Hearing Pefkin’s idiosyncratic take on acoustic folk music on Liminal Rites (WILD SILENCE NO NUMBER), I was reminded very briefly of The Iditarod whom we heard on their 2014 Foxfur & Rarebits compilation; based on scant evidence, I’m imagining there’s a recent trend in the UK (which might intersect with Sharron Kraus at some point) towards an extremely delicate and almost pallid form of singing and guitar-playing, arriving at something a bit like folk music, but which is quite some way from the full-bodied performances of 1960s folk revivalists such as Ray & Archie Fisher.
However, Pefkin is doing more than just singing and playing on these uncategorisable and near-shapeless (in a good way) solo recordings, touching on genres such as psychedelic rock and ambient drone, and creating captivating trance-like pieces from material that’s so insubstantial as to be almost transparent. Any patterns that emerge from her languid guitar strums or her thin singing voice appear to be happening entirely in my imagination, as she takes the idea of “free form” into her own personal dimension. It’s as though she’s trying to describe something so beautiful and personal that she’s reluctant to share it with anyone else, so she whispers it into her pillow or writes in a private diary and hides away the key. Or else she fears disturbing the unearthly mood that has been conjured up by a sunset, a view of the ocean, or a walk through a shaded glen, barely daring to pick up her watercolour brush to stain the paper. The lyrics are hard to make out, her voice rethought as another instrument in the spartan mix of guitars, drone, and wash effects; and for some reason I imagined she may even be singing in a Gaelic dialect.
Why did I even suppose there’s a folk music connection? Well, perhaps it’s something about the melodies, which tend to stay in a folk-like pentatonic scale; and the drones, though probably generated by synths, might evoke the Pibroch. Gayle Brogan is Pefkin, and is probably better known to you as one half of Electroscope in the late 1990s with John Cavanagh, who also appears here guesting on clarinets and VCS3 on a couple of tracks, and also as a recording engineer. This was released in a very limited run on a French label, packaged with a tracing-paper wrapper over a chipboard sleeve, and arrived here 5th October 2015. We’ve also heard Pefkin on Inner Circle, Outer Circle on the Belgian label Morc Records, and there’s much more material in her back catalogue released by Foxglove, Pseudoarcana, and her own Curiously Euphonic label.