"Land Lay Moldbrest is a three-part audiobook commissioned by PRIMARY and written by following packhorse trails in Lancashire, Greater Manchester and West Yorkshire over a period of two weeks in May and July 2022.
With a parcel of half-erased field journals, Walker journeys the bridleways of the remote Pennine moorlands. How long they’ve been doing their ‘research’ is anybody’s guess - even they can’t quite remember. Through gouged peat tracks and changes of season, they try to make sense of what they’ve read and what they’ve seen, but strange encounters with a cast of textual, imaginary and real-life characters derails the extended field trip, pushing Walker further into vital fantasy. Can they ever come back down from the moor?"
- PRIMARY
Praise for the album:
"It’s testament to Potter’s lyrical and performative deftness that these words somehow oscillate between the reassuring affability of Robert Wyatt’s spoken songs and the vertiginous challenges of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, between the nourishing fables of Alan Garner and the yearning poetics of John Giorno. While intermittent harmonium melodies and warm piano signatures, somewhat reminiscent of Ivor Cutler’s narrative vignettes, intersperse their reading, Potter’s stories ultimately lead us somewhere very different, to fogged moorlands in which language’s claims to mastery become diffused by the edifying contingencies of not knowing."
- Jamie Sutcliffe, Art Monthly
First streamed on 20 November, 27 November and 4 December 2022.
Released for download with pdf pamphlet on 11 December 2022
credits
released December 11, 2022
Written, performed and recorded by Roy Claire Potter
Mixed and mastered by Bill Vine at Ryoanji Records
Artwork by Roy Claire Potter
Special thanks to Dale Holmes, Gavin Bryars, Margaret and David Drake, and the South Pennine Packhorse Trails Trust
