2024 album, Requiem for Dead Dogs …
I write, play and record music as part of a collective under the name The Unattached. It’s folk music about history, or the present, sometimes the future. Future Folk Music, I think. The others are proper musicians: Darren Hayman, Ian Button, my sister Gwenifer Raymond, John McGrath, Holly Rogers, Matt Sofianos. They know what they’re doing, and have about a hundred albums between them.
Our first album, Songs for the Prophets, was a single 77-minute track incorporating a sequence of folk songs about prophets of the seventeenth century, recorded mostly in locations throughout England. It asked: what happens when music, history and place are woven into the same cloth? It wasn’t historical music, but the present viewed through the eyes of history. It was released on WIAIWYA in 2019.
Our second album, Requiem for Dead Dogs, was released on Gare du Nord in 2024. It’s a reflection on people’s relationships with dogs, the stories we tell about them, and the ways in which our treatment of them is an index of our humanity.
I recorded a piece of music for my friend, the extraordinary historian and philosopher Simon Schaffer. It was for a festschrift celebrating his achievements on his retirement in 2022. I was thinking about the airlessness inside the artificial body of Hobbes’ Leviathan, 1651 (and, yes, about George Floyd and Black Lives Matter). It was improvised and recorded in one take with no edits using a single guitar and a rack of mostly Electro-Harmonix effects. The track is called Inside Leviathan (for Simon Schaffer), and you can listen to it here.
Joad R Wren 