Frances Castle / The Hardy Tree – Stagdale (Clay Pipe Music)

Stagdale is more than a lovely curio, its intersection of music and graphic storytelling offers a vivid experience and fresh possibilities

Frances Castle’s Clay Pipe label releases music that very often has, by design, a strong sense of place. That idea has been brought to curious life with Stagdale, which takes the form of a three-track EP (flexi-disc plus download) and the first part of a bound graphic story. At its heart lies the fictional village of Stagdale, which may be to Clay Pipe what Belbury is to Ghost Box. Castle is first and foremost an illustrator, and illustration has always been a vital aspect of Clay Pipe releases. Poring over the artwork of a Clay Pipe record is as much a part of the experience as listening to the delicate, enveloping sounds. Likewise, the music suggests the unfolding of narrative, the capturing of a dream. Castle’s sleeves trigger an unseen process or else a series of notes sparks something from within the art. So Frances Castle telling a story in words and images, set to a soundtrack by her incarnation as The Hardy Tree, is the most natural and magical thing in the world. Even in its unfinished form, as the first part of a longer tale, Stagdale can be placed alongside such works as the 1977 BBC ghost story Stigma, with its portrayal of the countryside existing at a disconnect from the city and everyday trauma amplified by the mists of time.

There’s a pen and ink drawing by Tolkien of Bilbo Baggins standing in the hall at Bag-End after the conclusion of The Hobbit. I used to peer into it as a ten-year-old and feel myself get lost in the story again, the image allowing immediate access to the text. It was a portal straight back into that other world, a notion supported by the shape of the hall and the round door opening into the landscape. Castle’s illustrations adhere closer to reality than Tolkien’s, but are similarly transportive. The pages of Stagdale boast a dreamy realism that charms and unsettles with some of the lushest art to grace the pages of a graphic novel. P Craig Russell’s adaptation of Coraline sprang to mind, but the panels seem unfinished in comparison to Castle’s. It struck me that Stagdale might have more in common with certain children’s picture books, the beautiful detail of Jon Klassen or John Burningham splashed across full pages or spreads. Although Castle mostly boils down such magic to individual panels. Perhaps the closest comparison would be an imaginary one: an adaptation of The Owl Service by Raymond Briggs in Father Christmas mode.

The world building in Stagdale is assured and evocative. “The Theme to Stagdale” employs analog synthesiser sounds to memorably comforting and unsettling affect in a title-sequence-and-beyond captured from an alternate past’s gently apocalyptic children’s programming. Set in 1975, twelve-year-old Kathy and her mum have just arrived in the insular village of Stagdale – on flying ant day, an ominous sign indeed. Kathy misses her life in London and is traumatised by her parents’ divorce. Despite befriending a boy called Joe, she feels like an outsider, which is how the rest of the community seem to view her and her mother. Welcoming they are not. There’s a wonderfully disarming moment when Kathy and Joe visit the local shop, for local people. After an awful reception from the shopkeeper (“London eh?” she says, adjusting her glasses judgementally. “Well well.”), they buy some pear drops and go back outside. “Who was that man?” asks Kathy – and it was as if I had missed out on a great and wonderful secret. What man? Then I saw him, his presence pulsed out of the shadows in the room behind the shop counter. I could have jumped out of my seat. It was my own fault for going too quickly over the panels, but I wouldn’t trade the experience. Castle knows how to deploy shadows and tease out mystery while never pulling away from the details.

Kathy and Joe visit the Stagdale museum which introduces the central mystery of the missing Stag Jewel amulet, purportedly taken by a German boy during the Second World War. Not only that, but this room that takes up an entire page, along with inset panels blowing up artefacts, is like an old curiosity shop at the centre of Clay Pipe mythology. Clay pipes can be “found in various locations across the village,” one of the insets informs us. A stag’s head protrudes from the wall – the stag is a creature that appears throughout Clay Pipe Music history, from album sleeves to pin badges – and items of arcane power cry out to be traced across past or future releases. It’s a room to get lost in as much as the hall of Bag-End. The page gets its own dedicated score with “The Museum”. A Moog turns upon a revelation from the story’s deep past, its melodic insinuations teasing secrets out of the dark. It seems to take careful but insistent steps, opening doors to find out what lies behind them.

Castle carefully isolates the supernatural, amplifying its presence with the psychological. The jigsaw pieces rising up off of the bedroom floor during a storm is the zenith of this. It’s stunningly conceived and potently executed. “After the Rain” then siphons off after-the-dream sensations created by this heightened moment of metaphorical charge. Less an end theme, than a journey towards what happens next, the EP is poised to continue rather than stopped dead. It feels as much the first part of an album as the 36-page booklet is the first part of a graphic story. Both leave you wanting more.

Frances Castle and Clay Pipe Music were previously involved in the Tyneham House album (a joint release with Second Language), which is about an actual village in Dorset that was requisitioned by the government for strategic purposes prior to the Second World War. The village was, rather menacingly, never returned to those who had lived there. Perhaps this can be viewed as a real life corollary to Stagdale. Or rather Stagdale is a fictionalised version of that village reinstated earlier in the time stream. Either way, it is already a place that lives and breathes in the imagination.