Widdershins Review from Musiquemachine.com

The inner circle of the Glasgow Subway system doesn’t immediately suggest a venue for ritual. Its modern carriages merely ensure busy people reach their desired destination efficiently, unaware of their precise location until a big, clear sign rushes in to view. It’s a collectively ignored experience, an interim between A and B, where most seem encouraged to block out the environment by book or rag, phone or ad, as they’re herded beneath the city surface.
And yet, as the mysterious Psychogeographical Commission point out, the anticlockwise travelling of the subway’s inner circle can be viewed as a constant banishing ritual first performed in the late nineteenth century when an accident that stalled its opening provided a blood sacrifice distributed circuitously ever since.

With ‘Widdershins’ the duo of S.: and Hokano once again seek to address this disconnect they perceive between urban dwellers and their local mythologies. However, while their previous releases have more generally encouraged listeners to re-evaluate city situations through treated layers of ambient guitar and electronics to soundtrack exploratory strolls along lost rivers and secret historical tramways, ‘Widdershins’ is a straight recording of the noise of travelling on Glasgow’s underground.

Or is it? Through concentrating on the sounds of this 24 minute journey with its beeping electronic doors bookending the rhythmic rush of wheels as the engine accelerates and decelerates, one starts to perceive a change in mood, or a subtle presence, as the detail of the once familiar noises starts to reveal new qualities. Have The Commission deftly tweaked the tube sounds to invoke a sense of dread and otherness or have they merely separated the sound from its source and presented it in such a way that we finally take notice of what was there all along?

Either way it makes for a compelling listening, especially when using similar transport, bathing a journey in its altered light. Indeed, the duo apparently played the recording back into its source on a subsequent late night round trip and, in doing so, inspired aggression in those passengers who erroneously responded to its beeping doors as the recording fell out of sync with the train and, perhaps, the protection afforded by Glasgow’s secret banishing ritual.

4/5

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Widdershins now available.

A Magical trip around the Glasgow Underground

This recording documents the inner circle of the Glasgow Subway system which travels in an anticlockwise direction (widdershins), a constant banishing ritual performed daily upon the whole of the west side of Glasgow. The Subway first opened on 14 Dec 1896, but was soon closed after an ‘accident’ resulting in wheels painted in blood being traced around a circuit of the track (a blood sacrifice to energise the protection). The line didn’t reopen until well after the Winter Solstice (19th Jan 1897) allowing further rituals to take place. Central to this circular containment field is Cranston Hill, (formerly Drumother Hill from the Gaelic - druim odhar meaning Grey Ridge), which was prophesized in the 1600’s to become the future 'Cross of Glasgow' by the masked Covenanter Alexander ‘Prophet’ Peden. At that time, the hill stood in open countryside outside the Burgh of Glasgow, but during the western expansion of the City in the early 1880s, a series of railway tunnels were built in the area. No record can be found of what was discovered/experienced during the excavations, but a consultation process started shortly after between the Glasgow Town Council and members of the Societas Rosicruciana in Scotia (SRIS) (whose teachings were the foundation of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn). The Glasgow Subway was commissioned in 1890.

We had planned to record the outer (clockwise) line then replay it on the inner to negate the effect of the banishing, but then decided we'd subtly change its phase to glimpse behind the protection without dropping the shield altogether. Beginning and ending at Hillhead Station, we recorded over the period of totality on the winter solstice eclipse 2010, the first time a total eclipse has fallen on a winter solstice since the days of Prophet Peden (1638). This recording was then soundscaped and played back on the inner circle late one evening at beginning of Feb 2011. Because of differences in passenger numbers, platform delays and speed between morning and night trips our recording soon fell out of sync with the passing stations as intended. A notable increase in the train’s vibration was then felt; four people in the carriage fell asleep and needed to be roused in order to prevent them missing their stops and those used to taking audio cues from the train were standing in sync with the music and moving towards the doors only to find the train not slowing down. Confusion soon turned to aggression giving us a glimpse at what lay inside the protection field and we curtailed our experiment and ran, allowing the banishment to return.

The polymath Alasdair Gray wrote in Lanark: A Life in Four Books, of a vision concerning a mouth opening in a stone face within the Glasgow Necropolis which transported Lanark to Unthank, an altogether different, darker, Glasgow. We believe the portal is to the west of that, and within a few years, as the city moves slowly into alignment, they should coexist upon the Grey Ridge, the centre of the Subway ritual.



Total time: 24Mins

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Widdershins Video Review

The first review of our Widdershins project to be released on 23rd May, physically on http://www.psychetecture.com and digitally on http://psychcomm.bandcamp.com

video review of Widdershins by The Psychogeographical Commission from Was Ist Das? on Vimeo.

Thanks to Ned at Wasistdas.co.uk

S.: