WSOHOIDPS

With Christopher Tipton & Claire Titley of Way Through & Upset The Rhythm–Part I: Way Through
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For me, the key thing about Way Through is the band’s ability to keenly conjure place.  I am, I think, always on the lookout for a certain sort of landscape.  The kind that make you feel microscopic in the face of history, like less than an atom.  The kind that are almost nourishing in their profundity.  That is, a palpable feeling that could be described as a presence, brought about through accidental collisions of circumstance and geography, over time, without which a place wouldn’t exist as such, but would, instead, be merely space in nature.  We–our plans, conflicts, successes, failures–mark the world in this way, perhaps indelibly.  And, it seems, a space once stained will attract more and more, unique accumulations of stains, silt on a riverbed.  We are, I’m sure, pulled to the psychic residue of past endeavors, compelled to add our own.  So, I suppose what I’m looking for is a sense of place, a real feeling of it, rather than any specific physical location.  

And I suppose I’ve been aware of this my whole life, at least subconsciously (I am from Detroit, one of the placiest cities in America), but it was really made clear–my need for this sort of landscape–in 2001, when I was twenty-two, living in London, studying (mostly) archaeology and the history of Roman Britain.  Now, this required numerous trips to various dig sites in and around Northumberland, most of which were so mediated as to create a disconnect between what was happening at the space and the place itself, despite our “backstage” access.  It wasn’t until we–oh, this is going to sound so standard, so pat, so guidebook, but it wasn’t until we walked Hadrian’s Wall for a good, long stretch that I had what must have been an epiphany of place.  It was intense, like mainlining history.  I’m pretty sure I wasn’t the only one who felt it.  One girl had a panic attack.  It was magnificent.

This type of feeling isn’t necessarily, irrevocably linked to travel.  Sometimes, pretty rarely, it can be brought on by a work of art, but it almost never happens when I’m watching a film or looking at a picture.  Mostly, the experience is too literal–We are showing this to you–I might long to go there, but don’t feel like I am there, or have been there.  Books bring about the sensation a bit more often, but music is best.  When triggered by music, it’s almost synesthetic, but instead of colorful visions, there’s this potent sense of place.  This, exactly this, is how the music of Way Through feels.  And last year’s Clapper Is Still, an exploration of England via its places, is their masterpiece thus far.





Way Through is the duo of Christopher Tipton (vocals, guitar, samples) and Claire Titley (vocals, drums).  In the fall of 2003, they founded the legendary, London-based live music promoter, Upset The Rhythm.  In 2005, they started a label, dropping seminal records by Future Islands, BARR, No Age, Gary War, and many others.  Both have been involved in bands for ages, eventually forming Way Through in 2010. 

The band’s sound, like everything the duo has had a hand in, is very DIY, but not really in the way most people think of it today.  Clapper Is Still isn’t a record full of reverb, room sound, tape hiss, and distortion.  It doesn’t sound particularly lo-fi.  How it sounds is honest.  Everything is upfront, clean in the mix.  Guitar and drums dance around field recordings and each other, each is an integral part of the composition.  There is no excess.  The vocals, both sung and spoken word, are strong in the mix, most of the lyrics easily discernable.  Christopher mostly sings, Claire mostly speaks.  His voice is super distinctive, highly emotive.  Hers is calm, soothing.  The influence of British folkways is apparent, but their sound is also rooted in a kind of post-everything, punk approach.  The band’s called it “pastoral punk.”  I think it fits pretty well, and it’s one of the reasons why their ability to evoke a strong feeling of place is so exceptional.  They do so without long, instrumental passages, orchestral maneuvers, or any of the “cinematic” tropes that bands typically use–some more successfully than others–in an attempt to convey a sense of place and/or narrative.  Way Through’s approach is comparatively minimal, letting lyrics do their fair share of the heavy lifting, and, as a result, it’s quite idiosyncratic.

Clapper Is Still was born out of travel.  Notes were taken, sounds recorded.  Place names became song titles, the character of each reflecting its namesake–Dedham Vale, Imber & Tyneham, Stoke Poges, et al.  So, the sound of the record varies wildly from track to track, but is unified by Way Through’s methodology and the overarching subject matter.  Clapper plays like the distillation of a very real Englishness, conveying what it’s like to occupy the storied locales of England at present, while constantly aware of Britain’s deep history.  If this sounds like a niche record for anglophiles and history buffs, it’s not.  Lyrically, the album is so open and poetic that anyone interested in exploring the spaces we occupy will be enthralled.  Musically, the record is often thrilling, wildly out of step with most current trends in independent music.  Even the sleeve nails it.  The front:  a photo of a horse on a hill that overlooks green pastures cut through by a slate-grey roadway extending into the distance.  The back: a map, an itinerary of the journey contained within.  Inside, there’s a booklet full of photos, too.  These images act as a generous and ideal preface for the listener.  The end result sets Clapper among those rare LPs that bring together music, concept, and packaging seamlessly.  It creates a holistic experience as rich as the places it explores.  

Way Through’s music could be equally at home in a basement or gallery, but by refusing to limit themselves to typical venues and modes of performance, the group has ensured that its live experience doesn’t begin and end with a merch table in a sweaty club.  In 2012, they were invited to create a piece engaging with Patrick Keiller’s The Robinson Institute installation in Tate Britain’s Duveen Gallery.  Way Through responded with the Tate Processional, an inspired mixed-media performance, which is discussed in some detail below.

I recently got in touch with Christopher and Claire to ask them about Way Through, Clapper Is Still, their work with Tate Britain, and Upset The Rhythm.  This is part one of a two part interview, in which we discuss all things Way Through.  Part two will focus on things Upset.
  

I.  On the creation of Clapper Is Still 

Christopher: When we started Way Through we knew instinctually that we wanted to commit to a project that could just as easily open a door and stand outside of just being music.  I think we both see Way Through more as a dialogue, allowing us to explore in sound, song, poetry and photography all the narratives that most interest us about place.  So for such a “conceptual band,” primarily dealing with notions of landscape, the total picture is important to us. We want to reflect in each song its array of unseen belongings, like the field recordings, notes on scraps of paper, clouded ideas, and rain-splashed instruments that have to align to make the track possible, we want to map the process, we want the process to map ourselves.  So, maybe we should’ve included clods of turf, dog-eared postcards, destroyed shoes, and receipts for petrol in the packaging too!

Claire: With Way Through our main aim has always been to communicate ideas, so we’ve never wanted to disguise ourselves in the music.  There is a strangely disarming directness about the recordings, referencing the sincerity felt in traditional folk song, and I think that’s an attempt to make the songs our own.  We’ve wanted to make something that was about us and our own experiences, something that feels genuine and intelligible.  The way in which all the songs were written involved taking notes, photographs, and recordings whilst in situ.  That way not only is each song anchored in its location, but it’s also playing a direct part in the creation of the song.  For instance, the drum beat on “Roughting Linn” is derived from a field recording of our footsteps tracking down the stone monument through woodland whilst getting lost.

Christopher: That’s right, and the central guitar riff of “Imber & Tyneham” is very much of two halves, with each half being composed on site at each military village, and then reconciled into a single phrase.  I like the idea that the two places are duetting somehow.  Sometimes it feels like we want to sink into the places we write about and let them inhabit us, almost akin to ideas of channeling the atmosphere or aura of an environment directly into music.  It’s about letting the place write the music, rather than simply soundtracking somewhere.

II.  On Clapper‘s evocative exploration of Englishness, history, and the reality of place

Claire: Clapper Is Still was written throughout 2012 in the main part, and when I say written that’s not limited to sitting down with pen in hand and drum stick in the other, but rather more focused on researching the locations we wanted to feature on the record and physically going there with the aim of encapsulating what the experience was honestly like.  So at least half of the album was written whilst walking without compass or doubling back in a car down an unlikely track.

Christopher: I think that’s why most of the places on the record have almost an air of expectation about them.  They are all sites collected together with an initially loose theme of heritage and preservation in the English landscape, and so, with some prior knowledge of their significance in mind, we’d visit them and come up against reality like a slap in the face.  The incongruity of what they were meant to be like and what they actually were like made for interesting comparison, and I think some of my favourite lyrics from the album detail the almost mundane suburban backdrops for these expectations, like the chain-link fencing and pedestrian chicanes of “Westonzoyland” that border the waterlogged battlefield of Sedgemoor, or the newly built close crammed with dismal saplings in the infamous plague village of Eyam, roadcones and rock gardens jostling with self-sacrifice.  We’re interested in sites first and then sights second.

Claire: There’s certainly a thread of deep topology in Way Through. We’re both very interested in histories and how what comes before seems to leave its presence.  Clapper Is Still became an album about how the land can be marked, or play host to these presences in a number of ways. Mythologies, notoriety, found text, graffiti, lost letters, and overheard conversations all swim through our songs. It’s like we’re trying to sense everything at once, see the whole scenario with the same eyes. Layers on layers are how the songs are built and so there’s a correlation there with how places develop over time and strata. Clapper became limited to England in scope because we discovered, as the album grew into itself, that all of the places were linked by an elegiac quality particular to England itself. We focused on this very English trope of pining away for some lost golden era, and echoed that back in terms of heritage and the ritual year, i.e. methods of self-preservation and ways of marking the passage of time. Clapper takes its title from a line of Hillaire Belloc’s poem “Ha’nacker Mill” from 1923, which itself is a lament for a fast disappearing way of life.

Ha'nacker Mill

Sally is gone that was so kindly,
Sally is gone from Ha'nacker Hill
And the Briar grows ever since then so blindly;
And ever since then the clapper is still…
And the sweeps have fallen from Ha'nacker Mill.

Ha'nacker Hill is in Desolation:
Ruin a-top and a field unploughed.
And Spirits that call on a fallen nation,
Spirits that loved her calling aloud,
Spirits abroad in a windy cloud.

Spirits that call and no one answers –
Ha'nacker’s down and England’s done.
Wind and Thistle for pipe and dancers,
And never a ploughman under the Sun:
Never a ploughman. Never a one.

England has always glanced over its shoulder to a fondly remembered not-so-distant past and we wanted to explore this trait topographically.  So even though we had no initial agenda, Clapper Is Still grew into a project that insisted that we followed its lead.  We embarked on tracking down elegiac components of English landscape in an attempt to map this feeling of nostalgia and loss.

III.  On the origin of Way Through

Claire: Myself and Chris have been in a number of bands over the years since we were 14 years old. We’re both from the same village in Shropshire (a rural county near the Welsh border) called Bayston Hill, and so we have a shared terrain of ideas linked to home that we both took independently down with us to London for university several years back.  Way Through began in 2010 when the drummer of our previous band emigrated to Australia.  We decided we wanted to try something different, and so I learnt the drums whilst Chris looked into sampling and playing guitar patterns through open loops that resample and build upon themselves in an almost organic manner.

Christopher: I think we wanted to reach a freer sound, more improvised and spontaneous, and that got me thinking in terms of what that could mean for lyrical content and meaning.  At the same time, I became very interested in the radical power of the landscapes which surround us.  There just seemed a match in my mind at that time between the loose grasp most of us have of our own neighbourhood (e.g. What’s beyond that corner?  I’ve never been that far down that road…) and that of trying to express the complexity of human emotions.  In a world where you can swoop through cities you’ve never visited courtesy of Google Earth, it’s reassuring to discover that there are still some locations impossible to map through geography alone, that won’t relinquish their secrets so easily. Those are the places we wanted to go, those are the places where anything can happen.

Claire: Both myself and Chris were very absorbed in visionary and neo-romantic artists at that time, from William Blake and Samuel Palmer to Paul Nash and John Piper, and I think they beckoned us further down this landscape route, in terms of reclaiming the pastoral as an inventive and liberating form.  Most of the music that touches on landscape tends to be very passive, drone-based, ambient, minimal, and we felt that wasn’t really an act of response to those landscapes, rather than more in keeping with concepts of soundtracking them.  So we hit upon the idea of trying to capture the conversation that takes place between a person and their surroundings, in terms of the freedom of punk music, which has a lot of shared virtues with folk music, in so much as achieving a level of honesty in song.  If we’re really splitting hairs here, Way Through is really a post-pastoral post-punk band but that sounds so convoluted that we decided to christen our new sound, born of locked rhythms, free-looping and evolving structure as pastoral punk.  We see a real confluence between how a song is performed, what its subject matter is, and the power of landscapes to enthrall.

IV.  On straddling the divide between the “fine art” and independent music scenes

Christopher: I think rather than straddling both the art world and the independent music scene, Way Through is a project that almost side steps both.  Because “landscape” is a term so immediately connected to the history of art, there’s almost a rope lassoed around all other forms of exploring the notion, in turn making them art by proxy.  With Way Through we’re trying to free ideas of place from romanticism and tired parlance in an attempt to expand on what makes a place itself a place, an actual place, whether that’s through heightened expectation or even an innately unremarkable nature. There’s no filter, that’s the point, it’s about trying to document a place objectively using the most subjective of tools, like gut-feelings and interpretations. So to that extent Way Through finds itself in less of a traditional “fine art” scenario and more of a modern approach, revisiting a closed case if you will, re-evaluating what’s gone before, which I suppose is concurrent with a lot of art today.

Regarding musical scenes, we’ve never really fitted in with those naturally either, we don’t care about bashing out songs in basements, conforming to one sound, we try and play non-venues and with a broad range of acts, ideally.  However, I’d also argue that the non-preciousness of punk is still very central to the band, I think we abhor the idea of taking any of this too seriously, making it beloved, and the very act of expressing yourself through punk is to discard piety for raw emotion, to beat a path towards content rather than devotion.  It’s more about the songs being performed, rather than how they sound, if you follow my argument, there’s a ritual element, like the song is exacting its own sympathetic magic on the compass. Its performance is exerting itself into the real world, imitating somewhere that’s free to change with the time of day, the seasons, the developers, the tourists.  Nothing is static, essentially, and I hope that’s reflected in our attitude to “recreating” the songs live, they are what they are at any given time, spontaneity is key.  Recordings are by their very nature definitive, and so we feel closer to the instability of performing something live, breathing new dimensions into the song each time, the opposite of going through the motions and tapping your foot in time. The best record in the world would change each time you listened to it, and hopefully Clapper Is Still has some of that magic sown in its field.

V.  On working with the Tate Britain and Patrick Keiller’s Robinson Institute for the Tate Processional  

Claire: We ended up working with Tate Britain through Resonance FM, which is London’s foremost experimental radio station. They were asked to select a band to work thematically in sync with Patrick Keiller’s The Robsinon Institute installation in the Duveen Gallery. Seeing that Robinson as a character in Keiller’s work undergoes journeys around England employing place as a means of talking about larger subjects (in this case the recent economic crisis), Resonance FM made the connection between Way Through and Keiller’s motives in the same way as Robinson links up seemingly disparate locations to construct the whole.  Keiller built his installation largely from Tate’s collection, and so in turn we were kindly allowed to explore in terms of song the installation and other artworks in nearby rooms, most notably by Tacita Dean, Richard Long, Stanley Spencer, William Hogarth, and J.M.W. Turner.  Essentially, we performed a live set punctuated by five “processions,” each on foot through the galleries to an allotted painting, the act of pilgrimage evoked through myself playing a marching drum and Chris singing, occasionally supplemented with a tape boombox or birdsong and distorted chord clusters.  For each trip from the stage to the artwork we were followed by a hundred or so people, who participated in the procession and joined the dots between the paintings and the garbled popular songs we employed to resound them.  The Tate Processional was an extremely exciting project to be involved in and we were both blown away with the reception the performance was lucky enough to meet.

VI.  On key artistic, literary, and musical touchstones

Christopher: Musically speaking, I’d have to say I’ve been consistently impressed by Richard Youngs’s ability to leap from one genre to the next without losing his centre, he seems to have an infinite pool of ideas, and it’s so satisfying to see him rip up the script whilst remaining true to himself.

Claire: Very much, also in terms of being a duo I’d say we’re very in awe of Eyeless In Gaza too, who for two people have created an emotionally dense world of meaning from their earlier synth-based post punk to later plots of avant-folk.  There’s a rawness and poetry to their music we identify strongly with.  For Clapper Is Still we also tried to use overtly English music as a vocabulary to help us enhance notions of Englishness at times too, there are definitely some moments indebted to Shirley Collins, Benjamin Britten, and The Smiths. Outside of music I’d say there’s a lot of writers like Geoff Nicholson, Robert MacFarlane, Ronald Blythe, Richard Mabey, John Cowper Powys, Owen Hatherley, Richard Jefferies and Patrick Wright that influence us, poets like Alice Oswald, Edward Thomas, Kathleen Raine, John Clare…

Christopher: Steve Roud has written some brilliant books about English folklore and the ritual year.  W.G. Hoskins is an expert on the creation of the English landscape too. Roger Deakin is amazing, so is William Barnes’ poetry, Jack Clemo, John Stewart Collis.  I’m also a big fan of Arthur Machen, those Piper & Betjeman’s Shell Guides to Britain, The Lost Villages of England by Maurice Beresford, Garry Hogg’s series of books on odd aspects of England. Artists I think we’ve covered in previous questions although I’d like to mention Eric Ravilious, Fay Godwin’s photographs of forgotten and lost lands, and Jeremy Deller & Alan Kane’s  Folk Archive from 2005, which had a huge effect on us, especially in terms of the enthusiasm with which they continue to approach the subject.

VII.  On staying inspired

Claire: I think as long as you’re doing something that captures your imagination, the work flows from that without recourse.  Places themselves are our main inspiration, and I think there’s a real parallel between trying to re-enchant the landscape before you and re-enchanting yourself, it’s a two way process, and both sides have a lot to give.  Going back to that Hillarie Belloc poem, “Ha’nacker Mill,” as long as there’s “spirits that call” we’ll always be there to answer them.

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Way Through's Clapper Is Still is available through Upset The Rhythm.  Order it here.  Check out the band’s blog here.

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Bernie Brooks is Ship’s editor-at-large and SE Michigan correspondent.  Send him records, tapes, prints, and zines: bernie [at] shipinthewoods [dot] com

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All images courtesy Way Through / Upset The Rhythm.  Hand-drawn text by Bernie Brooks.