Time Travelling With Folklore Tapes’ David Chatton Barker

“When I know that someone was hung from that tree in 1720 and that a witch lived in that house in 1620, it becomes more exciting. I’ve got inspiration. It’s like time travel.”

David Chatton Barker was first gripped by the magic of ancient storytelling when he moved to Devon to study Fine Art. It signalled the beginning of an epic, personal journey with folklore.

“It was a real catalyst. The start of an amazing gestation period for me creatively.”

He soon became wholly consumed by its allure, fascinated with landscape, oral tradition and re-interpretations of the past in present-day form. The old made new. David is, in some ways, an embodiment of his passion: he has the urgent invention of a modern-day artist yet is inspired by a deep connection to a primal past.

“I think we’re all susceptible to psychic imprints and we receive them in different ways. It could just be a feeling we get from a place. Animals have a super-talent for it. A lot of people say hauntings happen as an energy, because of a big punctuation in the timeline. So murders and suicide are big ones, they leave a mark. They charge the area. Birth too. A baby’s birth is a traumatic thing. A hospital is super-charged. These imprints are like a lightning strike that cuts through. Like stone tape theories.”

David’s free-flowing, stream-of-consciousness is beguiling. It’s the kind of fluid, lateral thinking that has steered Folklore Tapes, a project he started with Ian Humberstone in 2011, into such rich, interesting and obscure territories. In that time, they have released a number of highly-experimental, thought-provoking pieces of music and accompanying art across a vast range of themes – Dartmoor, devils, Halloween, black dog traditions, rocks, plants, you name it.

But it all started with Two Witches.

“I met Ian as he was leaving Exeter. He was a big musician on the DIY scene there. We both had a love of cassettes for their immediacy. We’re of that generation, on the edge of a more analogue, physical way of recording and releasing stuff. We thought ‘let’s do a tape project – one side each’.”

For a theme, they chose witchcraft. They researched two reputed witches who lived around the Devon area, Hannah Henley and Mariann Voaden, and sonically interpreted their lives, “like creating a soundtrack to a film.”

Lacking a traditional background in music, David was drawn towards more unusual, experimental forms, using percussive instruments, harmonium, synthesizer, field recordings and clock chimes.

“I went down a fruitful path of making my own instruments. I started cobbling things together out of the natural environment, inspired by world cultures. I remember being in Morocco and there was a marimba made out of hacksaw blades. That was cool.”

Around this time he also discovered contact microphones and started amplifying his home-made instruments with little piezo mics, with startling results.

“They become totally different beasts. They can create menacing, sinister drone-type things.”

Two Witches was never initially intended for release. It was more of a personal, postal project between David and Ian. But, delighted with the finished artefact, they decided to do a limited edition of 30, each with a unique book-style packaging.

“At art school, I’d got an Observers’ Book of Music, a hardback book, and hollowed it out, cut through all the pages, so a tape fitted in, like you’re concealing a weapon. So that became the presentation box. We glued all the pages together and created a little A6 pamphlet. It’s not just about music. From the start, I said this is not a label, it’s a project and it incorporates a label, because we do exhibitions, books, live performances. And we called ourselves researchers, not musicians.”

By this point, David had a job at Finders Keepers Records. They instantly loved it there, put it on sale in the shop and it sold out in an hour. The appeal was immediate. So David and Ian created more, across different themes – graves, rituals, birds, inland water – all under the umbrella ‘Devon Folklore Tapes’.

From Devon, David and Ian naturally spidered outwards. They were soon creating a series of ‘Lancashire Folklore Tapes’, Cheshire, Oxfordshire, Somerset.

David’s latest project is a two-year subscription model covering all 48 counties in England – one cassette per month, each side of a cassette dedicated to a county. Each county is then researched and creatively interpreted by a different artist.

“Everyone picks a theme, like hauntings, ancient monuments, holy wells, or whatever. It’s 15 minutes per side, which isn’t that long. So it depends how immersed you want to get. I wouldn’t blame anyone for just doing a field recording in an old church.”

David is deliberately loose with his direction, making each artist collaboration fresh and different. But when it comes to the presentation of the finished item, he is meticulous. With the 48-counties project, you get a little cut out of a of an old OS map of each place and then a presentation storage box to house the full collection of tapes. There’s a tiny piece of imagery on the spine of each tape, so when they all slot in they create one complete image.

“It’s a daisy wheel, like a hexafoil, a protective symbol often used in witchcraft. The daisy wheel is a beautiful thing. It’s six-petaled. It’s very geometric. You can make them with a compass. People used to make them with shears. They would crudely mark them into the wood.”

David’s attention to detail is quite astonishing. For a Halloween tape, he included a pumpkin seed in the presentation casing. Subsequently, he orchestrated a 32-track plant-based series – each track limited to a minute and a half, purposefully creating an assault of many varied musical styles – with a seed of each plant included in the packaging.

“The covers were relief prints of pressed plants, inked up and then printed on the cover, so each one was different and a direct print from the plant. It’s always been really important, that direct engagement with the subject material. For the Pendle Witch compilation, you got a pressed nettle.”

Connection to place is vital to David. It’s something he is endlessly absorbed by and a topic he has been consistently drawn to, not just through the English counties but the world over.

“In Aboriginal culture, they orientated and mapped out the landscape by Songlines. They had a song for all the different markers in the landscape. Like an ancient tree standing on its own, that would be a tune. The hill in the distance shaped like a pregnant woman, that had a tune. The river had a tune. An area of flowers. As they walked through the landscape, they would be constantly singing different tunes. I’m trying to do that myself with the project, kindling specific little areas in the landscape.”

It’s certainly a hugely far-reaching goal. It’s one he is, therefore, keen to share out, collaboration being key.

“With folklore, it’s endless. I hope when I’m gone, the project itself will just have its own momentum. We’ve developed an approach to creating artwork, not just sounds, not just music, but also the whole package. So, yeah, it’s way beyond me.”