Children make weird art. Aside from labyrinthine fantasy fiction experiments or Pollockian attempts at the visual medium, young people tend to produce odd music when given the means. From the spasmodic clanging of The Shoreditch Experimental Music School in the 60s, to the creepy pre-teen junglism of X-Cetra in 2000, there’s a keen history of freaky kids wigging out on wax.
If after a day’s work you come home and feel like wading into such uncanny sonic waters then consider taking the Northern service to Todmorden in West Yorkshire. Nestled in the surrounding valleys and behind winding country roads you can find a primary school not unlike any other in the country. But if you listen closely, you may chance upon the sounds of 7–10 year olds producing semi-improvised, folk-based drone music from within.
Led by former teacher and folklorist, Mark S. Williamson, the Primitive Percussion Youth Orchestra weave eerie compositional webs from homemade string instruments, untuned pianos and tolling percussion to create bleak soundscapes that merge the doom of Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra with the oblique creepiness of Current 93.
Following a quiver of Bandcamp releases, the PPYO rose to attention with last year’s Places We Have Never Been, a foreboding and haunting collection of rudimentary avant-folk compositions. In the space of a year, any traces of entry-level musicianship has all but vanished from their latest record, Gabble Ratchets, replaced with performances that are patient and ominous, with writing mature far beyond the performers’ years.
Invoking the folklore of the Upper Calder Valley, the orchestra’s newest outing is inspired by the tale of the hellhounds of the region. Known as ‘Gabble Ratchets’, packs of spectral dogs are let loose across the Northern counties on Halloween night to hunt the souls of the newly dead who are left wandering in search of refuge. With Williamson’s (apparently) minimal instruction, the current iteration of the PPYO (six 7–10 year olds) have set out to capture this atmosphere of looming death and ghostly terror on their latest LP.
On presenting school children any form of instrument, it would not be a sin to predict a cacophony of banging and clanging to meet your ears. With Gabble Ratchets, this could not be further from the truth. The performances on display are invariably considered and open throughout, allowing for the gentle thunder of malleted drums and chiming bells to breathe easily over wheezing string drones and atonal pianos.
It is this patience and space that the performers allow which confounds the mind on experiencing Gabble Ratchets. On hearing the weeping strings of ‘Across the Valley’, the funeral march of ‘Into the Valley Bottom’, or the morose piano sighs of ‘Climbing the Pike’, you sense you’re listening more to the work of Cafe OTO experimentalists or RCM composition doctoral candidates, than literal children.
While the record is doused in post-production makeup to elevate the works to near transcendent levels in moments, the progressive marrow running through the skeletons of these players is unmistakable. With Williamson’s certainly patient and undoubtedly bizarre direction, on Gabble Ratchets, the children of the Primitive Percussion Youth Orchestra shine forth as avant-gardists of the highest calibre, proving the beauty and terrifying weirdness of uninhibited young minds when given the resources and encouragement.
