The English Heretic — Wyrd Tales(cd & book)

The English Heretic are a mysterious musically, literary & dark historic  collective who investigate ocultic matters  blurring the lines between fact and fiction, their music is a layered and sinister mix of dark electronics, folk and source recordings & ambience.  Their written word a mixture of  ocultic history, true crime and horror fiction- all to make a intoxicating and often highly un-nerving whole.

Wyrd Tales is their 3rd cd and booklet release and it’s there most extensive too bringing together a 90 page book and a 70 minute cd.  The books text discus’s the haunts of witch finder general Matthew Hopkins, accidental  ocultic death, hallucinogenic and occult properties of the  Foxglove plant/flower, Daphne Du Maurier’s  setting for  her story  The Birds,  the facts behind  one of  M.R. James most famous tales of horror , Austin Spare’s London & World war two and the occult- with  black & illustrations through out and 6 colour plates in the middle. 

The music is heady, psychedelic, muilt-layered and often very un-nerving with often retro sounding synth base to which acoustic and electric guitars, flute, singing bowl, sampled 1940’s music and all manner of strange source recordings are added.  Some of the source recordings made  on the grounds of  occult or haunted sites by the Heretic themselves, other strange spoken word passages, and other bizarre occult based samples. I guess the closet thing you could compare the English Heretic to is coil - but this is less about suggestion and leaving it open to interpretation, The Heretic English deepen the detail and mythology behind the music and text so you really become unsure what is fact or fiction anymore. There are the odd mis-steps here and there, mainly when the male singer pops up and sounds a little wavery- but these are few and at the end of the day Jonh Balance had similar problems too.

A fascinating, disturbing and intriguing  project that has to be taken as a whole text and music. It’s Intelligent, wordy and dense this is occult music and text at it most tangible, un-nerving and down right terrifying, those of a nervous disposition be aware. To find out more about the Heretic, buy direct etc go here .