A Closer Listen
Ben McElroy‘s Allotment Tapes series has reached its halfway point, so we feel it’s a good time to dive back in ~ especially as people in the Northern Hemisphere have all returned to the great outdoors by now, and St. Anns Allotment is bustling with activity. We covered the first installment here back in January, and pick up the thread with the second.
Allotment Tapes #2 visits with Steno Vitale and his partner Michelle, the former a musician in the early music ensemble Carnival Band. The two took on the challenge of clearing a small plot and populating it with vegetables, fruit and “a place to jam” (which is also a fun play on words). Steno calls this “A Happy Place to Be,” while music cascades around the garden. The birds are happy, the people are happy, even the water seems happy, although a siren in the background hints at trouble in the outer world. The violin is the main instrument, while the interview becomes an instrument of its own. At certain junctures, the music stops completely before re-launching, a pause between thoughts.
March’s tape (not actually a tape, don’t ask) focuses on Rachel Brooke’s work at the community orchard. She speaks of “Access to These Spaces,” looking after nature and each other. “We provide a hot meal,” she shares; everyone is family. The phrase “happy place” resurfaces as a discovery for younger people. How many green spaces are preserved while others are destroyed? Joni Mitchell’s prophetic words come to mind: they paved paradise and put up a parking lot. The Ragbeck bubbles in the back, serenaded by guitars, brass and fowl. The EP’s subtitle: We Are All Visitors Here.
St. Anns in the Countryside interviews gardener and historian Mo Cooper, who begins by talking about “Little Animals” before delving deep into the centuries of flourish, decay and restoration. McElroy calls the music “scavenged, repurposed and scraped together stuff from my hard drive;” one cannot help but see a parallel with the garden. No matter what its genesis, the music flows around the narrative like water around stones. A particularly clear guitar passage arrives in the sixth minute of the opener as Cooper speaks of the older rules for weddings. “The Earlier Gang” showcases strings as Cooper talks about “guns and knives and prostitution.” In the title track, a contented McElroy sings without words, while “The Decline” is haunted by a persistent motor.
And then it is May; the flowers are beginning to poke through the earth. I Wanted the Trees offers contrasting approaches to gardening, presented by husband and wife Gail and Peter. In the Myers-Briggs Inventory, Peter would be a J and Gail would be a P; his plot is “immaculate and neat,” hers “wild and self-seeding.” The title track of I Wanted the Trees sounds like the bottom of Björk’s cliff: “car parts, car doors, chairs, shoes, pieces of glass, batteries.” For thirty years, the land had gone untouched. “I wanted the trees,” admits Gail. And she and her husband went to work.
“Chickens and Twirly Things” is one of the series’ most endearing pieces, sounding exactly as one might expect. The new addition is a harmonium, like a non-native plant. “That cost me a pound, that cauliflower!” exclaims Gail. Again McElroy begins to sing. The similarly amusing “Ain’t Got a Shed (But I’ve Got a Greenhouse)” stops and starts as the recordist fumbles with his tape. The title suggests a country song; the instrumental folk guitar follows suit. In the final piece, McElroy adds opera and dialogue loops to the mix, like perennials.
Urban Nature visits a managed habitat recently allowed to go wild. “The birds still love it,” writes McElroy. The EP is different from its predecessors in that it is a single piece that begins and ends in field recordings, is free from dialogue and embeds a fully instrumented piece with wordless vocals. Birds and “boy racers” battle, but the birds seem to be winning. Allowing the allotment to speak for itself is a perfect way to end the half year, as the artist’s footsteps vanish into the green.
Each of these tapes is approximately twenty minutes long: 120 minutes to date, 120 to follow. One wonders if they will indeed become tapes, and if so, whether they will number twelve or three. In the digital era, it’s also okay to save the cost and energy of production. These are tapes because the interviews are taped; but they would also make a wonderful souvenir. We’ll have to wait and see; the next six months await! (Richard Allen)
Tue Jun 30 00:01:46 GMT 2026