Images by Noriko Okaku
That Long Moonless Chase is a live mixed media animation alongside music for electronics, recorded voices & baritone sax, made in collaboration with Noriko Okaku and including sound design elements from Başar Ünder. The work is based on folklore from Sheffield and Kyoto and is centred around two texts which Noriko & I looped between online translators in Japanese and English. The process of translating the tales back and forth between languages warped the stories into a bizarre new text which laid the foundation for our animation and music. I weave recordings of the auto-translated texts, narrated by Noriko and David Clarke, throughout the musical composition, and Noriko warps the text subtitles during the performance as their semantic associations are eroded.
The Japanese story takes place at Honganji Temple in Kyoto, which, Noriko told me: “is the headquarters of the Honganji sect of Jodo Shinshu Buddhism, founded in the 16th century by Shinran. The legendary ginkgo tree that stands here is said to have been planted by Shinran”.
One of our stories is about a special ginkgo tree in Kyoto: “There are many old stories in Japan about ginkgo trees extinguishing fires. Ancient people must have known that ginkgo trees have the special ability to store water. The ginkgo tree mentioned in this story is particularly well known as the legendary tree that saved Kyoto from a great fire in the Tenmei period of the 18th century.”
Our piece draws on the miracle of this water-weeping ginkgo tree: “The great Tenmei fire of 1788 burned through the city of Kyoto and headed for Honganji Temple with no let-up in its momentum. The monks tried to put out the fire, but their efforts were unsuccessful and the fire only grew stronger. Just when they thought they had lost their way, the ginkgo tree spouted water and protected Honganji from the fire.” (Noriko Okaku)
We also draw upon encounters with Sheffield’s Gabriel Hounds, which David Clarke describes as “a folk belief that was once very common in the north country. There are lots of stories about a mysterious sound that was occasionally heard in the sky, usually in the depths of the night. It sounded like hunting dogs, ranging through the sky, and usually heard over houses and heard before death or some kind of disaster...” David supported us in our research for the Sheffield side of the project and we were also inspired by his book about ghost stories from Victorian Sheffield.
The other key sit in our work is the Sheffield Cathedral (formerly known as ‘the old parish church), which was the site of a well-known experience of the Hounds in 19th century. David told us that “there is a really good first hand account of the Gabriel Hounds from a very well known Sheffield journalist called John Holland, one of the editors of the Sheffield Iris, born in 1794 in Sheffield. He’s left us an account of an experience he had one night in the mid-19th century. He was leaving his offices of his newspaper in York Street, Sheffield and he was walking back through the churchyard:
“A mimic pack of beagles low did bark, Nor wondered I that rustic fear should trace, A spectral huntsman doomed to that long moonless chase.””
I made field recordings around the cathedral, as well as other nearby and places of haunting in Sheffield including Campo Lane, Bunting Nook and Pearl Street. Başar then worked his magic on these to create some audio samples for our soundscapes, as a part of his sound design process.
We came across other literature & accounts of the Gabriel Hounds informed by 19th century life in Sheffield. The Gabriel Hounds are interwoven into Charles Reade’s novel Put Yourself in His Place, set in mid-Victorian Sheffield, at the time of the Trade Union outrages & culminates with an account of the 1864 Great Sheffield Flood. David Clarke told us more:
“The characters in his novel start to hear these weird noises in the air, that they describe as the Gabriel Hounds. And he actually uses the experience of John Holland…you get these supernatural sounds that are giving the characters a sort of premonition, that something really awful is going to happen, and then the novel reaches its end with the collapse of the dam...That reinforced the folk belief that these were supernatural sounds, and that if you hear them, disaster was sure to follow.”
That Long Moonless Chase / その長い月のない追跡
#moonlesschase t-shirts available online at Noriko’s shop!
