up to Green Man Eta), with each release conceptually focused on the Green Man imagery associated with a specific location. For Green Man Alpha, this location is St Peter’s Church in Barton-upon-Humber, which is an historic town in Lincolnshire on the banks of the Humber estuary. The church has Green Men carvings on column capitals. I don’t know this church, but as it happens I am very familiar with the Humber estuary. I used to have relatives living in Hessle, a small Yorkshire town just outside Hull, and directly across the river from Barton-upon-Humber. Many times I have walked down to the shore of the Humber and gazed out across its brooding brown expanse and the immense 1400-metre span of the famous Humber Suspension Bridge which runs between Barton and Hessle. As Temple Music’s sleeve notes point out, this liminal, windswept landscape where the land slips away into the tidal river is a strange and lonely place, not particularly welcoming or inviting, but possessed of a bleak grandeur.

The music of Green Man Alpha is presented as a single 51-minute piece, which of course makes it difficult to dip in and out of – better to relax and let its ambient currents wash over you. For this release, Alan Trench (also of Orchis and Twelve Thousand Days) and Stephen Robinson were joined by Tracy Jeffery, who contributes harp and vocals. And as with Volume II, Temple Music employ a number of acoustic instruments alongside keyboards, guitar and bass, specifically lyre, dulcimer, rainstick, harmonium and a Lapp frame drum. The piece opens with rhythmic washes of cymbal, ebbing and flowing like the tidal currents of the Humber itself. As it develops, the music remains dark, eerie, and remote without being utterly malevolent. Loosely strummed guitar is backed with undulating, hypnotic keyboards, as the cymbal keeps a steady, lapping beat. Muted crashes of thunder and distant dulcimer notes appear around the half-hour point. Tracy Jeffery’s harp and keening, siren-like, abstract vocals are introduced about 38 minutes in the piece, along with long droning harmonium notes. Fragmented melodies appear and overlap, collapsing back on themselves in involuted, closed structures with minimal linear progression. The piece fades out after a series of deep, booming drum beats.

The aspect of the Green Man evoked by this music is certainly not a comfortable or cuddly one, which is in keeping not only with the bleakness of the Humber estuary, but also with the Green Man’s status as a vegetation spirit, a personification of the essentially amoral and blind forces of nature. It’s possible, if a bit pedantic, to take issue with Temple Music’s characterisation of the Green Man as a Saxon deity (there are no Green Man images earlier than the Middle Ages, and no evidence that he was ever considered to be a deity of any sort), but let it pass.

Green Man Alpha is available from Shining Day in a limited edition of just 50 copies, and it comes very nicely packaged in a hand-painted and hand-printed textured card sleeve. This release, as well as the next three volumes in the series, is also available as an mp3 download from the folk music site Woven Wheat Whispers, although strangely the title of the piece is different there – it’s called The Green Man Project: Barton-Upon-Humber. Given that this Shining Day art edition is so limited, though, it’s worth bearing this in mind as a possibility if you don’t manage to obtain a copy of the CD-R.

www.shiningday.pl

www.myspace.com/templemusick 

www.wovenwheatwhispers.co.uk