Being ignorant to the hole's opposite end opening out on the sea, the determined giant dies from blood loss. The moody atmospheres divert briefly on 'Colour The Ocean Pink', which refers to a legend from the St Agnes region in which a woman tricks a tyrannical giant into filling a hilltop hole with his blood in exchange for her hand in marriage. These 'field recordings' are more to do with process than finish, but add a sense of live performance in real time to an otherwise virtual, studio-layered composition. In doing so, Kemper Norton is wholly in sympathy with its use, extending its original purpose by some 2,000 years and trapping its mysterious aura on disc.
As with the five tracks that follow, much of its ingredients were recorded within the mysterious fogou itself, whose ancient function was thought to be ceremonial. Both locations bear 'uncanny' contexts, the primary quality sought by Kemper Norton's sound.Īptly, a backwards-camouflaged voice opens the Cornwall side, stating "some kind of ritual significance", barely perceptible amidst woozier, time-stretched voices orbiting shiny moons of mandolin and starbursts of computer glitchery. Like many of the other download-only releases he has intermittently skimmed surreptitiously across the internet (most of which are no longer available) – both 'chapters' of Carn are firmly and personally linked to a specific place: Carn 1 marks the end of Kemper Norton's life in Cornwall by focussing on Carn Euny fogou, an astronomically-aligned Iron Age chamber in West Penrith where he spent the eclipse of 1999 while Carn 2 is located in his new home of Sussex and centred on Chanctonbury Ring, also Iron Age in origin. Here, medieval mandolins meet modular synths, or a 19th century harmonium harmonises with its future cousin the Casio keyboard, evoking anything from pre-Christian myth to post-modern polemics.Ĭarn, his debut physically released album, draws together two conceptually related download-only EPs from 2012-13. Far from being a romantic nostalgia trip, like the rash of recent releases that turn today's laptops into yesteryear's Radiophonic Workshop to relive their youths spent watching cult TV, Kemper Norton's music exists within the continuum, encapsulating a free range of sounds and stories spread throughout history. The music of Kemper Norton streaks across the ages like a tipsy beach-comber, enthusiastically and expertly skipping across time's tide and handpicking an array of instruments, contexts and influences to form what he succinctly describes as "coastal slurtronic folk".
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