In a post in 2015, I wrote about The Heartwood Institute's album inspired by Penelope Lively’s children’s novel Astercote (1970), about a Grail-like cup. The music was in the mode of early Seventies synthesizer exploration, new and experimental, yet also slightly eccentric, inspired by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, and it had the authentic tone of the incidental music to some lost eerie series of the time.
In their latest release, The
Heartwood Institute pay tribute to ‘Unburied Bane’ (1933), a story by the enigmatic
N. Dennett. Editor and anthologist Richard Dalby advanced the plausible theory that this was a
pseudonym of Helen Leys, who also wrote Randalls Round (1929) as ‘Eleanor Scott’. A new edition of this edited by Aaron Worth was published last year in the British Library Publishing Tales of the Weird series, and it includes the two N. Dennett stories.
The four sinister and melancholy electronic pieces on The Heartwood Institute's digital album admirably evoke the atmosphere of the story.
(Mark Valentine)
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