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Weald is the first LP by Rob St. John, released on gatefold 12” vinyl by Song, by Toad Records of Edinburgh, Scotland in November 2011.
“And they will sit, and they will talk, in darkened rooms, in deserted villages”
Weald is an Old English word from which the concept of a ‘wild’, a ‘wooded’, and a ‘dark, dangerous’ place in the landscape has emerged. This record reflects this multiple reading of a shifting physical and emotional landscape, where a host of meanings and histories underlie a palimpsest surface. For example, Stainforth Force is a waterfall near the Lancashire-Yorkshire border, a symbol of change, fallibility and renewal. Meanings emerge and drift away on gusting washes of sound, spiralling lyrics are open but rarely confessional; echoing a British, rural Dirty Three, Low, Bert Jansch or Phil Elverum, intoned in a deep, Lancastrian tone.
“The first light calls a father home, and I am hardly asleep, and I know”
A writer and researcher interested in the shifting natural and cultural histories of Britain’s upland landscape, St. John ties this record to some imagined contour between the bleak Lancastrian moors and the cobbled wynds of Edinburgh, creating a narrative of transition, obscured meaning and quiet revelation.
“We paced a beat just slipped again, whirled and knotted, the weak end of a strong line”
Weald was recorded partly in December 2010 by Ian Humberstone from Tissø Lake (with whom Rob will share Your Phantom Limb as a split seven through Song by Toad in October 2011) on a reel-to-reel tape recorder in a Cambridge kitchen draped in freezing fog; partly in St. Michael’s Church, Oxford in the bright dawn; and largely in February 2011 over two days in a shutter-drawn house in northern Edinburgh with Neil Pennycook from Meursault.
“In these words, what my love is. And in time, the dying imperative.”
It features a host of friends and collaborators including Humberstone, Pennycook, Brendon Massai (Viking Moses), Tom Bauchop (UNPOC), Malcolm Benzie (eagleowl), Owen Williams (Two Wings), Tom Western and Seb Reynolds (Keyboard Choir, Braindead Collective). It follows 4 years of U.K. and European touring, and two critically acclaimed (and quickly sold out) EPs through Scottish micro-indie label Fife Kills:.
“On the horizon, clouds became islands, betrayed some silent and some still sea”
Side A:
01. Your Phantom Limb
02. Sargasso Sea
03. Vanishing Points
04. The Acid Test
Side B:
01. Stainforth Force
02. Domino
03. Emma’s Dance
04. An Empty House