I am nothing pure. Nothing pure. My race is mixed. My sex is mixed. I am woman and man. Light with darkness. Mixed! Mixed. I am nothing special, nothing pure. I am mud and flame! 

Penda's Fen (Alan Clarke, BBC, 1974)

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Hey friends, it’s been a little while since I sent anything out here and I’m a little unconvinced by the medium at the moment, while my own inbox is becoming a graveyard of unread DJ newsletters. But there’s more I’d like to say about this mix than I can fit into an Instagram post, so here we are.

The other week I had the great joy of joining the Avon Moot on Noods Radio and EHFM, celebrating May Day and the coming of summer. The programming was incredible (big shouts to our Lupini!) and to be honest I felt a little overfaced with contemplating what I could bring to it that may be interesting or a little different. So I dredged through distant memory to explore what connected me to folklore and pagan ideas in the first place. 

As a child I had a confusing double life. I grew up in Bolton and Manchester, but my grandparents came from another northwest, in villages at the foothills of the Carpathians in north west Ukraine, and my weekends and summers were spent among the Ukrainian community at a club and church in Cheetham Hill, and a summer camp in Derbyshire. We sang in folk choirs and learned cossack dancing, but were also taught a partial and ideologically compromised view of Ukrainian history. 

It was a strange environment where a kind of decolonial approach to folk practices and revolutionary anti-imperialism mixed with deeply right wing politics, ethno-nationalism, social conservatism, and a refusal to acknowledge or engage with a history of Nazi collaborationism. It was a confusing and alienating space for a little queer Marxist without the language or resources to really understand these things, and I still have a tortuous relationship to this part of myself, long after I disconnected myself from it as a teenager with a growing political awareness. Especially in this time when I’ve seen the old familiar cultural spaces turned over to military supply chains and people I grew up with accept MBEs for ‘political activism’ from the same British government that’s complicit in genocide in Palestine and criminalising peaceful protest here. 

It instilled a sense of alienation and a peripheral sense of conflicted disconnection that I’ve always carried since, but it’s also the source of everything that’s felt beautiful and purposeful in my life. The sense that music and dance and ritual can be the crucible for belonging and connection. I sometimes wonder if my attachments to club culture and British folk music have been simpler spaces, sublimating these questions of identity that I struggle to face head on. 

I’m not sure if I’ll ever resolve this stuff for myself, but if I do I expect it will be through the music. Maybe this mix was a little step in that direction. Mostly Slavic and Balkan folk songs from the mountains and steppes of Ukraine, and beyond its many borders x

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Extract from Penda's Fen (Alan Clarke, BBC, 1974)

Księżyc - Syreny

Apricot Tree - Can't Breathe In This Life Any More

Boris Kovač - Sacred Millstone

Dragoslav Pavle Aksentijević - Anonymous, 18th century: Lord I Have Cried

Werchowyna - Zoriuszka

Folk ensemble of Polessa village in the Sosnitsa district of the Chernihiv region - The Willow Tree with Many Leaves

Folk ensemble of Kozelets village, Chernihiv region - The Reapers

Laboratorium Pieśni -  Oj U Poli

Ensemble Hilka - Strila – Spring ritual song

Веданъ Колодъ (Vedan Kolod) - Ведьма (Ved'ma) (Live)

Werchowyna - Werbowaja Doszczeczka 

Philip Koutev National Folk Ensemble - Protekla E Voda