Thank you for reading Uncanny Landscapes. This time I've got a special episode of the podcast: Jim Jupp and I walking and talking about our collaborative Belbury Poly album The Path. As you know, Uncanny Landscapes is a free project, both newsletter and podcast. If you're able to support my work through a paid subscription - thank you!! I truly appreciate it. And if you're not, perhaps you can support by telling a friend (or two, or 100) about the Substack's free subscriptions and accompanying podcast.
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Jim Jupp is a ‘friend of the podcast’ - he’s been on before, and his music starts off every episode as the Uncanny Landscapes title chooon. Recently, his Belbury Poly project - one of the flagship artists on the Ghost Box Records label that Jim co-founded with artist and designer Julian House - released a new album: The Path, a collaborative ‘band’-type setting inspired by 60s/70s British library music and related spheres, and including a spoken narration by me, following a vague tale of a walker descending into madness along the uncanny pathways of England.
At the end of the summer, Jim and I went for a walk along the South Downs Way on England’s southern shores, near Jim’s Sussex home. It’s the same route we followed the first time we talked about making what became The Path. This time, we recorded our conversations - as best we could! - and here is the result, 80+ minutes of conversation and music about/from the narrated album The Path.
I hope you’ll enjoy this, and if you dig the music, check it out - ask for Belbury Poly’s The Path at your local rekkid shoppe, online at the Ghost Box Records store, and on most of those newfangled streaming services. (My linktree has a linko to them.)
On this episode, we talk about most of the tracks on the album, as well as loads of rubbish about inspirations, influences, ideas and the good stuff that goes into making what - for want of a better term - we’d have to call a ‘concept album’.
I’ll be back in a week or two with more episodes of Uncanny Landscapes on which I’m interviewER and not interviewEE, with more amazing artists such as creative field recordist and composer Cheryl E. Leonard, and writer James Canton. For now, sit back and indulge the footsteps and birdsong and passing cars along a 5,000-year-old trail as Jim and I chat about The Path.
[[Caveat: there were technical issues with this episode; I think I've solved most of them, but apologies for weird stuff that may haunt the ep!]]
Uncanny Landscapes Podcast: The Path