Reigns - The Widow Blades

deluxe vinyl edition on 180 gm white vinyl with black  speckles, which also includes a numbered A5 lino cut print hand made by the band. Wessex duo Reigns release their fourth long-player on Monotreme Records. Whilst growing up in the country, Reigns Operatives A & B, from an early age became aware of the bizarre, yet inconclusive, fate of a woman from a neighbouring village.  It took some years (and a great deal of wading through a seemingly endless stream of local conjecture) for them to ascertain that the woman in question was Millicent Blades: a middle-aged widow who had disappeared during the blizzard of 1978, vanishing somewhere between the villages of Tup’s Fold and Tone Gulley.  Nothing was found of her save a set of interrupted footprints and a pile of clothes – all turned inside out. The intervening years have provided much in the way of outlandish theories pertaining to her disappearance but very little in the way of answers.  In a possibly futile attempt to reverse this situation and still haunted by the stories they heard as children, Operatives A & B went back to the area to document her final journey across the countryside.  Using equipment selected purely on the basis of portability and resistance to the elements (with perfect synchronicity, their week of recordings coincided with the heaviest snowfall since 1978), they recorded at all the key locations that the widow visited (or is thought to have visited) on her final, fateful day: including, amongst others, her house and that of her physician, an Anderson shelter (home to a vagrant who was briefly suspected of her murder), a former tea room that she had frequented since the fifties, a disused tannery, and (for the climactic 20 minute closer, “The Mounds”) an excavated series of barrows; the approximate location of her disappearance. The recordings proffered no conclusive answers: whether this was due to the inclemency of the weather, the passing of time and the resultant cooling of the trail, or the operatives’ disastrous decision to record the entire album under the influence of Hybrium Sulphate (a monstrously unpredictable chemical that the widow had herself been prescribed) is a moot point. Some press quotes for Reigns: “An uncanny delight from start to finish”  Rock-a-Rolla  “A thing of beauty, mystery and carefully crafted wonder”   Mojo  “Beguiling  and not a little bizarre…deeply affecting music”   The Wire  “Music that rewards the imaginative, the illogical and the ever-so-slightly insane”   Time Out.  “Engaging and confounding…Reigns are genuinely original ambient composers”   Artrocker

Tracks:

1. Over Tone Gulley

2. Hybrium Sulphate

3. The Diagram

4. Four And A Half Minutes Missing

5. I Will Burn For This

6. Horse Murders

7. Green Butter

8. They Likes To Sleep Soft

9. Plainsong

10. Vessels

11. The Mounds

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