There’s a moment in Woodstock the Movie, during the Country Joe and the Fish tune, ‘Section 43’, where the camera zooms in on a soft-focus blurred psychedelic lightwheel slowly turning. The blissful gentle guitar melody starts turning also, towards a more sinister realm. Richard Wileman lives in that moment.
Similar moments occur during the movie ‘The Wicker Man’, flashes of pastoral beauty to detract from the horror, nature so breathtaking you can almost forget that nature will kill you in a heartbeat and never give it a second thought.
It’s in this netherworld, a zone that coats the unspeakable with a veneer of beauty that Richard Wileman’s music exists and thrives all its ethereal strangeness.
Described as a ‘Prog / folk horror concept album, charting the encounter of a comet with Earth resulting in the undead rising and converging on The Ridgeway (an 87 mile chalk hill walk that starts at World Heritage stone circle site Avebury), ‘The Forked Road’ is an album well suited to winter, and indeed the impending spring with its arcane pagan fertility symbols.
‘Butterfly’ could even evoke hazy summer days lying in cornfields, but the gods of the harvest and creepy corn dollies are never far away. For every euphoric revery like ‘Children of the Sun’, there’s a solemn slightly unsettling riposte like ‘Avenue & Circle’. For every yin a yang.
As on previous releases, he’s aided and abetted by the haunting vocals and instrumentation of Amy Fry, with additional contributions from Chantelle Smith and Sienna Wileman.
Modernity has done it’s darnedest to sanitise the magic out of life, and bury the old gods under shiny shopping centres, but Richard Wileman’s music is a chilling reminder that it only takes a simple turn of a clod of earth and here be monsters.
The Forked Road is out now on Believers Roast Records, and is available to download and stream through the link below:
