Carli Jefferson and Clair Le Couteur can never be considered conventional as a study of the 18 panel fold out cover of Lunatraktors’ will confirm. Even by Lunatraktors’ standards Quilting Points: Invitations and Open Calls 2019-2025 is not a conventional album. The fourteen tracks have been remixed from recordings recovered from a damaged hard drive and comprise original compositions, reworkings of traditional songs and live improvisations.
If you haven’t listened to Lunatraktors before this album is probably not the best introduction – I’d recommend This Is Broken Folk as a starting point. Don’t get me wrong, there is some fine music here but some that is decidedly experimental and which are difficult to relate to away from their original context. Take the opener, ‘Diffraction Pattern’ which consists of the sound of a bronze statue being hit with mallets, live performance loops and the sound of a sewing machine. Once you know that it begins to make sense but it isn’t easy listening.
‘Larentalia’ concerns a Roman household god discovered in Rochester with lyrics including a Latin chant. It’s a strangely hypnotic piece which descends into cacophony. ‘Museum Studies (Queen Street Mill)’ features Carli’s clog dancing and its full explanation is best left for when you have the album. ‘Now The Time’ is the first conventional song, written to fill the gaps where all the LGBTQ+ songs should exist in the folk archive had they been written. ‘The Hoard’ is a soundscape including field recordings which imagines the burial of a Bronze Age hoard and once again the full explanation is rather too long to go into here.
‘The Boy I Love’ is a live recording of the old music hall song and hearing it sung by Clair makes you sit up and take notice in the way that a conventional female voice wouldn’t do. ‘The Truth Of Eanswythe’s Bones’, written for Folkestone Museum, commemorates the country’s first female saint and for the pnly time I felt the need of printed lyrics. Again, it was written for performance and I suspect it needs the appropriate atmosphere to flourish. ‘Life, Clay And Everything’ was written for potter Keith Brymer Jones and, although uncredited, I think that’s his voice we hear. ‘Pegasus’ is another live performance recorded for a children’s show Pegasus The Clothes Horse and I can just imagine the wonder on the audience’s faces.
Now, Lunatraktors move back to traditional music with ‘’Oss Girls’, a reworking of the Padstow May Song. ‘The Hazard Bears’ are Carli and Clair’s alter egos – you can see their wonderful costumes on the cover – featuring a snippet of ‘Copshawholme Fair’. Again the full explanation is too long to go into here. ‘St. Martin’s Land’ is a traditional song (allegedly) from Hookland (non-existent but actually in Suffolk) about green-skinned children – this is East Anglia after all. Look up the story if it pleases you.
‘Wassail’, another commission and released as a single, is self-explanatory with the song originating in Somerset and the actual wassailing occurring in Warwickshire. Finally, ‘Museum Studies (Kunsthalle Zurich)’ is another exploration of the acoustics of a particular place something which Lunatraktors place a lot of importance in, combining two live improvisations recorded in a stairwell. And this is when their computer died.
As I said, Quilting Points: Invitations and Open Calls 2019-2025 is neither conventional nor easily accessible at times. You do have to listen, study and think and it will come to you.
Dai Jeffries
Artists’ website: https://www.lunatraktors.space/
”Oss Girls’ – official video:
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