The first year, it happened as Jay Griffiths was speaking, just as she came on to the theme of shape-shifting: the PA system broke down, the misplaced formality of the hall came apart and we found ourselves sitting around her, on the floor and on the stage among the useless web of cables. That was what brought it home to me.

In year two, I remember more of these moments: Tom Hirons and Rima Staines holding hundreds of listeners around the campfire with the tale of Ivashko Medvenko; Anton Shelupanov corralling thirty of us into a tight square of rope to bring home the reality of the overcrowded prisons where he had worked in Russia; Rachel Horne moving me to tears, as she spoke of the collapse of the mining community into which she was born and the work of finding meaning in its aftermath; then the gathered silence and symbolism of Liminal, after a day in which so much had been spoken.

Last year, it was Martin Shaw drumming in the stories, those dreamlike Mearcstapa figures seen out of the corner of the eye, and the sight of a small child dancing on the steps of the woodland stage.

If you have been to Uncivilisation, you will have your own memories of the moments when it became magical. Every year, people tell me about things I missed altogether that were what made the weekend matter to them. I have been thinking about these moments lately, as we came to the decision that this year’s Uncivilisation will be our last festival.

It is too easy to get stuck on a track of mindless growth, or to do the same thing year after year until it becomes an obligation rather than a joy. We want to bring this particular incarnation of Dark Mountain to a close while it is still full of joy – and to do it mindfully, to celebrate what we’ve experienced together and to ask how the parts of that experience that have meant most to each of us might find new homes.

There was never a plan for Dark Mountain to run a yearly festival, yet I can’t imagine what this project would have been without it. If the printed word is at the heart of what we do, it is these face-to-face encounters that hold us to the knowledge of how much can never be captured in writing. At times, they have brought us face-to-face with our mistakes, and I suspect we have learned more from them than from any other part of the project so far.

Not least, we have learned that there are others with strengths and gifts different to Paul’s or mine who are willing to step in as we step back. All the same, a great deal of the time and energy of those most closely involved in Dark Mountain has been absorbed by the logistics of putting on a centrally-organised festival on the scale of Uncivilisation each year. After this summer, we want to free that up – to do more and different things in our original role as a publisher of uncivilised writing, and to collaborate in other creative attempts to navigate these times of global disruption, loss and uncertainty.

For all this, it seems more than likely that gatherings in the spirit of Dark Mountain will go on in other forms. Indeed, they already have in the form of events such as The Telling in South Yorkshire and Carrying the Fire, which is coming up next month in Scotland.

So one of the themes of this year’s festival, both in the organised sessions and (we hope) in the conversations around the campfires, will be Bringing It Home: how might we take parts of Uncivilisation back with us, to the places where we live? And what parts do we want to leave behind? There will be time to hear from and talk with people who have organised their own local Dark Mountain groups and events, and to learn from other pockets of grassroots activity that have a similar flavour. All this will be woven in with the dance of stories and ideas, talks, workshops and performances that have given Uncivilisation its form in previous years. Knowing that this is the last chance, we want to throw everything into making it the best festival we’ve ever done.

Today we are unveiling this year’s full programme on the festival website - come over and see what is on offer. In the next few weeks we’ll also be sharing some of the ideas that are already sparking for what happens beyond Uncivilisation. But we wanted to tell you now that, while Dark Mountain events will certainly continue to happen, doubtless in as-yet unthought-of forms, this will be the last of our annual festivals – so that you have the chance to be there and to be part of the search for new beginnings.

The last Uncivilisation festival will take place from Thursday 15th to Sunday 18th August 2013 at the Sustainability Centre, near Petersfield, Hampshire. Tickets are available now at this link. (Please note that previous festivals have sold out, so we recommend booking early.)

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He was released from Intensive Care, and died three or four days later of pneumonia, which had set in while he had a tube down his throat, helping him to breathe, for 8 weeks.

I thought he was coming home. During our last visit, the night before he died, I was surprised to find that he was having difficulty talking. When he said something I couldn’t understand, I suggested that he write it down, but he shook his head. I figured that, whatever it was, it could be dealt with when he finally came home. Since we couldn’t really talk, I cut our visit short. I had no idea he was dying. But for some reason, acting completely out of character for our relationship, before leaving, I leaned over and kissed his forehead and told him I loved him. Lucky: it was the last time I saw him alive. I thought we’d have a lot longer to sort things out.

Would it have been better if I had known? Maybe not. I could not have said goodbye better than I did. We might have had a longer conversation and said more deliberate goodbyes, maybe cleared the air a bit.

But here’s the thing: regardless of whether I had known, I’d have felt, and been, helpless to make a difference. I think the essence of grief may be the powerlessness. We develop a ruthless desire to alter destiny, and we have utterly no ability to do so.

It’s important for people who are dying to know that they are loved, to receive the last little gestures their family and friends have to give. At least, I think it’s important to the dying. Maybe those gestures are only important to those of us left behind.  Little expressions of love in the face of death feel sacramental to me. They don’t turn back death, but they say, in effect, “Your life has had value to me. I will miss you.” They also say, “I’m showing up. I’m here, and I’m doing what I can, even though I suspect – I know – that it isn’t enough.”

Knowing that my friends would someday be going through what I was going through, I determined to pay attention to what people said or did at Dad’s funeral when they offered condolences. Here is what I learned.

Nothing but time can touch something as genuine as grief. But that’s okay. Because here’s the other thing I learned.

What mattered was that people showed up. One grade school friend, Tom Price, showed up to offer condolences, though we had not seen each other for years. I cried in my pastor’s arms when he showed up. Many of Dad’s colleagues from work or the Elks Club showed up, including my grade school math teacher who knew Dad from the Elks. I don’t remember what any of them said. What mattered, I discovered, was that they were there. It’s not easy to show up when we can’t make the difference we’d like to make. We come face to face with those we can’t help, when they most need help. We might as well be greeted with, “Well, if you can’t DO anything, why did you come?” Yet thirty years on, I remember many of those who came to pay their respects and offer condolences, and am grateful. They couldn’t bring Dad back, but damned if they didn’t make a difference in the face of his death. I was powerless to change my father’s fate. They were powerless to change my grief. But we all did the best we could, even if it wasn’t as much as we wanted.

*

Grief and powerlessness are parts, not only of the deaths of loved ones. They are also parts of things like a frustrated love affair or plan for college or career – anything, basically, on which we have fixed a passionate hope or expectation that becomes frustrated. . .

I have been trying for months to write about climate change and other threats to the environment: about my fear of the fires and floods; the plastic patch the size of Texas in the Pacific; the disappearing bees; the skies nearly empty of birds. I am aghast at those who refuse to acknowledge climate change, like smokers denying the connection between their habit and their cancer. I am confused by the lack of urgency our governments exhibit, and the questions they don’t have the courage to ask, much less debate. I vacillate between rage and a philosophical detachment. The rage is frustrating because I have no clear enemy to pummel. The detachment sometimes feels too much like giving up too soon. It’s like suffering all the stages of grief at once. It’s hard to write, at least coherently, when fear, sadness and rage are jockeying for pride of place on the keyboard.

Our predicament feels Hitchcockian. Like Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window, I see loved ones in danger and am flayed by our desperate helplessness. How can you know that something this bad is happening and be powerless to stop it? What sadistic, capricious god gives us the capacity to diagnose without giving us the capacity to heal? Or the capacity, but not the will? In this sense, perhaps this grief is more like dealing with a suicide: there is a sense that the impending disaster is actually willed, not just a fate to which we must submit.

I love this Planet: the flowing, falling, freezing, heaving, melting water; all the seasons; shy deer leaping away through the trees or eating from my hand; great flocks of birds launching themselves into the morning; the sound of thunderstorms; the playfulness of young animals; massive whales, massively graceful; the sun setting on El Capitan in Yosemite, making it glow like backlit quartz; the magic of fireflies in my grandparents’ back yard; the majesty of a redwood forest that makes people giggle as often as it makes them hush; the smell of rain in a thirsty desert . . .

I love much of the people-built world, too, though that love wrestles with my misanthropy. I despise our capacity to use power against the weak among us; our ability to delay acting, or to wait for others to act first; our selfishness, that can persist beyond childhood into a rapacious adulthood – these things make me wonder if Kurt Vonnegut was right when he said that we are an interesting, but failed, experiment. “The good Earth,” he wrote in A Man Without A Country. “[W]e could have saved it, but we were too damn cheap and lazy.” What a species.

Yet our capacity for creativity, compassion, and perseverance inspire us to use words like “miraculous” for our own accomplishments. In our darkest hours, our capacity for heroism blazes. Writers and film makers move us to tears by depicting our kindness to strangers. We can find peace in gardens, cathedrals, and meditation halls, before paintings and sculptures in museums – all made by people, all expressing who we are and how much we have to give. And then there is the great-hearted writing of people like Twain and Vonnegut, who knew so much suffering in their own lives, and did alchemy with it.

I don’t believe in blame any more. Not for this. The behaviours that have brought us here were, by and large, not ill-intended. Plastics made things safer and more convenient for a long time before they became a massive garbage dump in the Pacific. Oil and coal and gas made it possible for people to visit far-flung places, and to stay warm in winter, long before we knew that they were fouling the whole planet. Yes, there are some who take money to confuse us about our condition and its causes, and they do bear particular blame. But there are few of them, and they either know what they are doing or are deluded.

I want so badly to do something to make it all better, to be heroic. I can only make decisions for my own life, and while these are comically inadequate to the situation, they are what I can do, how I can show up. It seems the least I can do, to live a little more in harmony with my values. It won’t save the world, but it will signal my acknowledgement of the situation and my respect and love for what is passing. It’s a small gesture in the face of what appears to be a bad and inevitable conclusion.

Knowing the truth doesn’t always mean you can fix it. Knowing that Dad was dying would not have changed that fact. Knowing that the relationship between humans and our planet is changing doesn’t tell me how that’s going to unfold, or which of the species or people I love will or won’t survive.

There has been a lot of death recently. Tornado victims in Joplin, Missouri; species, and the industries that live off them in the Gulf of Mexico; forests of New Mexico, Arizona and Texas last year, and the forests around Moscow the year before; the homes of New York and New Jersey which took the brunt of Superstorm Sandy; the sinking Maldives; and Australia, which burns with nearly 130º temperatures as I write this. I don’t see a lot of reason for hope that we can make the difference we’d most like to make. Even with all of this happening, year after year, world governments have yet to show any interest, much less urgency. It’s as if they have received the death sentence, and decided not to fight any longer.

The difference we’d most like to make is not possible, and never has been, any more than it’s possible for individuals to live forever in good health. To see our actions as inadequate in the face of a perfect world that we can imagine, but that we cannot create and has never existed, is a way of creating resignation and futility. It’s like saying, “I can’t bring them back from the dead, so I won’t do what needs doing – to go to the funeral and be with the family.” We are here now, and this is the situation we face.

We are only helpless, and our actions inconsequential, relative to a perfect world that has never existed. In the real world, people die, and make bad choices, and they and their children must live with them. And yet here, in the face of that hard truth, in that context – this is where we show up. This is really what it means to be human in the world. An ideal world wouldn’t need us. But we’re needed here.

Thanks for coming.

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“I found a one-word poem by the fireside. It said ‘hearth’. So I wrote it out in orange all that a hearth contains. Heat. Art. Eat. Hear. Earth. Heart. What more? Hart.”

Jay Griffiths, A Love Letter from a Stray Moon

Wiston Lodge

There’s now just a month till Carrying the Fire, our mid-summer event at Wiston Lodge in the Scottish Borders. This is not a festival as such – more of a convivial gathering on a smaller scale than Uncivilisation, the main Dark Mountain festival which is held in August.

Carrying the Fire is a rare opportunity to sit round the hearth in a clearing in the woods, to share stories in good company and to engage in the kinds of conversations that have always been at the heart of the Dark Mountain Project: conversations about how we best live in this era of ecocide and economic collapse; about the stories that will help guide us through a time of change; about creative responses that dig deeper than that which is offered by our mainstream culture. It’s also an opportunity to take time out and to explore the beautiful woods and permaculture gardens at Wiston, as well as to climb (weather and fitness permitting) Tinto Hill which rises over 2000ft at  the back of the Lodge.

Whilst the aim is for something more intimate than a festival, we do also have some wonderful talks and performances lined up, including from two of the UK’s foremost writers on our relationship to the natural world: Jay Griffiths, who will read from and discuss her new book Kith: The Riddle of the Childscape; and Sara Maitland, discussing Gossip from the Forest. There will also be performances from the amazing Metaforestry and from food activist Mike Small, who will present Equidea, his blistering and darkly comic account of the ongoing horsemeat scandal.

Feedback from last year’s Carrying the Fire suggests that folk really value this kind of event –  some claimed it was the highlight of their year. For more information on this year’s programme, visit carryingthefire.co.uk

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Album artwork copyright Rima Staines

You can’t have missed the campaign we have been running for the last six weeks to raise the funds to produce our first album, From the Mourning of the World. That campaign is now over and we have raised over £3000: enough to produce the album, which is currently being pressed.

However, we didn’t hit our financial target this time around, which means we still need to raise the money to distribute the LPs that have been ordered, and to pay the curator and the designer of the sleeve. For this, we need around another £1000. Until we have raised that, the launch of the album proper is going to be delayed (although the download version will be winging its way to those who’ve placed orders over the next week or two).

In order to make it happen, a fundraising event for the album is going to be held in London on Saturday 8th June,  in a suitably wild outdoor location, featuring artists from the album and readings from Dark Mountain books.  There will be more details about this up on our events page within the next week.

In the meantime, the album is now available to pre-order or buy as a download from our Bandcamp page.  If you meant to buy a copy before, but didn’t get round to it, now is your chance!

And after the hectic pace of the album campaign, we’ll be back to business-as-usual on this blog next week.

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“Without parallel, the velvety ‘honeysuckle bloom’ tone of, inspired choice, Bethia Beadman stands out as the albums startling highlight. Vocally mesmerizing and compositionally assiduous, her resonating hymn like swoon, Georgia, is a drifting, opulent duet with REM’s Mike Mills and sounds like a long-suffering Joan Baez fronting Anthony And the Johnsons: oh yes it certainly stirs the soul!” - God is in the TV Zine

Image: www.mason-jar.net

What is it that interests you about the Dark Mountain Project, and this album?
When I was singing at the festival last summer, I felt a delicious sense of homecoming, somewhere that’s always been there if only we knew it.  I hope these songs settle together just like that.

Dark Mountain tries to offer some new perspectives on the way we live and what our values are. We think that art – stories – are a crucial way of doing that. Does that ring true for you?
Yes, though my mother taught me that stories are rather the only way to live at all!  Magic does inhabit the world of truth and I think it’s a mistake of some storytelling to constrict it to fantasy, which polarises the magical with the mundane or real.  We all need to feel its power to inspire our daily lives.

Can – should – music carry a ‘message’ of this kind? Does yours?  
I wouldn’t necessarily say ‘should’ since purpose is vast, but I don’t see a lot of point in creating mindlessly or endlessly unless it needs to be so.  I can’t help feeling an energetic awareness of ‘cyber waste’ that holds magnitudes of recordings or footage capturing something or other, that seemingly takes up no space except zeros and ones (I’m not even talking about the physicality of the hardware required), and then on a human scale, energy waste even in artistic creation.  I feel that it might be worthwhile to allow these things to inhabit a more sacred space, like sweets on Saturdays.  It’s down to personal discernment.  There’s a lot of art out there, perhaps it’s not so helpful to make more all the time unless it really wants to exist, or unless it can wash in an out with the tide, without weight or impact, sand castles then.  I don’t know!

Can you tell us something about your song on the record?
Well, you know, every single detail is a true event.  The adventure occurred in Georgia, in the USA and there were strawberries.  I really did retrieve a ring from the bottom of a lake, and the water was black-opaque with no way for me to see but through my soul light.  Every character is real.  The only thing that goes unmentioned is that it was also Easter Day!  For me, this is present in how the song sounds at times like a hymn.  I just remember that gorgeous heat, heavy and wet with green, yet light with spring.  It’s a psychological epic of love, loss and rebirth, spanning generations and continents, exploring relationships by proxy and projection, mirror upon mirror, family upon family, all the way to the song itself and its writing, questioned in the final verse.

What are you working on musically at the moment?
We are about to start mixing the third album.  Unlike my song on the Dark Mountain record, this album is entirely conscious.  Watch out.  It’s *the one*.

The song you’ve donated to this album, ‘Georgia’, has a lullaby feel to it, I wonder what the connection of that feeling is to the lyrics of the song itself. Can you tell us about it?
Perhaps the simplicity of image and melody within the lyric serves to soothe the listener whilst comfortably unfolding in a traditional folk form.  The story features archetypal symbols, a ring, lost into a lake, oh and it’s a waltz of course, so we lilt into unconsciousness upon meeting the water in that time signature… Lullabies are universal but may come into focus in a place with such a history as the South.  We sing such songs for comfort, to ourselves, to our children, to those we have lost and to those yet unborn.

Your performance at Uncivilisation festival last year captivated everyone there who witnessed it. Do you see your performance style as uncivilised, in whatever that may mean to you?
Thank you.  Perhaps my performance is uncivilised in the sense that it is boundless and bare beneath the sky and uncompromisingly seeks to get to the heart of the matter, the matter of reality, the heart.  But in truth, I think this is a highly civilised past time!

Your track is a duet with REM’s Mike Mills – how did that come about?
I was working as a sound trainee at The Hospital Studio in Covent Garden in 2007, where REM mixed their penultimate album, which brings us back to the fairytales of our lives…  MM’s vocals on the recording are so clever because they are both the memorising swamp I am lost in and the weighty anchor that holds me safe. And the latter quite literally in terms of the actual musical recording since I’d tried to capture the song as soon as it was conceived, resulting in times when it is barely vincible… Pianist Jools Scott is also exquisite in his piano accompaniment so I am able to wander with the in-discrepant footsteps of a child.  And Harvey Brown, violist and violinist, glistens as the last sight of winter slips away.

The end is in sight for this crowdfunding campaign – please support us by pre-ordering your copy of this most beautiful creation! 

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Image: David Angel

What is it that interests you about the Dark Mountain Project, and this album?
I first came across Dark Mountain shortly after completing my album Songs From The Floodplain album which imagines life in a post-oil rural community. It was very exciting to discover that there was a broader artistic movement going on that tallied exactly with the ideas I was exploring. I feel that providing an imaginative, creative response to changing times is one of the most important things that artists (of all kinds) can contribute to society – offering positive ideas of where we could end up, rather than just doom-mongering. So it’s really exciting to be a part of an album of material by different songwriters all approaching these issues.

Dark Mountain tries to offer some new perspectives on the way we live and what our values are. We think that art – stories – are a crucial way of doing that. Does that ring true for you?
Yes, I think people become very attached to the lifestyle that they find themselves in and can’t really conceive of any other. So something that is an incredible luxury for one generation becomes commonplace for the next, and often people start believing they have a right to that luxury. I studied history and one of the most frightening things history teaches us is how quickly things can change. So telling stories and making art that opens a window onto different lifestyles means that people can be more prepared when change comes. Even if the stories don’t get it right, just preparing people for the idea that things will change, but not seeing that as necessarily all bad, is tremendously important I think.

Can – should – music carry a ‘message’ of this kind? Does yours?
I think the nice thing about songwriting and album-making as an art form is that it can maintain an ambiguity about the story it is telling, leaving more space for the listener to weave their own stories around the songs. Because music can be listened to over and over again (more so than say a novel can be read over and over again) the journey into that story can be more gradual and ultimately perhaps more profound. I know there are many albums and songs that have coloured my view of the world and that I can dip back into whenever I want to renew that colouring, so albums and songs that hint at stories of what-is-to-come can, I think, offer quite a profound experience for the listener.

Can you tell us something about your song on the record?
Beating the Bounds is the first of a song-trilogy which tells of the beginning of a love affair between the protagonist and a girl he meets in this song. He is taking part in a strange, rather corrupted folk custom, and she is looking on and basically taking the piss out of them all! I’m really interested in how folk song and folk custom might come to have a deeper significance in a post-oil future, and how this can be a great force for social cohesion. But one also needs to be aware that the power of ritual can work both ways, and that folk customs can be corrupted and mishandled if not looked after properly.

What are you working on musically at the moment?
I’m currently working on a classical commission for the Britten Foundation. I’m writing a set of interpolations for Britten’s choral setting of the traditional ballad Little Musgrave. The interpolations will be sung by folk singers with a classical (hopefully Britten-esque) accompaniment. The premier is in Snape in August.

Hear Jon Boden talk more about folk music and post-apocalyptic novels on BBC Radio 3′s The Essay.

We’ve reached just over 50% of our target and only have six days left to go! Please visit our crowdfunding page and order your copy of this stunning album.

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What is it that interests you about the Dark Mountain Project, and this album?

Going back to a way of living which values the small things is something we are all going to have to get used to and many of us already subscribe to that. Any chance to bring that to a wider audience is welcome. The danger in ideas like the Dark Mountain project is that it can end up ‘preaching to the converted’ and putting out music, literature, art is a great way to bring new people into the fold, as it were. I think the idea of a vinyl album represents Dark Mountain’s ethos brilliantly, actually.

Dark Mountain tries to offer some new perspectives on the way we live and what our values are. We think that art – stories – are a crucial way of doing that. Does that ring true for you?

The Dark Mountain perspective is something which many of us were raised on unintentionally – usually because economically there was no other choice but to to live simpler lives. My generation has had false luxury bestowed on us over the last decade. We have all become accustomed to a way of living which we have borrowed and have to pay back.
Art, music, stories remain important as they are the places where we are shaped. If you want a message carried somewhere, let a minstrel, a storyteller take it. People will be more likely to listen. We all come from traditions like these – fairy tales, fables, folk songs. This is where we all learnt about life, the world, love, danger, death.

Can – should – music carry a ‘message’ of this kind? Does yours?

All real artists can’t help but have their ideals inform the art they make, I suppose. It doesn’t have to be worn like a badge to carry weight, though. Personally, everything I write is imbued with my opinions – it’s difficult not to let them in! My favourite songwriters captivated me with the poetry first, the ideals second. The best protest songs creep up on you in meaning, I think. I remember reading the backs of albums religiously – the meanings of the songs were obviously important but not always clear-lines would lead me to quotes from politicians, philosophers, books I had never heard of, little known poets. I always wanted to write songs like that. I think it is entirely possible to drive your art by your ideals, but the difficulty is doing it well.

Can you tell us something about your song on the record?

I’m aware that ‘America’ sounds like it may be a straightforward protest song, but, without wanting to be mysterious about it, I had multiple ideas in mind, lyrically. For the record, it is in no way an America-bashing rant. America as a continent obviously can’t be summed up in such simplistic terms, but it does seems to encapsulate extreme ways of thinking, living and that is fascinating to write about. I thought of it like The Roman Empire in scale, in it’s rise and in it’s eventual collapse. This is what happens to all empires. It is, in part, also about war and religious fundamentalism. I hope the the song stands up over time, so didn’t want it to seem about a specific event or time in Global history. I like others’ interpretation and never like to dictate too much of my own meaning to the audience. When I first wrote it, it felt like a vitriolic gospel song, full of anger, but now when I play it I feel a sadness in it. It’s as if the song follows the route America is taking. Or maybe I am just getting soft in my old age!

What are you working on musically at the moment?

We are currently in lock down at The Murder Barn writing and recording the album, which is turning into somewhat of an epic tale so hopefully we’ll have some gargantuan monster to release soon. We play April 25th at The Bull and Gate with Minuteman and Midway Still.

Our Double A side vinyl single (with free download) of ‘Harvest/America’, 4 track EP and free downloads of extra tracks are all available through bandcamp:
Bandcamp
Facebook

We have just eight days left to reach our target. Please help Dark Mountain bring this beautiful creation to life by visiting our crowdfunding page and pledging for your copy of this unique album!

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What was it that interested you enough in this album for you to offer a new recording of a song for it?

I think I’ve been so long on the margin that the whole Dark Mountain thing just felt like a coach party arriving at my favourite solitary place on the edge of the North Kent marshes. Then I realised that several people on that coach felt the same way I did. The age-old loner’s paradox. Like Groucho not wanting to join a club that would have him as a member.

At the first Dark Mountain Festival you suggested that instead of looking for new stories we should be looking for old ones.  What did you mean?

Someone once said – “Truth goes through three stages. First it is ridiculed. Then it is vigorously opposed before, finally, it is accepted as self evident.” Contemporary voices have yet to go through this trial but the voice of Anon has been tested already.

It seems likely that in 500 years time, whatever direction our civilisation takes, people will still be sitting around fires singing songs.  A lot of old English folk songs are about living through or coping with very hard times. What do you think it is that makes people tell these stories in song?

People’s desire to chant in an attempt to unriddle their universe is as old as people. So much else is an invention, the novel, poetic form etc. The “hard times” sub-text is almost meaningless. People make songs and chants at the drop of a hat and it is their spontaneity that allows the other stuff to sneak in without the author using their forebrain too much. “Ring a ring a roses” – a child’s rhyme for a playground game based on the plague.

You once said that anonymous was the greatest songwriter in history. What did you mean?

The greatest writer, storyteller, poet, composer, songwriter, artist who ever lived is, Anon. Picasso stood before the cave paintings at Lascaux and declared “we have learned nothing”. It didn’t stop him working, it made him work harder and better! I humbly suggest that more contemporary writers, storytellers, poets, composers, songwriters, artists could do the same.

What is your next project?

NONE THE WISER – you can listen to the songs now on ChrisWoodMusic.co.uk 

Thank you and good luck!

We have just 12 more days to raise enough money to turn this creative vision into reality. Please support us by pre-ordering your copy of From the Mourning of the World here.

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If you like what you see and hear please visit our crowdfunding page and pre-order your copy. We still have just less than £3000 to raise in the next 15 days!

Bleak band. Photo: Tom Godber

What is it that interests you about the Dark Mountain Project, and this album?

Anton: Dougald, one of the founders of the project, and I are friends and have been for a while. So my involvement with Dark Mountain came via that friendship. Stuff was looking pretty heavy in 2009 and we were thinking about what would happen next. Everything we talked about, everything we wrote, it all came true. 30-40% public sector cuts in the UK, a wealthy country. Stuff you would expect to go down in Egypt going down in Greece. Entire developed countries’ economies going down the toilet. And the environmental disaster getting worse. The US has bailed itself out through fracking, they bought themselves maybe 5-10 years economically but at what cost to future generations, our children?

It just so happens that Bleak play death.blues – the blues as it was intended back in the 1920s-30s, and before that in the 1870s-90s – the last two huge depressions. We kinda happened at a time when music like ours historically gets dragged to the fore out of its 80 year long hibernation in some Louisiana swamp and gets hijacked for the soundtrack. So there was a synergy, we were just doing this stuff on our own, and then something bigger, connected, came along, and it made sense. Those who have seen our performances at Unciv 2010 and 2012 we hope will agree that our way of narrating all this through death.blues, or rock’n'roll, or music, or whatever you want to call it is consistent with the movement. If you saw Bleak’s 2012 performance and you didn’t come away with something, good or bad, moving or numbing, then there is something missing from your soul. We’re just glad we’ve been with Dark Mountain from the very very start, and as the world grows more sinister, the message gets more succinct and better honed. It’s an honour to be part of that channel of communication.

Andrew: I have performed at Uncivilisation as a solo performer. I think that is where Anton and I met. The peaceful nature of the festivals, and the friendly nature of the community, is an extremely valuable thing. I will not hold meeting Anton there against them.

Dark Mountain tries to offer some new perspectives on the way we live and what our values are. We think that art – stories – are a crucial way of doing that. Does that ring true for you?

Yvonne: Yes.

Andrew: If we pretend we are not ruled by the stories we tell to ourselves, we will be ruled by the stories others tell for us.

Anton: Without art, music, stories, history would be a series of lies, sanitised and censored by the winners. And the good guys/bad guys winning is pretty much 50/50. But to this day, we almost subconsciously know of the struggles of those we may not even know existed, or are only dimly aware of. The songs of the White Army were a big taboo under Soviet rule but they still survived and at least gave a qualitative aspect to the official “They were evil and pro-tsar” version of events. It’s all the rage now though, and again, maybe we have to rely on old war songs and laments to remember what it was like in the Soviet Union? Same with the blues, the closest you’ll ever come to FEELING the struggles and privations of poor people in the South in the 1920s is through that music. Stuff is a bit different now but maybe, just maybe, in 100 years some music geek will hear an obscure long lost Bleak tune and go “Oh, right, so THAT’S what some people were feeling in Tottenham when it was on fire in 2011 which we read about in history books”. That’s assuming there is anything left 100 years from now…

Can – should – music carry a ‘message’ of this kind? Does yours?

Rachel: Of course. Lyrics are a powerful medium, I’d argue they can be more powerful than spoken word; you can convey so much depth of feeling and emotion in the rhythm, the pitch, the key, the melody.  Music without message lacks any soul, from my perspective. Our songs range from deep and political to light and entertaining, but they all have their place!

Andrew: Everything is political, and songs that pretend not to be only convey a politics of apathy and selfishness.

Anton: Music without a message is valueless decoration. The message need not be verbalised – it can be musical. Nor does it need to be Political with a capital “p”, there are politics in the heart, soul and human interactions too. Of course the message can be false too – people jumping on bandwagons and doing a song slagging off the religious right or some cartoonised hate figure like Margaret Thatcher… That kind of pretence is possibly even worse than meaningless pop music, which at least you can get drunk and dance to in an effort to lobotomise yourself to the mundane horror of the world around you.  In our case, the burden is pretty heavy – we have inherited, through no choice of our own, an overwhelming and demanding musical tradition, and like it or not, the ghosts of Blind Willie Johnson and Bessie Smith will kick the crap out of us if we don’t tell our audiences the truth. And the truth is, it’s closing time. Drink up. But the good news is, there’s a lock in. Will you stay? Your call.

Can you tell us something about your song on the record?

Yvonne:  Credit Crunch Blues was written at the beginning of the crisis pretty much prophesising what we are all living through today.

Anton: Credit Crunch Blues… yeah… written when it was all about to kick off. Howlin’ Wolf had the best explanation of what the blues is, and it’s about not knowing where your next meal is coming from. I’ve been there, and don’t exclude the possibility that I might be there again. We all might be there pretty soon, billions around the world are, so what makes us so god damn special? As we say in Russia, never say never to the prison or the beggar’s bag. But that’s what’s Dark Mountain is all about, right? It’s already all gone wrong, the question is how do we articulate what we do next.

Musically (for blues geeks) it came out of making the switch to mostly writing in the open D minor tuning. For the best example of that, take a listen to Devil Got My Woman by Skip James.

Your name and your image are pretty dark! Where does that darkness come from and what is it saying?

Andrew: The blues is about expressing the darkness, letting it out and sharing it in as matter-of-fact a way as possible – that way you lessen its power over you.

Anton: Buddy Guy, a man whose voice is so mournful that it causes most people who hear him to shed a tear, tells a story, where he is checking into a hotel before a gig, and a tourist couple see his famous “BLUES” ring and say to him: “Blues, that’s sad music right?” and so he guestlists them for the gig and the next day the couple runs into him in the lobby and the guy says to him: “I didn’t hear you play one sad song”. The darkness and the light are in your head. Bleak are a mirror. If you think that what’s going on right now – which we try to describe – IS dark, that’s your decision, your perception of your world. But maybe honesty is the ray of light which helps you figure out what else there is?

You’re a very diverse band in many ways. Where do your various influences – cultural and musical – come from, and how do they come together to form a whole? Do you work in harmony or creative tension?

Yvonne: We are a diverse band but we all have an appreciation for good music so there isn’t much musical tension between us.

If you come to see us live, we’ve got five massive flags hanging behind us. We use imagery in the form of 5 different flags in our live shows to represent our diversity and ethical stand points. These are: the African Union flag, representing the continent where the blues originates, the Russian imperial flag from 1861- the year serfdom was abolished, the Yankee Union flag from 1863 -  the year of the Emancipation Proclamation – and as a reaction to all those bands on the rock’n’roll circuit who think it’s cool to sport the Confederate flag with little thought as to the meaning behind it and the suffering of millions which was inflicted by those flying it. Then there’s Calico Jack’s Jolly Roger – the first pirate to have a unisex crew. And a black and white Union Jack – a monochrome version of the flag we all have in common.

Rachel: My background is really in the folk area, like Andrew’s; something I got from my mum. I’m always keen for clear harmonies and strong rhythm – which means playing bass and pitching in with backing vocals works for me. We absolutely have our musical differences but if we were overly self-congratulatory, I’m sure we wouldn’t progress.

Andrew: I have been a solo folk performer for a very long time. I joined this very un-folky band because being in a band keeps you honest. You can’t get your way all the time, and have to fight for your ideas, and respect the ideas of others. Having those ideas be as different as possible – due to our very different histories and influences – creates tension. As long as the fighting is about making the music stronger, creative tension is the only place for your band to be, and is in no way a negative emotional space.
If Anton fucks up my tea one more time I am going to kill him.

Anton: You’re welcome to try, wolfboy.
Bleak is London. And London, for better or for worse, is one of the most resilient cities in the world. It’s not about harmony or tension, it’s about resilience – and staying true to what the blues is meant to be like – raw, honest and painful – not sanitised endless guitar soloing by wealthy upper middle class men. The reason for which we are frequently described as one of the best live bands in the UK is, I hope, in part due to that resilience and ability to operate under combat conditions.

Anton, you’ve spoken at the Dark Mountain Festival about the situation in Russia, a country which has experienced collapse at first-hand. Has this influenced the kind of music you play?
Anton: You can take a boy out of Siberia, but you can’t take Siberia out of a boy.

What are you working on musically at the moment?

Yvonne: We’ve been writing a lot of new material and are half way through our second record which is set to be a double album smash.

Rachel:  I’ve been spending time working on some of the more complex bits of the songs we’re pulling together for the next album, nothing is ever quite as simple as it seems! But for that, it is a rewarding process once you can see the end…

 Andrew: Alongside the Bleak album, I’m also working on a solo folk album, music for film and several other collaborations. I will let Anton tell you all about the next Bleak album…

Anton: We’re in the process of making a massive juggernaut of a sophomore double album. It’s still death.blues, and it’s heavier than a freight train but it also has gospel choirs, duets, ethereal laments… But you know, as a band we are cursed, and this process is no exception. The first time we went into the studio this time around, everything blew up, the desk got burnt out, we lost many hours’ worth of session and the recording engineer left the country… We’ve spent much of March holed up in a Joseph Fritzl-esque basement on a weird no-man’s land type road between Rochester and Chatham – a street bereft of pretty much all life, with shopfronts including three undertakers, a boarded up gun store and a shop specialising in scary clown masks. You can imagine the kind of psychological effect that has, but it’s translating into the kind of music you guys are going to need to remind yourself you are still alive. But we’ll see you on the road, yeah? Got shows in a few cities this year, Liverpool, Manchester, Bristol and so on. Come out next time we’re in town. See what all the fuss is about. Get a dose of the truth. Be good to hang out.

If you like what you read then please visit our crowdfunding page and pre-order your copy of this stunning compilation album. We have £3000 to raise in 15 days to help bring this beautiful creation out into the world!

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First of all, here’s a question that someone recently put to us: why has Dark Mountain chosen to put out a record on vinyl – a medium that is so clearly made from questionable materials? Materials that can’t possibly come from anywhere other than environmentally-damaging industrial processes. Isn’t this a contradiction? Wouldn’t a simple download be better, simpler and cleaner?

One answer to this is that a download is indeed an option! But as to the vinyl issue: one of the pillars of this project, as I have understood it, is to create beautiful physical artefacts containing the counter-narratives we so keenly want to see give balance to any discourse going. Of course, these narratives could remain in the ether; fragmented in memories of pub conversations, or in the annals of some long-forgotten blog’s comment thread. But I think, if we want these thoughts out there in the world, we’d better put them into formats that can be enjoyed and have longevity.

The Dark Mountain Project started with a manifesto and then followed with volumes of uncivilised writings and pictures and artwork. I don’t know about anyone else, but I intend on having these exquisite anthologies on my bookshelf for the rest of my life, telling any future children I might have the stories contained within them. These books will be enduring, they will last longer than an ebook, and they will be a pleasure to read from. I do not think you can argue with that format, in a primarily literate society.

And so I return to the choice of vinyl over other formats for this compilation record; and I would make the same arguments for music as I have for print. This format has stood the test of time as an enduring medium to put recorded music onto. The first vinyl records as we know them today came out in the early 1950s. If you can find any of those records today, you can still play and enjoy them. During the Digital Enlightenment of the early 1980s, the compact disc aimed to replace both the cassette and vinyl record. It was highly successful for a time, but then digital downloads and vinyl’s resurgence made it almost irrelevant. Physically speaking, too, it has shown its fallibility, with disc rot and other problems. Vinyl, on the other hand, if properly cared for can last for as long as it takes to degrade … which is 500 years.

Another tangible reality of this format is that the sound waves are actually carved into the physical vinyl. If industrial civilisation collapsed tomorrow and you wanted to play your old Dylan records, you could hear them with a piece of paper twirled into a cone pressed into the groove. I imagine you’d have more pressing issues to contend with if industrial civilisation collapsed, but you never know what comfort you might need …

Whether or not vinyl has a ‘warmer’ sound than digital is a heavily contested question and rightfully so -  it’s a matter of taste. As an ex-audiophile though, it certainly sounds more human to me. As I’ve said, this record is available as a high quality-digital download as well as on vinyl, so these differences in quality can be compared should anyone wish. This is probably the first and very last time I would link to a Wired article, but this is not a bad summary of how vinyl and downloads give you the best of both worlds.

In short then: we’re not producing a vinyl record without thought. Who knows how long these 500 copies will last? But it would be nice to think that in a century or so there may still be some kicking around in whatever civilisation our descendants are living amongst.

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