it MUST be doing me some kind of good at least.

When I heard CS singing her reconstruction of Ragwort Road it was immediately apparent that I hearing a transfiguration that was at once as intimately personal as it was revelatory of a more collective meme embodied in a lyric itself inspired by a line from the incantations of the witch Isobel Gowdie. That creative power is, I feel, mediumistic and requires a catalyst by way of providing focus - in that case the catalyst was a lyric for which the catalyst was an incantation collected from a witch during her trial. The result was both stunning in terms of its vibrational potency and aural beauty; the familiar made strange in what was, in essence, a ceremony of renewal as immediate as it was ancient. Through the media of a digital MP3 file I was reconnected with the primal Hedge-Witch; She who goes in the wild places, as CS does in her uniquely beautiful singing.

In the singing of Traditional Folk Song we are, in effect, conducting a seance with what lurks on the other side of The Revival, which is to say the primal core of our cultural dreaming in which these songs once ran wild and free in natural habitat of unspoiled woodlands, ancient field systems and anciently managed hedgerows which has now been stripped away and concreted over. I personally sing Traditional Folk Songs by way of a deeper ceremonial communion with this archetypal and very joyful wilderness in which I merrily wander as vagabond - which is why my music sounds the way it does - the music of a primal archetypal vagabondia. Even in performance Rachel and I use the songs as vehicles for an improvised immediacy of ritual purpose by which we might return something of the potency we find in field-recordings and singarounds where the individual sense dissolves into a deeper choral dreaming and one experiences the pure vibrant heart of the thing. The energy remains potent in its resplendent wyrdness, be it in songs of the Archetypal Hunt and Blood Sacrifice such as The Innocent Hare, or else in the weaving of the Bacchanalian Orgy that is McGintie's Meal and Ale.

A very timely thread methinks, CS - poised as we are on the very cusp of the Equinox, and the autumn...