A field looks different once someone tells you …

A field looks different once someone tells you what happened there.

Nothing has moved. The gate still hangs badly. The hedge needs cutting. Somewhere beyond it, a tractor is getting on with the day. But a story has entered the scene, and now your attention has somewhere else to go.

That’s where my mind went reading Michael Hann’s piece on Green Lung, Druidess and folk horror in British metal. I’m interested in what happens when music makes the ground beneath us feel less settled.

We get used to places. Familiarity makes them manageable. The church becomes a turning point on the drive home. The wood becomes somewhere to exercise the dog. We learn enough about our surroundings to move through them efficiently, and much of the rest slips out of view.

Then a strange story interrupts the routine.

I like the thought of a heavy riff doing that work. Giving the familiar enough weight and menace that we have to look at it again. A song can put a troubling thought in your body before you’ve decided whether you agree with it. You can stand at a gate and think about mortality. Add an amplifier, and mortality gets a chest cavity.

There’s pleasure in that. I don’t want to turn every encounter with darkness into a diagnosis of modern life. Sometimes you want the loud guitars and the witch on the sleeve because they’re fucking great. The pleasure deserves room before we make it carry a theory.

But I keep coming back to the kind of attention this music invites.

A place can hold more than its current use. The field grows something now; it has held other lives, other arrangements, other ways of understanding what a person owes the ground. We don’t need to believe every legend to let it disturb our assumption that the present has explained everything.

Myth gives the imagination something to work with. It also gives us something to argue with.

That second part matters to me because the wish to feel rooted can become possessive very quickly. There’s a point where affection for a place starts issuing membership rules. Someone decides which ancestors count, who gets to tell the story, whose presence requires an explanation.

I want a relationship with place that makes me more curious about the people living there. If an old story helps me care for a wood, good. If it persuades me that the wood belongs spiritually to people with the correct surname, something has gone badly wrong.

And I’m wary of making the past too hospitable. An imagined village can look wonderfully whole from a distance. Get closer and there are neighbours watching, obligations you never chose, somebody deciding that your difference threatens the harvest. A community can give you somewhere to stand while making it difficult to move.

The horror earns its place there. It keeps the longing for belonging uneasy.

What interests me is the possibility of carrying that unease back into an ordinary walk. Hearing a song, then passing the same churchyard and noticing how casually we live beside the dead. Looking at a field and wondering who worked it, who owned it, who was kept out. Letting curiosity survive the end of the track.

The music doesn’t have to answer any of that. I’d rather it left a little interference in the familiar picture.

Tomorrow the gate will still need fixing. Someone will still have to cut the hedge. I like the idea that, for a few minutes before getting on with it, we might stop and listen.

Reply to ‘The cauldron was already bubbling …’: Green Lung, Druidess and the return of folk horror to British heavy metal in The Guardian.