Yulatraktors – Solstice Wyrd

by LUNATRAKTORS

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matpringle Subversively anarchic drone heavy folkloric versions of festive traditional songs. Pagan chanting, doom laden synths and off kilter rhythms to lure Krampus, Jólaköttur and Grýla out of the woods into our cosy homes... Favorite track: Let Your Heart Be Light.

Marianne Dissard A lighthouse in gale weather. Indispensable and on a loop in this raft mine. Favorite track: Solstice Wyrd (Gapless).

pauladrianemery Seasonal ritual music.

Yulatraktors take you through the wardrobe into a liminal frozen world of the longest night. Old things and ways dwell here on the edges of perception and sense memory in the dark forest. Fear not though intrepid traveller for the path is clearly illuminated by the light of the Full Moon reflected on the snow that lays all around. Not much further now until you reach the warmth of hearth and home.

Enjoy the trip! Favorite track: Solstice Wyrd (Gapless).

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Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album
Listen to Solstice Wyrd like it's Yule in the Year 2000 with this shiny Compact Disc. Perfect for driving around pretending to be in a Hammer Horror movie, or drinking mulled wine in the dark.

Includes unlimited streaming of Yulatraktors – Solstice Wyrd via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

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1.	Brightly Shone the Moon 03:29
2.	Lully Lullay 03:08	lyrics
Lully, lulla, thow littell tine child, By by, lully, lullay thow littell tyne child, By by, lully, lullay! O sisters two, how may we do For to preserve this day This pore yongling for whom we do singe By by, lully, lullay? Herod, the king, in his raging, Chargid he hath this day His men of might in his owne sight All yonge children to slay,— That wo is me, pore child, for thee, And ever morne and may For thi parting nether say nor singe, By by, lully, lullay.
3.	Field & Fountain, Moor & Mountain 04:54
4.	Horns and Hooves in the Dark 03:44
5.	The Wolves Are Running 05:05
6.	Most Highly Flavoured Gravy 01:37
7.	This Time of the Year 01:26		buy track
8.	Gathering Winter Fuel 02:01
9.	The Howling 05:06		buy track
10.	Let Your Heart Be Light 03:11
11.	Remember the Poor 03:54
12.	When We Were Gone Astray 01:10
13.	Once Again as in Olden Days 05:55
14.	Solstice Wyrd (Gapless) 44:44
15.	Lully Lullay (Radio Edit) 02:53		buy track
16.	Remember the Poor (Radio Edit) 03:44		buy track
17.	Horns and Hooves in the Dark (Radio Edit) 03:46		buy track

about

"Like Mike Oldfield on ketamine." A twisted journey into the dark heart of Yuletide.

Peel back the colourful paper — the enforced gaiety and extravagance of a consumerist Christmas, or the vestiges of Christianity — and there’s something very different underneath. For many people, the holiday season is burdened by unwelcome emotions. Anxiety, grief and loneliness feel all the more overwhelming because there’s an assumption that ‘negativity’ shouldn’t be shared. Lunatraktors believe we should stop shutting out the shadows. Holly, ivy and fir trees, wreaths, fires and mistletoe: these things go back a long, long way. There’s a reason Christmas used to be a time to tell ghost stories. Yule is the dark heart of the year, the midwinter solstice and the longest night. Let’s go out into the night, let’s free our feral selves to howl our pain and defiance, to dance in the frozen moonlight and the flickering of the fire.

We call our music ‘broken folk’ — it’s folk music for queers and lunatics, misfits and nonconformists. People exiled from family, society or homeland, with little patience for nationalistic fantasies of the pure tradition. A pagan rave where all are welcome, the weirder the better. Lunatraktors explores tradition as a folding or layering of time: present troubles echoing through history, and pre-figuring events in the future. A haunted landscape, where psychic patterns from past eras are unceasingly dug up and re-buried. Icons are hacked down and half-forgotten, only to sprout from the ground again decades or centuries later. This is the Wyrd of the British Isles, the twisted knot of fate. Anachronism as folk horror.

Lunatraktors began in Margate, back in 2017. The Tom Thumb Theatre — a fifty seat independent venue with one of the smallest stages in Europe — became the lab where we could test out mad ideas with our passionate local crowd, lubricated by the best espresso martinis in Thanet. In 2018, we put on a show called Yulatraktors celebrating yuletide: the hairy pagan underbelly of the season, the dark side of Christmas. It grew so popular that it became a kind of alter-ego for us, and kept going through successive annual shows and lockdown livestreams. Yulatraktors was born in the troubled times of Brexit and COVID, a solstice revel that had as much to do with rage and grief as thanksgiving. A chance for people to come together, to vent their feelings, and hopefully reconnect with something primal in the turning of the seasons.

Now in its sixth year, the project is only getting deeper and weirder. Yulatraktors explores a crop of popular carols that — beneath their veneer of Christian doggerel — dance to a different beat. There’s something pulsing through Good King Wenceslas and God Rest You Merry Gentlemen that has very little to do with piety, an echo of their origins in mediaeval folk dance tunes. In 2022, from their new base in Ireland, we put together a 44 minute recording and video for the solstice, building up layers of full-take improvisations onto a heavy DJ set with Zen Delay and Moog Subharmonicon, an unusual polyrhythm synth based on the subharmonic series. In 2023, we remixed the recording, adding samples from live Yulatraktors shows at the Tom Thumb. The result is a psychedelic take on Yuletide ‘like Mike Oldfield on ketamine’. Solstice Wyrd is due to be released on 12.12.23, St. Lucy’s Eve, and is best listened to in the dark.

credits

released December 12, 2023

Lunatraktors: Recording, Mixing and Mastering

Carli: Vocals, Frame Drum, Tuned percussion, RAV Vast, Moog Subharmonicon, Zen Delay, Chimes, Shakers, Singing Bowl, Ayoyotes, Gong, Hooves, Jingle Bells

Clair: Vocals, Rhodes, Moog Subharmonicon, Zen Delay, Korg Monologue, Lyre Harp, Low Whistle, D Whistle, Duduk, Bass Accordion

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about

LUNATRAKTORS Waterford, Ireland

Broken folk experiments by Clair Le Couteur (vocals, drones) and Carli Jefferson (vocals, percussion). MOJO Magazine Top Ten Folk Albums 2019 & 2021. Weird musical performances in the Anglo-Celtic tradition.

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