(First published in Electronic Sound magazine #115, July 2024)

COMMON PEOPLE

Emlyn Bainbridge and Josh-Day Jones are Orbury Common, and their debut album Sylvan Chute is a dreamlike delight, combining hip-hop beats and traditional folk trappings with the hallucinogenic imagery of a nightmarish, parallel universe English countryside

Words: Bob Fischer

“There’s an element of portals about this album,” explains Emlyn Bainbridge. “Basically, my friend looked through a tunnel of trees and said ‘Look at that sylvan chute’. It made complete sense, because ‘sylvan’ means leafy and tree-like, and a chute is obviously a tunnel. And it just felt right for the album. It’s something that you slide down to get to another world. It’s a portal to Orbury Common.”

His musical partner, Josh Day-Jones, is nodding thoughtfully.

“I remember, as a kid, passing through holes in trees and acting as though they were portals to other worlds,” he adds. “There was a specific tree in my local park that was absolutely huge with lots of loopy bits of roots.”

And what was he expecting to find on the other side of them? He pauses briefly.

“Space, probably.”

Let’s get some bare facts on the table before we pass completely through the gateway into dreamlike, bucolic oddness. Emlyn and Josh are the Gloucestershire duo behind Orbury Common, and their debut album Sylvan Chute is wonderful. It has hip-hop beats, traditional folk trappings, ritual chanting, disorienting sound collages and fragmented, hallucinatory lyrics that suggest a nightmarish parallel universe version of the English countryside is occasionally bleeding through the hedgerows into our own familiar world. And our own familiar world can be pretty bloody weird and scary in its own right.

They’re younger than you might imagine, two twentysomethings bringing fresh-faced Millennial oddness to the silver-bearded hauntology scene. 2018 debut single ‘Ecto’s Chasm’ fused minimalist beats with winsome acoustic plucking, but felt like a tentative dipping of the toes into a midge-infested millpond. By 2022, however, their imaginary world was coalescing. Thrilling EP The Traditional Dance Of Orbury Common found the tipping point between warehouse rave and arcane, occult ceremony, with Orbury Common itself gradually becoming more tangible, forming in a rippling haze on the distant horizon.

“When we made our first two songs, we put them out as a double A-Side,” says Emlyn. “We were mind-mapping, working out what imagery they conjured up. We both agreed we had an image of a strange place in our heads, so we named that place Orbury Common. We were imagining ghostly entities that look like orbs. And round here, there are lots of commons. They’re vast, open spaces, often quite misty in the mornings. Barren, but still bucolic.”

“In Gloucestershire, there are signposts everywhere for random places you’ve never heard of,” adds Josh. “So we thought it would be one of those places. As well as the strangeness of the countryside, a lot of dream logic plays into the lyrics and the music. When you’re out sometimes, you see certain landscapes that feel like they’re outside normal reality.”

There’s a lot of it about, I tell them. Want a charming tale of rural eccentricity? A few years ago, I was walking across moorland in Upper Teesdale, on the fringes of the Pennines, when I chanced upon a fence on remote farmland. And, along the entire length of that fence, the farmer had nailed dozens of dead moles, all in different stages of decomposition. The nightmarish quality of that experience, I tell them, reminds me so much of the feel of Sylvan Chute. There’s a song called ‘Jaundice And The Pipermen’ that perfectly captures that feeling of brutal, bucolic wrongness. “An embryo / pinned to a fencepost / Just down from the waystone / A trail of slime”.  

“That was based on a daydream I had,” says Josh. “Sometimes, uninvited thoughts just float into my head and I try to write them down. I think it’s important to acknowledge them. ‘Jaundice And The Pipermen’ is set on the big misty plain that Emlyn has already described, and things were popping out of it as I was walking. The pipermen. A ghostly gaggle of ill-looking men playing bagpipes. A lot of these lyrics come from dreams.”

They met while playing in the band of young singer-songwriter Katy J Pearson, herself no stranger to a spot of pastoral horror: for Halloween 2023 she released a covers EP of terrifying folk songs from The Wicker Man. So why are these youthful young bucks becoming so drawn towards the faded, 16mm world of 1970s childhood disquiet? 

“There’s a specific word for it that I can’t pronounce,” begins Emlyn. “Anemoia? It’s nostalgia for a time you haven’t lived through. I definitely have a bit of that, a longing for a simpler time. But also I have an interest in the weirdness of the 1970s, and that aligned with the music we were making. We stumbled upon hauntology and Ghost Box Records, and thought ‘That’s similar to what we’re doing’.”

“When Doctor Who came back in 2005, I got really obsessed with the 1970s episodes,” says Josh. “I watched them all on DVD, so maybe that seeped in somewhere along the way. Tom Baker and Jon Pertwee. The modern episodes are set in the current era, but the older ones seemed even more alien and strange and surreal for being based in the 1970s. Everything about them is very different, and I was drawn to that when I was younger.”

So do they both wish they’d been born in 1969 or something?

“Oh, I dunno,” says Josh, wincing slightly. “Although it’s a really interesting period to look back on.”

“What’s really fascinating,” says Emlyn. “Is that films and TV series only give you a vague representation of what things looked and sounded like in the 1970s. And there’s something a bit otherworldy about that, too. We’re not getting a sense of what things were actually like back then, we’re getting a warped, second-hand version. Looking back at something like Rainbow – it’s really trippy and weird.”

“Is that the one with the little baby doll things?” asks Josh.

Emlyn looks baffled.

That, I suggest, actually sounds more like Play School. Rainbow had an effete hippo called George. And Bungle, a gigantic bear with anxiety issues. And Zippy, who was… actually, even I don’t know what the fuck Zippy was. Sorry.

“Ah, yeah,” nods Josh. “The thing with a zip for a mouth”.

Even for those of us who remember the 1970s, I suggest, our actual memories have become irrevocably enmeshed with the half-forgotten children’s TV shows of the era. When I think about things that actually happened to me during the earliest part of my childhood, I now see them on faded film stock with a little dot in the corner of the screen to tell me there’s an advert for Lyons Maid ice lollies coming up. Emlyn is nodding. 

“It’s a similar thing for us with the Noughties,” he says. “Enough time has passed for the Noughties to feel quite nostalgic to us now. The music and the pop culture is pretty alluring, even though at the time I probably thought it was all quite lame.”

So what are the Noughties triggers that push their weirdy nostalgia buttons? They fall over themselves to reply in unison. 

“Black Eyed Peas!” exclaims Josh. “The song ‘Fantasy’ on the album has a bit of their influence.”
 
“Definitely the R’n’B stuff, Nelly and Usher,” nods Emlyn. “But then you’d also get indie rock at No 1 in the charts. All that naive, fun indie stuff that I don’t really think you can get away with these days. That was quite nice, and it felt like people were more optimistic back then.”  

Is the truth, perhaps, simply that childhood perception itself is a bit strange? No matter when you grew up? Our minds are being completely flooded with new experiences, at a time when our brains are hardwired to take it all in, and our still-forming noggins often give this influx of influences some unexpected connotations. I get disquieted by the harmless 1970s idents of regional ITV stations, and I’ve met people in their twenties who get the same feelings from the Windows XP start-up jingle.

“Yes!” grins Emlyn. “It’s Pokémon music for us.”

They’re hard to pin down sometimes. Early publicity shots show them in hoodies and balaclavas, crouching half-hidden in woods or dimly-lit caves. Cursory googling reveals precious little about their personal backgrounds, save for Emyln’s predilection for mountain-boarding and public-spirited bicycle repair. In person, they are friendly but endearingly bashful. Are little hints of the confessional hidden among those dream-like lyrics, though? “You and me, is it fantasy? / Watch you fade into a dream,” sings Emlyn on the aforementioned ‘Fantasy’. “You and me, no synergy / Watch you walk into the sea.”

I say it’s Emlyn, it could be Josh. They’re a little reluctant to clarify.

“From the start, we’ve never wanted it to be about us,” says Josh. “But I suppose when you’re making music you can’t escape putting your own emotions into it. It’s quite difficult trying to write lyrics that aren’t personal or intimate.”

Emlyn isn’t convinced.

“When I write lyrics, they’re more images that come into my head,” he shrugs. “In some of the songs, we’re embodying characters that might inhabit Orbury Common. So ‘Fantasy’ is a melodrama, a soap opera. Without discussing it, we were basically playing other people when we wrote those lyrics.” 

So who is singing on the album? Come on, let’s clear this up.

“It’s both of us,” says Emlyn.

“Emlyn sung more than I did,” admits Josh. “We also messed with the pitch of our voices quite a lot, to take it further away from us and make it more in line with the concept of Orbury Common. That way, it’s harder to place who is singing or even what gender they are.” 

And is the occult stuff on the album a total fiction as well? There’s enough in the lyrics to suggest they’ve genuinely dabbled with forces lurking beyond the veil. Have they ever, as the lyrics to ‘Diamonds And Dust’ suggest, been tempted to “light a scented candle for the poltergeist”?

“I’ve had a go on a ouija board,” confesses Emlyn. “And in the same room at my friend’s house – but at a different time – I thought I saw a ghost. But now the memory has faded, I’m not sure exactly what I saw. It was just a white shadow that passed through the room. Nobody else saw it, but my friend has seen lots of ghosts there.”

“I see sleep paralysis demons, and that’s the closest thing I’ve had to a supernatural experience,” says Josh. “You’ve got your eyes open, so you really do believe that what you’re seeing is real. And I guess that’s where the dreams start to overlap with reality.”

Demons? Really? Go on, give us some nightmare fodder of our own here.   

“It’s generally people standing in the corner of the room or looming over me,” he continues. “It’s quite vague. Probably because the room is dark, and I’m just seeing a shadow. But it’s definitely a humanoid figure.”

It feels like the beginning of some weird, ghostly empire. Not so much a multi-media experience, more a spectral kingdom of rotting leaves and overgrown clock towers. For their EP launch in 2022 they commissioned the construction of an actual maypole. For the album’s release, a local florist is festooning the venue with “surreal mossy pillars”. They have also begun collaborating with visual artist Alfie Dwyer, whose hypnotic animated video for lead single ‘The Resident’ draws on his own experiences with lucid dreaming.

“They’re all ways of representing this world that we’ve come up with,” explains Emlyn. “We’re not trying to create it literally, but we like artists’ impressions of that world. It’s about giving people an immersive experience, and hopefully that visual element helps the music to make more sense.”

When asked whether the shimmering boundaries of Orbury Common will continue to expand, however, they are surprisingly reluctant to commit.

“Yeah, we’re in talks with Netflix,” smiles Emlyn, almost – but not quite – resisting the temptation to roll his eyes.

“I feel like this album is the statement,” says Josh. “It paints quite a broad picture of Orbury Common. There might be more to discover, but it hasn’t immediately presented itself.”

So this might be our final visit? Should we really be making the most of it?

“It might be,” he nods. “I’m not sure. We need to get the album out. Then, after we’ve had a break from it, we’ll go from there.”

“And it’s got a life beyond us anyway,” adds Emlyn. “In people’s responses to it.”

Then the mists circle once again. Malevolent sleep demons slowly take shape in the corners of the room, and – somewhere in the distance – the wail of a jaundiced bagpipe echoes faintly across a sickly village green. Emlyn Bainbridge and Josh Day-Jones have travelled back through the portal of a loopy tree root, perhaps never to be heard from again. Not in this world, anyway. 

Sylvan Chute is available here:
https://orburycommon.bandcamp.com/album/sylvan-chute

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