English Dancing Master: 1651, by way of Castlemorton

The narrator of English Dancing Master never raises his voice. Leo Chadburn speaks in a flat, unhurried murmur across twenty episodes, and the Phaedra Ensemble moves around him: pizzicato tumbling over itself, a cello drone that refuses to resolve, violins swelling and then thinking better of it. Twenty-six minutes in total, none of it built like a song. What it builds is an argument about dancing, carried on in fragments, with a string quartet as the second voice and the final say. It is a strange, disciplined record, and it does not ask to be liked.

Chadburn has spent a career writing for the speaking voice rather than the singing one. The Subject / The Object (2020) came out breathless; ANTICLOCK (2019) worried at the ambiguities of time with much denser arrangements. English Dancing Master worries at the same problem with less of everything: fewer players, shorter pieces, more room between the words. The Phaedra Ensemble commissioned it, and it grew out of a performance at Cafe Oto in 2023, on a Gavin Bryars bill alongside A Man in a Room, Gambling. Bryars is the obvious shadow. Michel Chion is the other. Speech first, music as the thing that catches it when it falls.

The source is John Playford's The English Dancing Master, a manual of country dances published in 1651. Chadburn keeps the manual's shape and drops its manners: twenty entries, a minute or two each, every one an anecdote about movement rather than a tune to move to. It is radiophonic in the plain sense, made for the ear with the pictures left out. Jamie Hamilton, the ensemble's co-director, mixed and produced it, and he gives the quartet the same weight as the man talking, letting a drone sit until it stops being background. Hamilton mixed last year's Sleep in the Shadow of the Alternator. The patience is the same.

The best episodes are the ones where the voice and the quartet disagree. Castlemorton Common is in and out in under a minute: a passing motorist hears the 1992 free festival, up to 40,000 people in a Worcestershire field, from at least a mile away. The plucked violins get louder like sound systems coming over a ridge, revellers and police arrive, the whole thing peaks and fades, and you are still adjusting when it stops. The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 is the shadow this record keeps walking around.

St Vitus / St John goes back further: dancing mania in medieval Europe, ergot in the rye, contagion made worse by economic stress. The narrator reads it like a case note and the quartet supplies the symptom, an unnerving glissando that slides out of tune and back. The Ice Sheet works the other way. Chadburn's phrase for it is a dance of almost imperceptible movements, and the cello and viola drone like a glacier deciding whether the effort is worth it. Almost nothing happens, very slowly, and it is the record's best joke.

Because We Love Our Pets is over in well under a minute and welcomes creatures with two, four, six, eight and many legs to dance together, the pizzicato tumbling while the voice stays dead level. Chadburn's term for it is interspecies participation through superimposition of rhythms. Then Manual Transmission turns. The narrator tells you to put your hands in the air like a 90s fitness instructor, goes nasty, slides around the stereo while the strings swell, and the scene moves from the club to being stopped and frisked by police on the way home. Old Amsterdam, set at the turn of the millennium, recounts a multi-day psychedelic trip where time slipped and music was the only thing holding its shape; the voice counts downward and the quartet glissandos under it. International Statues lists English eccentricities as though they were dances and lets a peal of London bells turn into thunder and weather, which is where the record's idea of Englishness sits: odd local habits rather than a flag.

The narrowness is the limit as well as the method. Levin's Reverie turns up twice, at slightly different lengths, and neither pass makes the case for a second one. Colloid Exchange puts you in rhythm with strangers while gels, foams and emulsions whirl in a centrifuge, and the idea is more interesting than the room it gets. The narrator's flatness, so effective when the strings are pushing against him, flattens two or three jokes into notes, and the middle of the record sags under a run of ideas all the same size.

It is for anyone who keeps A Man in a Room, Gambling within reach and has argued about whether rave was a folk revival. Put it beside Bryars, beside Chion, beside the spoken-word records that get filed under composition because nobody has a better shelf. If you want tunes, you will not find them here. If you want a record that treats the rye field, the Castlemorton field and the walk home from the club as one subject, this is the one.

It earns a 4. Twenty fragments, no chorus, a narrator you should not entirely trust, and most of them land. The two that miss are over in under a minute, and the next one has already started.

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