Justin Hopper & Sharron Kraus with The Belbury Poly – Chanctonbury Rings (Ghost Box)

Justin Hopper, Sharron Kraus and Belbury Poly have brought the thinnest of places to vivid life in this oddly comforting avant-garde wonder

Robert Macfarlane relates an evening spent alone at Chanctonbury Ring on the South Downs in his book The Old Ways. After falling into a “senseless sleep” he is abruptly awoken later on. “I heard the first scream at around two o’clock in the morning. A high-pitched and human cry, protracted but falling away in its closing phase.” Another cry joins the first, with both moving towards him, albeit at treetop level. This continues for fifteen minutes and then stops. Macfarlane “eventually, uneasily” goes back to sleep.

That he has the self-control to lie there, instead of leaping up and running away as fast as he can, suggests he must be made of sterner stuff than most folks. This is, in his telling, the type of haunting I encountered in a Reader’s Digest book of ghost sightings that frightened me to my core as a child. Spine-tingling, most assuredly. Terrifying, I think so. What it doesn’t do, however, is haunt in the same manner or to the same extent as Justin Hopper’s conjuring of the same place, drifting through time as it intersects with his own past. Hopper is a reliable narrator who happens to be reporting from a haunted world indistinguishable from fiction.  

Chanctonbury Rings was born out of spoken word performances of Hopper’s beautifully written and moving work of poetic psychogeography, The Old Weird Albion. Joined by folk alchemist Sharron Kraus and Ghost Box’s own warmly uncanny Belbury Poly, this audio manifestation of Hopper’s exploration of Chanctonbury Ring is an LP for the ages; an oddly comforting avant-garde masterpiece. It’s a heady mix of spoken word, poetry and song, where off-kilter electronic excursions meet deep-rooted folk invocations and the landscape is translated into mystical musical passages. Put the record on and it’s as if you are pushing open a moss-covered stone door, then stepping over the threshold into an antechamber that transforms into the South Downs. The world building is brimming with life – whether it’s Kraus’s breath creating an ever-more-enveloping soundscape, Belbury Poly’s Albion analogue theme which bookends the LP or Hopper’s steady narrator navigating visions of his dead grandmother – and indeed death. 

It begins in what could be ominous fashion, but is strangely inviting instead. “Time had gone soft at the Crossroads,” intones Hopper, “and let me tell you how.” Belbury Poly’s “Chanctonbury Rings (Intro)” then carves a passage into a narrative as still and immersive as the virtual reality unconscious dreaming of Christopher Priest’s A Dream of Wessex. Storytelling as an audio experience can – under certain conditions – offer a sensory experience unlike any other and make no mistake, Chanctonbury Rings is a richly evocative narrative of the highest order. The Story Teller cassette series I listened to as a child springs to mind, an almost olfactory recall. Although I now reimagine those tapes populated with Sharron Kraus and Belbury Poly’s music out of time, and Hopper’s narration throughout.

Kraus’s voice emerges out of mists on “The Thinnest Place”, nudging analogue electronics from pagan Britain up and around Hopper’s words. It’s where he gives context, allows the listener access to the cartography of his mind: “Chanctonbury Ring is the thin place on my map. That place where another world peeks through. It’s where I go to believe, to remember that I can believe.” Local legend, myth, allegory – it all bleeds through the present and Hopper sifts through it to deliver a personal narrative rich in reference.

The record is haunted by visions of Hopper’s grandmother Winnie. She was so full of life and such a key figure in his, that she is alive to him still. His evocations of Winnie are delightful and believable; grounded in the reality of memory, immune from terror. Hopper makes us consider our own dead. My father died a little over twenty years ago and I’ve sometimes wondered how I would deal with encountering his apparition. Yet I always answer my own question, confident I am to be spared such a vision. Hopper haunts us with the notion that ghosts are of course embedded in the everyday. “I don’t often see the dead”, he says on “Breath”, as matter of fact as you like. “Certainly no more than anyone else. Because we all see the dead sometimes, don’t we? Waiting on a cloud-darkened bench. Or passing by us on a side street. Or fumbling for their keys in the hallway.” “Breath” is hauntology raised from the dead, emanating from barrows. Kraus becomes a spectral multitude as she breathes into the microphone, amongst environmental sounds sourced from deep time, to craft a world in a song as haunting as A Warning to the Curious was on television.    

There’s a lovely moment where Morris Men gather to dance in the May at Chanctonbury and Hopper watches along with other assorted onlookers, a tourist to old rites. Hopper’s outsiderness as an American allows him degrees of impartiality. He even references William Burroughs and Fear and Loathing in The Old Weird Albion (yet not on the record) which suggests unexpected connections that nonetheless feel right. Hopper is linked to Sussex through his family, and visits to Chanctonbury Ring with his grandmother played a vital role in his formative years. His viewpoint is therefore both looking in and looking out, the plurality of the LP title’s “rings” echoing the different spheres of his existence.

Chanctonbury Rings stands up alongside that BBC Schools Drama Workshop album – and hauntological touchstone – The Seasons. Justin Hopper’s delivery is however miles away from Robert Duncan’s stern enunciation of crisply arcane material and the music by Sharron Kraus and Belbury Poly is less ornately avant-garde. For The Seasons is an ancestor to rather than template for Chanctonbury Rings. Each is their own peculiar and intoxicating work of inimitable art. If only the children of today and tomorrow could be encouraged to express themselves through movement and dance to Ghost Box number 33. For Chanctonbury Rings encourages magic to occur. Magic to think, breathe and dream more. The campaign to have it installed in assembly halls and played in primary schools across the country begins here.

ghostbox.co.uk/chanctonburyrings