The Heartwood Institute - Barsham Faire (Polytechnic Youth)

The shadowy organisation known as The Heartwood Institute have constructed an imaginary reality that listeners can inhabit simply by playing Barsham Faire and The Third Eye

By dropping the needle on the lathe cut 45 – or indeed pressing play on a digital device – you invite transformation. Reality flickers like static, the picture around you that of a VHS tape recorded over too many times. A palimpsest where what is before your eyes begins to break down, revealing shards of what was there before.

You attempt to stand up, get out of the chair and shake these visions off. But it is to no avail and you are pushed back down by unseen forces. Seated once more, the only course of action is to steady yourself and accept what is happening. Now calm, it is as if your nerves have operated a switch. Words from a book you once read are reprinted across your mind’s eye:

“The landscape, too, reflected the unconscious. It had its idiosyncrasies and illogicalities – the climate was either dramatically good or dramatically bad, the days seemed longer, the hills seemed higher and the valleys deeper – but it was still a recognizable version of the true Dorset.”

You are made to remember this is from Christopher Priest’s A Dream of Wessex. The passage is itself a passage – it allows you to move along to adjacent realities.

The next words you hear rather than read. They seem to be from some forgotten 1970s documentary. These are words that guide you through the otherwise impossible to navigate passageways to a specific destination.

“The lost Barsham Faire, a medieval faire of wares and all to please the mind”

It’s a journey that has been mapped out by the shadowy organisation known as The Heartwood Institute. As the words fade, you realise that you have arrived in a pastoral dream. Pipes call out from the light mists that dance upon the meadow. You stumble towards them before understanding that you are actually following something less obviously benevolent. A throbbing darkness is your guide. What to do but embrace it?

This imaginary past was constructed eons ago and only yesterday by The Heartwood Institute. The organisation’s true motives remain unclear, but they continue to siphon off select individuals from this world, depositing them in another. Answers may be found by making the journey yourself. And so you light out, ready to seek solace, adventure and darkness in the corridors of unreality.

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