Welcome to Pinedemonium, an abandoned pine plantation ruled over by an enlightened but occasionally hubristic mycelium 'king' and populated by the spirits of hunted living things it has consumed. Dig down in the dirt and meet the ghosts of Reynard The Fox, (staunch anti-imperialist), The Elm Tree (nature's trespasser) and The Orchid (the original tree-hugger). Like in John Milton’s capital of hell, the spirits who dwell here have lost their paradise: the common land. But their omnipotent foe is capitalism and its many agents, and their sin is trespass.
The album forms the first volume of Mycelium Music, our attempt to create an entangled musical ecology, a universe of interconnected and flowing songs and stories modelled on the symbiosis of the forest. But as the pine demons imply on the track Symbiomedome, this is no pastoral idyll: 'we'll offer our hand but here be warned, you might find us macabre'. Sometimes the segues are smooth and flowing, sometimes they are jarring and strange. We want to take you on a musical journey as diverse and dizzying as the subject matter.
The concept sprung forth as an act of escapism in the deepest depths of lockdown. Constantly reminded that humanity's innovations and inventions had outstripped the generosity of our living Earth, we ran to the woods for guidance. Suzanne Simard's pioneering research on cooperation between trees made us wonder what an 'ecology music' might sound like. After reading Merlin Sheldrake's 'Entangled Life' the idea of mycelium music became even more intoxicating: the possibilities of this subterranean network seemed to reach out across time and space. Anna Tsing's structural biomimicry in her wonderful 'The Mushroom at the End of the World' became the literary model for what we wanted to achieve:
‘What follows is a riot of short chapters. I wanted them to be like the flushes of mushrooms that come up after a rain...they build an open-ended assemblage, not a logical machine; they gesture to the so-much-more out there. They tangle with and interrupt each other'.
What we discovered as we tried to think like a mushroom or flow like the River Lea is that performing these roles freed us of our inhibitions. Recording Reynard's tale in the studio became a wild improvised summoning of some strange vulpine energy; the music took on a life of its own. In this way we hope our record heeds Amitav Ghosh's call for artists to tackle the 'crisis of imagination' in the face of climate breakdown. By restoring agency to the more-than-human perspectives in our stories we remind ourselves of what is at stake beyond just our own survival. So, as Reynard sings, let us 'unearth the magic' in the land. From: https://themightyorchidking.bandcamp.com/album/mycelium-music-volume-i-pinedemonium-awakes
