Ghostlore of Britain - The Holy Sickness & the Boundless Majesty (2024)

The Holy Sickness & The Boundless Majesty is an album of 8 tracks made from Ghostlore of Britain’s experience of traversing the Sussex landscape, undertaking a psychic drift to unearth interconnected histories, memories and premonitions. The album is the soundtrack to their most recent live show, a performance with films, props and sound which presents the occurrences and revelations made along their journey. Ghostlore chose Sussex as the scene of their second drift as it is where Kieron and Sarah respectively spent their formative years. Further, the deaths of three people in 2022 connected to Sussex who were significant to them both, one of which was Sarah’s father, prompted an urgent investigation into the geographical, personal and psychic ties to the county.

The journey began in a 19th Century sandstone mine, a cave close to Chanctonbury Ring: a prehistoric hill fort on the South Downs. Field recordings of groaning in ‘The Ammonite’ are overlaid with the sounds of groping in the dark. The cave is where you are truly alone in the void. Hopeful choral vocals emerge from the depths; light within the darkness of psychic suffering. Reworked sampling of a church organ accompanies Sarah’s voice, redolent of the sounds of Christian faith, its churches interlaced into the Sussex countryside. Ghostlore’s secret recordings of chants in the monastic lay commune at the foot of Chanctonbury hill swell up in ‘Storm of Steel,’ a track constructed from synthetic drums, samples and the sound of a reconstructed ‘carynx’, an Iron Age war horn. The track is spurred on with sounds of marching drums, and sub bass echoing from the parties held on the South Downs - it's how a spectral Iron Age battle might sound if made on a laptop.

Ghostlore’s drift also consisted of mundane car trips up and down the M25, Shell and BP garages, refuelling at Costa; brands as sigils and symbols read as corporate black magic, the sacred intersects with the mundane. These road trips evoked memories of free parties at Devils Dyke and nights out at Tonka in the Zap club in Brighton, and samples from recordings of these places and events make up the track ‘M5M25’. ‘Crosses on the Floor’ interrupts with frenetic bowed harp, drifting into absent minded singing. That morning, one of the deaths occurred. Her father’s poems about his own father’s death lay to one side. Heartfelt gentle prose and loss. This is a rupture happening in real time: the beginning and the end, the rising up with soft guitar and vocals build up to the heavens, then crash down to the murky repetition of the 303, speeding up to a different frenzy. This is digital, mechanical but there is a soul: dissolve and coagulate, transformation.

In the trees of Chanctonbury Ring, they came across the embers of a recently lit fire. Lost in childhood memories of walks on this hill with her father, the somnambulant plucking of a King Crimson riff by Sarah on the harp begins in ‘Hospital of Snow’; reconstructed memory drawing her to action like a sleepwalker propelled by a dream. The album ends with ‘Gone Gone Gone’, its an ascension into the light expressed by chambered singing and an excerpt from Virginia Woolf's writing about the Sussex countryside.

As an epilogue to the album the two VIP tracks are jungle and drum n bass remixes of the final track ‘Gone Gone Gone’. They hark back to the time tape packs lay in the dirty footwells of cars that both Sarah & Kieron travelled to raves in, and connect with the celebratory excitement of buying VIP white labels at Rounder Records and driving up and down the motorway. At the core of Ghostlore’s exploration is the belief that magic and esoteric practice reveal layers of reality otherwise unseen. This is then cast into a theatre of performance to extract the dormant power within. During their journey through Sussex they came across a Goldman Sachs data centre, the Scientology institute, a Forest Row Steiner school and W.B Yeat’s house, as well as a burnt down right wing revisionist press in Uckfield, each representing powerful zones of new ageism, religion and finance. By using diverse esoteric and exoteric teachings in their methodology via a process of derive and psychic drift, an investigation into self and surroundings, they attempt to emancipate themselves from the binary, polarised political and ideological systems, as well as recognise and articulate the core occult practices of the dominant culture which operates beyond the material realm. Their investigations into parapolitics, espionage, and polarised modern cults seek to reveal layers of reality within the experience of place whilst allowing a formative spiritual attachment to occur. The battle is outside and therefore within. As such, this album is not only an attempt at a personal transformative journey from darkness into the light but also an examination of landscape mysticism for the sake of demystification