Gilroy Mere - Adlestrop
Pre-Orders from 3rd July 2020.
Release date 24th July 2020.
600 hand numbered copies with download code.
150 cassettes with download code.
Vinyl version comes with cut-out station by Gary Willis.
SOLD OUT
Repress due in September.
Clay
Pipe is very happy to bring you Gilroy Mere’s third record on the
label, Adlestrop is inspired by the
remains of the rural railway stations, that were closed in the wake
of the 1963 Beeching Report.
“This record started with Edward Thomas’s poem Adlestrop and a chance visit to the village that it takes its title from. I wanted to see the station, but found it was no longer there, all that remains is the old platform sign Adlestrop, now part of a local bus shelter. However as I walked around the village I was struck that; “all the birds of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire” were still singing away - like ghosts from Thomas’ verse.
Visiting
Adlestrop spurred me to get hold of a copy of the Beeching Report
which, in Appendix 2, lists all the services and stations recommended
for closure in the 1960s. The names read like an epic British poem,
from halts to branch-line stops and stations and singular terminals
for public schools, mines, ferries and even an asylum. There’s
Ravenscar where a resort was planned but got no further in its
construction than the station, and a hotel - the grid marked out for
the roads never laid. Bethesda, a short branch line from Bangor up
towards Snowdonia, was used for slate and passengers and is now just
a quiet green valley, Christ’s Hospital on the old Cranleigh Line,
opened with seven platforms to cope with the daily flood of pupils
attending the famous school nearby which never came as it was a
boarding school. Many
of the stations have vanished, with just fields and car parks left in
their place, some are repurposed as houses, or shops, or abandoned as
artefacts of a lone-gone industrial past.
Armed
with a digital recorder, and with a copy of Beechings
Report as my guidebook I made notes
and recordings on my travels around the country, and used them as the
starting point for a set of pieces that try to capture the fading
layers of history, in the areas where the stations had once stood
making sure each track retains something of the real place within
them. Back in my studio I reacted, improvised, and crafted musical
responses to each station, trying to capture the ghosts and former
lives of the stations and their imprint on the present.”
Gilroy
Mere is Oliver Cherer who trading as Dollboy, Rhododendron, and
Australian Testing Labs as well as his own name has meandered his way
through the backwaters of left of centre English folk, ambient and
electronic music, issuing numerous albums of original music to much
critical acclaim via highly regarded boutique labels such as Static
Caravan, Second Language, Deep Distance, Polytechnic Youth, and
Awkward Formats.