Capra Hircus (COLD SPRING CSR338CD) is the fourth record we’ve heard from Christopher Walton and his Tenhornedbeast – I don’t have a great deal of sympathy for all the components of his world view, although we kind of liked the intensity of The Lamp of No Light from 2023.
I was at pains to point out the underlying Christian message of the York Minster doomstone that inspired that album, but as if to reassert his pagan stance, Walton today proposes an instrumental hymn of praise to the “goat”, and making no secret of his allegiance to this “child of Pan” as he wanders the Yorkshire landscapes for inspiration. It’s as if he’d taken a look at Pink Floyd’s Animals album and decided to add this vital “missing” animal to the Roger Waters list; and on one level these strange, abstract tones of his could almost be squeezed onto the instrumental sections of that abominable prog-rock excess. Speaking of the Floyd, we could also draw a line back to the first Pink Floyd album, which drew its title from a chapter in The Wind in The Willows in which the great god Pan appears. Some readers interpret that odd, disturbing chapter as depicting a “fugue state” for Ratty and Mole, bordering on a psychedelic vision – a notion which I expect might well have occurred to Syd Barrett in 1967 also.
We’re invited to find some psychedelic elements in this Tenhornedbeast record too, although the creator stresses it’s largely a landscape record, his attempt to express in sound his experiences when walking in high places in that part of the Pennines he knows so well. Not an unpleasant sound, but somehow there’s just not enough concrete events in these long tracks to engage the attention. I’m not asking for anything as prosaic as a sampled goat’s bleat, but anything to vary the monotony would be welcome – it’s hard to connect this abstract music with anything real. Nor does the overlong duration of these wisped-out hollow drones induce the hoped-for trance state. (29/07/2024)