The Worm – Pantilde

What a strange, but fascinating, journey Amy Lawrence offers us with Pantilde from her alter ego, The Worm. Imagine for a moment stepping through a portal into a parallel universe with skewed characteristics compared to our own. That is, in fact, exactly the premise of this album, explicitly defined as such. The portal in question (track 2 – “Portal”) is made of birds and transports ears curious enough to venture into it to a Cornwall drawn by nutty, hallucinogen-addled artists. Amy Lawrence thus has fun making us play the role of Alice in a particularly destabilizing Wonderland. This is skillfully illustrated by a whole range of instruments associated with Celtic folk, but not only: harp, guitar, jew’s harp, flute, pipe, various percussion, cello, etc. Voices, including Lawrence’s, are added and disrupt our expectations without entirely rejecting them.

Pantilde sounds like folk, yes, but in a ghostly version, sometimes spectral, and in any case, completely off-kilter. There are, everywhere in this Cornwall of the Multiverse, strange people and intriguing creatures, though never menacing, fortunately. Pantilde invites folk to invest the world of contemporary scholarly music, without resorting to abstract atonality. Rather through the unusual displacement or superposition of musical tropes associated with roots music.

Each track is a new facet to discover and explore in this parallel land, and even though we often remain perplexed, the amazement is always enjoyable.