Moving and uplifting music that defies genre or predictable structure.
Ghostwriter, the nom de music of writer Mark Brend, has intermittently produced music in an ambient folk space. This time regular confederates Suzy Mangion, Andrew Rumsey and Michael Weston King have turned their attention to five pieces that draw on a shared love of antique evangelical hymns and spiritual songs.
Michael Weston-King, a well-known name to AUK readers turns in a version of ‘Satan, Your Kingdom Must Come Down’ which borders on the menacing. The words, and the ethereal instruments fade away to be replaced by marching drums suggesting that the whole song was in fact a battle cry. His performance here is way ahead of Robert Plant’s version from some years ago.
The 10-minute ‘I Stand Amazed’ features a slightly hesitant-sounding pump organ which could have come from some ancient chapel. That leads us to think about the album title. A tremulant is a device on a pipe organ which creates tremolo or vibrato effects. The words are a setting of Charles Hutchinson Gabriel’s Nineteenth Century hymn. ‘I stand amazed in the presence.’ With the chorus. “Oh, how marvellous. Oh, How wonderful And my song shall ever be. Oh, how marvellous. Oh, How wonderful. Is my Savior’s love for me” repeated through the first half of the piece and reprised at the end. The central part sounds like nothing so much as the sort of background music an organist would play before services commence. You can almost smell the mustiness of a seldom-used rural church and get a sense of its small congregation.
The just over a minute ‘Here,’ with its backwards piano serves as a bridge to the next piece. ‘Often Forfeit’ is a reflection on the ‘Oh What Peace We Often Forfeit’ line in the hymn, ‘What a Friend we have in Jesus.’ It closes with a section of almost Rober Fripp-like soundscapes.
The album closes with another extended piece. ‘The Anchor’ starts with a spoken word section from Michael Weston-King. He brings a gravity that leads into a simple almost folk/prog section that is replaced by abstract percussion and feedback and a ship’s bell, which sounds like it may be intended to represent a stormy sea. When Suzy Mangion’s voice arrives over a drone, she is singing the words of another hymn from the 1800s, ‘We Have an Anchor.’ “Will your anchor hold in the storms of life. When the clouds unfold their wings of strife When the strong tides lift and the cables strain. Will your anchor drift, or firm remain?” And the preceding section falls into place. The anchor in the context of the song is of course Jesus. Her solo vocal is supported as the song progresses by male harmonies, with the drone swelling over the words and guitar and percussion punctuating her words. A lengthy coda reprising the folk/prog guitar and piano-led section from earlier in the piece has the most occasional musical structure of the album, by way of returning us to a place of more conventional music.
The cover art of stacked chairs in (presumably) a church hall and the lo-fi nature of the music leads you to the vision of the four participants drawn from some diverse walks of life meeting to create devotional music of a sort that is seldom heard over the volume of commercial work. A quite astonishing feat.
But that’s not all.
Ghostwriter “Clarion Mixture” (SubExotic/Wick Hollow, 2024)
Released at the same time is ‘Clarion Mixture.’ Four individual tracks by the Ghostwriter collaborators responding to the themes from ‘Tremulant.’ A limited-edition vinyl EP, which was available for only 10 days, Mark Brend told AUK that it will still be available for streaming and download. Brend’s own ‘Hymn Of Warnings’ is an abstract price that serves as a manifesto for the project. Suzy Mangion’s ‘Be Still My Soul’ is more in the style of her solo work, delicate piano and voice. ‘A Spirit Glided Past My Face’ an unaccompanied vocal by Andrew Rumsey. In an interview Rumsey has said that that Evensong is his favourite form of church service, and this would fit into that style easily. We end where we began in the Deep South with Michael Weston-King’s guitar and harmonica offering a wonderful bluesy take on the hymn popularised by the Carter Family, ‘I Can’t Feel At Home In This World Anymore.’
This may not be AUK’s normal review fare in some ways, but with so much Country and Bluegrass music having its roots in church liturgy these are interpretations that connects traditional hymns to settings that could only be created in the mid-21st century.
