First of all, there's Bridget.
She is so strange, twilight-like, a sweet creature from a parallel universe.
Composed, although not very much, of wandering particles of lo-fi blues meditations.
She surely comes from afar, specifically from rural Todmorden, in the green county of Yorkshire.
A place infested by nature and oddities, with UFOs that seem to have taken up residence and cottages haunted by ghosts. It's said that she's a bit of a witch, a bit mystical, and in town, the most British claim she’s just a clever illusionist.
She might have an enormous musical talent, she's the muse of the noise drone collective Vibracathedral Orchestra, in short, the creator of ghost music.
Her lyric is an ecstatic fire, paradoxically disconcerting but ultimately... enlightens.
In short, ghost music for those who still live, breathe, and feel.
Then there are the Apparitions; although when I arrived, they had already disappeared.
The wild beat of Cold Blows The Rain can be fascinating, sweet, and unsettling, and it astrally reconnects with the visions and chants of that timeless sound dimension: echo and distortion of Annie Briggs, of Judy Dyble with the nuptial sacredness of a new Nico.
As often happens, the recording is mundane, within the walls of Todmorden's Town Hall, that slow refraction of the sun's rays still below the horizon, that sleepy slow pace of the Municipal Administration, that Aurora composed of lo-fi bubbles of suggestions and skeletal cacophonies.
Eight ancient tracks handfuls taken like grains of sand from the repertoire of folk songs made famous by Pentangle, Sandy Denny, among folk songs from the medieval Irish tradition.
The secret is to regenerate the Enchantment from Tradition, oh how sublime Bridget Hayden is.
A mention for She Moved Through The Fayre, which features a text mostly written by a couple of Irish folk music collectors just over 100 years ago. Here Hayden's delicate voice lowers and glides, evocative in its most primordial soul level, as haunting as it is eternal. Although there isn't exactly a murder ballad in this group of eight traditional English and Irish songs, one can perceive the noble wounded souls who in eternity, under our stars, suffer from infinite and terrible losses, surrounded by restless spirits whose graves were not dug deep enough.
And once the unbearable lightness of the harmonium converts into a headlong flight in the sound carpet of a God as beautiful as he is absent, in that middle ground that is the recomposed sum of yourself and your dreams, Cold Blows The Rain is an ecstatic soundtrack in the background.
The apparitions, in fact, have not yet appeared.
But this absence takes nothing away from the Beauty of the Album.
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