Inner Circle: Collaborative Podcast

Created and originally streamed through summer 2020, The Dark Alchemy Inner Circle collaborative podcasts is a three part series of audio collages featuring a seamless combination of music, sound, field recordings and spoken word. Human fragility and tenderness entwine, inviting the listener to take individual comfort and solace in the emotive power of sound and music.

Made possible by Arts Council Emergency Funding, the series was edited, mixed and produced by Marcus Dyer aka Theskyisthinaspaperhere. It features contributions from artists within the Dark Alchemy circle.

Episode 1 explores the initial disorientation and visceral feelings evoked by lockdown; an attempt to comfort without sugar-coating.

Featured artists:
Satori Dave Kirby / Dead Space Chamber Music / Ellen Southern voice/sound/art / Tommy Creep / Thyark Gabriel Perez Atroz / Theskyisthinaspaperhere
Episode 2 takes as its starting point nature’s reclaiming of locked-down cities, newly empty of humans, presenting an experience of the uncannily pastoral, an eerie and dystopain dark-folk, a solitary experience of wildness.

Featured artists:
Dan Flew / Dead Space Chamber Music / Conny Prantera – Animal Choir / AB UNO / Ellen Southern voice/sound/art/ Jeffrey Lee Hearse – exerpt from Duet for Raven and Harmonica / Lorenzo Abattoir / Kate Arnold / Eyespiriteye aka The SeeR / Theskyisthinaspaperhere
Episode 3 takes in the wider, historical context of the pandemic: when prayerful chants echoed and bells rang out until both fell silent; when superstition ran free, and fear and grief haunted the land.

Featured artists:
BURL + Ellen Southern voice/sound/art ( vox Dead Space Chamber Music ) collaboration / AB UNO / Peter Verwimp ( ASHTORETH ) / Tommy Creep / Maud the moth / Ryan Beitler ( Rare Form ) / Theskyisthinaspaperhere / Kate Cherrell (spoken word), Common Eider, King Eider / Jo Quail

Inner Circle was streamed as part of a series of live online events through 2020, available to watch again here: Show 1, Show 2, Show 3 & Show 4. It was featured in Bristol 247, as part of their creative lockdown series and part broadcast on Resonance Extra, as part of Unexplained Sounds Recognition Test show; the latter also lead to it being featured in their 6th annual report.

To conclude the lockdown series a Dark Alchemy Inner Circle compilation ‘mixtape’ V/A was also compiled.

Featured artists:
New Haunts / Dead Space Chamber Music + TRIBES OF MEDUSA collaboration (exclusive) / Lessens / Theskyisthinaspaperhere / Trianglecuts (exclusive) / IlSantoBevitore / The Nent / A-Sun Amissa / Tommy Creep / Skrei / Dave Kirby SATORI / Ambulance v Ambulance

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