Lunatraktors: Quilting Points

Lunatraktors kindly sent me a copy of Quilting Points back at the beginning of May, and I am woefully behind in getting thoughts down on a page. I was delighted from the first “Diffraction Pattern” whir of a sewing machine and every luscious texture that followed, but I found myself struggling to find the words to adequately describe this album.

When I wrote reviews for Folk London, I often ended up with the weird ones. With the exception of Julian Gaskell (I chose A Shandy Ballad explicitly because it looked weird and as regular readers already know, I’d do it again fifty times over), this was almost never on purpose – James would send out a list, we reviewers would request a few that sounded appealing, and then James’d distribute them as fairly as possible from there. While I suspect that he occasionally sent me the weirdest ones on purpose, it seemed to fall that I would inevitably gravitate unknowingly to the strangest things on the list, drawn to them perhaps by some as-yet-unrecognized sense of familiarity.

Anyway, this album is weird.

It’s really weird.

Lunatraktors describe their genre as “broken folk,” the answer to the question “what’s left when we’ve lost everything?” What is folk, when you strip it down to its nuts and bolts, to rhythm, to sound, to voice? Quilting Points takes this question quite literally in some ways, inspired as it was by the process of attempting to retrieve early recordings from a corrupted hard drive. The album is an archive, chronological and meandering; it’s both familiar and entirely incomprehensible, visceral and unsettling, comforting in ways I can’t quite pin down.

The project examines what it means to create in response to the endless cycles of despair, devastation, and injustice — to gather, despite it all, and absorb sound as vibration, as shared memory, with a strong emphasis on community, intimacy, and reclaiming public space through sound.

This is a project built of resistance and community - gathering, creating, building as activism. Everything here is a collaboration, with other artists, with public spaces, with children in a museum, with one another. It’s a stunning counter to the idea that we are so often sold – that the horrors of the world, fed to us in unending streams of despair at all hours of the day, are ours alone to bear and collapse beneath. Fear-fueled isolation is not the way, Quilting Points all but screams. The only way we get out of this is together.

We can’t find our way out, which way do we go?

The album is also (perhaps unsurprisingly) queer as fuck, which brings me to the other reason this review took me ages to actually sit down and write: track #6.

I have literally lost count of how many times I’ve listened to “The Boy I Love.”

“The Boy I Love” derailed my first listen of the album months ago and has derailed every attempt to listen through beginning to end since. It comes on, and I find I can’t listen to anything else for weeks. I could not focus on a single other thing about this album until I got it out of my system, and if I’m honest, I don’t think I’ve managed it even now. Sitting down to write this at last, I, of course, had to play it again, which, of course, turned into six more plays and ultimately being late to a work meeting, but it’s fine, it’s completely fine.

I love “The Boy I Love.”

I could listen to Clair sing for hours (and I have), and their delivery here is everything. It’s flirty, it’s cheeky, it’s achingly sad, and I want to wrap myself up in a blanket of it. You can watch the original livestreamed video here.

Recorded during lockdown as a livestream performance at The Preservation Room, our reinterpretation of the 1885 #MusicHall classic ‘The Boy in the Gallery’ celebrates the nearly forgotten tradition of Victorian male impersonators. These drag king megastars of the late 19th and early 20th century – including Vesta Tilley, Bessie Bonehill, Annie Hindle, Ella Wesner, Hetty King and many more – toured worldwide for their many passionate admirers, male, female, and otherwise. We are sharing this for #TransPride 2022 as part of the Beyond the Binary research project, exploring gender performance on the popular stage from the 18th to 21st centuries, organised by the University of Kent Library Special Collections.

The unfortunate thing about having been thus derailed by “The Boy I Love” (I regret nothing) is that it delayed my joy for the rest of the album, which, thankfully, was just right there, patiently waiting for me to finally sort myself out.

I took up Morris dancing last October, and Lucy Wright’s Dusking project fell into my Instagram feed basically immediately as a result. “’Oss Girls” was therefore not entirely new to me, but hearing it in situ here among the other bits and pieces of the past few years was really delightful.

I have (repeatedly) wept in my car to "Life, Clay, and Everything" on days when I can't seem to find my way; the children shrieking with excitement in "Pegasus" is a balm to the soul; and "St. Martin's Land" has recently found itself in a loop on my car speakers, spooky and gutting and full of all of the magical terror of being a child.

Grow well and bear well

This is a gorgeous project from start to end. Don’t be put off by the weirdness. Embrace it, and you’ll find the magic at the core.

You can find Quilting Points on Bandcamp. If you can swing it, I’d highly recommend nabbing a physical copy of the album. The design is absolutely beautiful and includes a fold out map with liner notes (and a v handy fresnel lens magnifier with which to better read them). Get some merch while you're there - it's all Very Cool and if we have to spend money to live, we may as well throw it at our artist friends.

you know you want a cool patch

You can (and absolutely should) follow Lunatraktors on Instagram. You can also read more of me gushing about them in my review of Sing Yonder 2, and they have some really cool stuff happening on their YouTube channel - here's one of my favorites right now.