Craven Faults: mesmeric electronica in Northern landscapes
Northern Exposure – a new features series #1
Northern Exposure #1
I come from the North of England and, though I don’t live there anymore, I know I’m a Northerner. In the values I hold, the people I connect with, the places I yearn for and remember and, often, in the music I listen to. This new series of features will focus on artists and musicians from these parts. It will feature little known (or lesser known) musicians whose work I love and I hope you’ll come to love some of them too.
Introduction
Whenever I travel from where I live now in West Wales, to where I lived then, back in the North East of England, I am touched and reassured by familiar, evocative landscapes. It’s not only the familiarity, it’s something in the lands, languages and cadences of the places I pass through. Even now, the further North I travel towards what used to be home, leaving behind the wonderful coastlines and mountains of Wales, then through the bland traffic-riddled flatness of Middle England, the more I begin to breathe out and allow myself to feel that sense of place and this intimate knowledge of a journey.
Yet, the North is a mystery for many. When I came ‘down South’ all those years ago to get a teaching job, I realised that Northern England was, in some ways and for some people, beyond the pale, incomprehensible – existing only as stereotypes. The things I had taken for granted growing up were the crumbling industrial landscapes and the histories they held. The big rivers. The cities with their own identities and self-confidence. The football teams. Working class intellectuals. Friendly strangers (not always, it has to be said, with friendly opinions) and cultures deeply rooted in peoples who had laboured to build, make, dig, farm and fish.
In the North, music flowed in its own directions too, and still does. You could say that Northern music is forged from stone, steel, mills, moorland, giant ships and coal. These might also be stereotypes, but there’s some truth in them. Northern music emerges somehow – in cities like Liverpool, Manchester and Sheffield – and it’s knitted into the wider culture – like Sam Fender’s recent deep connection with Newcastle Utd and the ‘Geordie nation’, or the Hacienda Club and Factory Records in 80 and 90s Manchester that birthed that city’s acid house and rave scene – influential the world over and still reverberating today.
However, there’s further depth in hidden places, so this first Northern Exposure piece is about the mysterious Yorkshire artist known as Craven Faults whose centre of operations is a hundred miles or so south from Newcastle; down the A1(M) and right a bit. He (we at least know he’s a he) is an electronic artist who emerged as Craven Faults in 2017 and now releases his ‘parcels’ of music through the equally underground Leaf Label. Almost no-one I know has heard of Craven Faults, and I suspect that’s the way he likes it. His music comes out on limited edition vinyl, accompanied by posters and booklets full of grey photography of Yorkshire landscapes and post-industrial buildings. His gigs are in dimly lit spaces filled with banks of analogue synths. His music is about “Half-remembered journeys across post-industrial Yorkshire.” and that’s about all we’re told about this passion project, apart from enigmatic descriptions of the journeys themselves.
However, he’s part of a movement too, I think. One that sees independent DIY electronica artists releasing music that speaks to history, landscape and the social world we find ourselves in. A movement championed by magazines like Moonbuilding and labels like Castles in Space (see my previous piece on these HERE). Artists like the equally enigmatic and anonymous Veryan, living and working in and from Scottish landscapes – or delving into the histories of urban and post-industrial places, like Craven Faults himself and Gordon Chapman-Fox aka Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan.
So, here you go, lads and lasses, I’d like to introduce you to the hypnotic, electronic (Northern) world of Craven Faults…
Headphones on…
Deipkier, from the album, Erratics & Unconformities released 10 January 2020 on The Leaf Label
How did we get here?
This is a question we often ask on Ziggy’s Lament. What are the origins and contexts that make this music special and unique? In this case, even though the music is enigmatic and the identity of the artist hidden, the words he uses to introduce his journeys are way-guides to these origins. At the foundation, this music is analogue electronica, and Craven Faults is determined to pay his dues, tracking his own path to the beautiful landscapes and grey histories of Yorkshire through hints and signposts – though we soon find out that there’s no actual specific histories (or rabbit holes!) for us to follow:
“How did we get here? It almost certainly started in Düsseldorf or Köln. Or possibly The San Francisco Tape Music Centre. It’s not important. The journey to Yorkshire is somewhat hazy. Hansa by the Wall, 1977. Stockholm’s Museum Of Modern Art, 1968. Maida Vale, 1963. Rugby, 1986. It enters Yorkshire via Kingston-upon-Hull. Although, even that isn’t set in stone. It’s not important. It’s important to ask the question every now and then. The answers less so.”
This enigmatic passage comes from the notes on his first release in 2017, Netherfield Works. For each release on Bandcamp, there’s an almost poetic guide to the journey of a particular track, EP or album. The devil is, he points out, in the detail. As he tells us, we could travel through Yorkshire and the Pennines seeing the usual stuff, “past familiar mills, peaks and dales”, but what actually emerges in his music – in the hypnotic patterns and found recordings on that very first release – is something extraordinary and revealing.
The patterns shift. The pulses rise and fall away. The electronic detail is almost forensic at times, as if you can see a particular stone or building or cloud in the landscaped mind of Craven Faults. And the music itself, though it has no specific history – at least not in the landmarks and connections of a known, named artist – it arrives somehow fully formed out from a massive bank of analogue synths that certainly haven’t just appeared from the local music gear shop!
The name he gives himself comes from a geological feature – the ‘Craven Faults System’ in the Pennines. The system runs from near Ingleton in the north west across the hills down towards Skipton and Ilkley, and it’s this landscape that the music partly springs from.
(If you’re interested in the geology behind all this, you can find out more on Wikipedia at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craven_Fault_System).
That first release, Netherfield Works, includes a track called Eller Ghyll which is definitely a portent of things to come. I should say that many of his pieces are longform, the original Eller Ghyll running to over 16 minutes. And the featured version, which you can find below, taken from the 2020 album, Liveworks, runs to nearly 23! Like all Craven Faults’ work, Eller Ghyll is hypnotic and repetitive. It’s electronic music, but it’s not an obvious one to dance to, though I guess you could definitely move a bit with a pair of headphones on, once the beat drops in!
The video to this ‘Live’ version is wonderful, the flickering coloured lights of the giant electronic console modules, as the artist composes/performs his piece, combine with the stark grey scenery of Eller Ghyll itself (possibly a district of the Yorkshire town of Otley - though on the map it is spelled Ellar Ghyll – off one letter, which only adds to the mystery!).
Eller Ghyll, from the album, Liveworks released 10 September 2020 on Lowfold Works
Netherfield Works was followed by two further instalments in the Lowfields Work Trilogy: Springhead Works and Nunroyd Works and then a limited edition boxset of all three packaged together. Craven Faults’ first full album, Erratics & Unconformities, came out in early 2020 to positive reviews and was followed by a series of shorter releases, further journeys into the music’s Kraftwerkian origins, that started life on German autobahns and in American experimental soundlabs, and was then forged in the post-industrial North of England.
Liveworks (PARCEL 198), in turn, was “recorded … during lockdown in the old textile mill Craven Faults calls home”, and included versions of tracks from the early Lowfield Works releases, plus a new bonus track. It’s a wonderful piece of work and I was lucky enough to get hold of a limited edition copy which takes minimalism to new heights – literally two records in a cardboard die-cut sleeve and a postcard with track names and basic information! The tracks on Liveworks were originally released individually as part of Bandcamp Fridays, and the subsequent remastered album was Craven Faults’ first attempt at a live performance and is, he writes, “proof of concept”:
“Proof that these shadowy analogue journeys can translate live. Proof that a fixed start point, and set of rough coordinates, is all that’s required. The destination is never the same.”
Cold places. Effortless cool.
I first came across Craven Faults on his Bandcamp site. Like many artist, it’s the place where he markets, launches and sells his ‘PARCELS’ – numbered releases that are usually music, but are sometimes performances (physical and online), prints, turntable mats, CDs, box sets, cassettes, embroidered patches and even T shirts. Sounds pretty standard for a musician? Maybe. However, there is something enigmatic and unique about how he releases and packages his work. It feels like important art. It feels minutely, carefully considered. Its feels… well, cool. Which is probably as good as it gets in the music world, particularly when the ‘cool’ is as effortless and unintended as this, and springs from a project that has integrity and intrigue baked in.
Having followed Craven Faults for a while, and nearly buying a limited edition parcel or two, my first purchase was his second album, Standers in 2023. It is, like all great records, a beautiful object. In this case the ‘parcel’ consists of a heavyweight vinyl pressing of the double album and a printed photo book of the often cold, bleak and lovely places about which he writes his music. The music is a journey, as in all his releases, but this time there are hints and references to musical and cultural timelines of influences:
“ On Standers, there’s a sonic shift. A new palette to paint from and further refinement of the craft. We’re no longer exclusively travelling overland. Familiar landscapes are viewed from a different perspective. There’s a growing obsession in how this island came to look the way it does, and how its ancient and modern history affects its current population. Landscapes shaped by the elements, and then by countless conquerors and settlers. Livestock and machinery. Money, religion and politics.”
The full album is on YouTube HERE, and I’ve included the Sun Vein Strings video below.
Just a thought: the fact that he releases full albums direct to YouTube, and performances too (see the 2023 PARCEL 451 - May Day Broadcast HERE) shows the creative generosity of the Craven Faults project and makes me (and perhaps the small band of other CF aficionados) feel both tempted by his offerings, and justified in our purchases!
What’s the saying? ‘Pay it on’?
Sun Vein Strings, from the album, Standers released 12.05.23 on The Leaf Label
Tarn Sike Blue
Like a lot of independent artists, Craven Faults relies on creating and marketing unique and collectible versions of his music. Vinyl is again a collectible thing for music lovers (like me), and it makes sense to sell beautiful and limited edition objets d’art direct to the collector. It’s still capitalism, of course. The artist is selling something and I am a consumer of that thing, but I’d like to think that the albums produced and crafted by artists like Craven Faults are going to be loved and coveted for their intrinsic value and longevity, as opposed to the latest iteration of some plastic consumer gardening machine or kitchen gadget with obsolescence built right in – or even that streamed song you might have played to death on Spotify, for which the artist receives Sweet FA!
Craven Faults recently advertised the remaining few copies of a limited edition of his latest album, Bounds, previously only available to independent record shops, with only 700 copies worldwide! It’s on ‘Tarn Sike Blue’ vinyl (Oooooh!) and so I decided to treat myself to one. Of course, I know that I am being a bit of a dick in falling for these marketing ploys, but I am happy – yes, happy – to be supporting an independent artist, and knowing that I will love the record when it gets here. And anyway you can see how lovely it is in the picture above.
In the meantime here’s my featured track from that release, Lampes Mosse, which has a different feel to it from some of Craven Fault’s earlier stuff. In this case you could almost dance to it – or at least nod your head in a lively fashion! Seriously, though, the chords on this piece just grow and grow into something grand and orchestral – though in a very spooky and wonderful way!
Lampes Mosse, from the album, Bounds released 25.10.24 on The Leaf Label
If you’d like listen to the full album on YouTube, you can find the stream of Bounds HERE, or, better still find a copy to buy, download or listen to on Bandcamp:
And finally…
So a bloke from Yorkshire who won’t tell anyone his real name turns out to be one of my favourite artists. Someone who I check out regularly and whose music is always intriguing and tempting. And he’s from the North.
He has also done a wonderful remix of The Cure’s song, I Can Never Say Goodbye from their deeply excellent, late career masterpiece, Songs Of A Lost World. So this nameless man can do no wrong in my eyes… You can find his Cure rework in the bonuses below.1
And here’s a link to a YouTube short promotional version of the Cure remix featuring some sheep (no I don’t know either, but I think it works…).
https://youtube.com/shorts/lrepdiGXspA?si=uwjSidLbxNlWbYdE
Bonusess
Bonus: the Craven Faults remix of The Cure’s I Can Never Say Goodbye, from the band’s 2024 album, Songs Of A Lost World is an excellent piece of music in its own right. Here it is in all its glory:
And here’s what Gary Crossey from the Better World With Design website https://betterworldwithdesign.com says about this track (find Crossey’s full review of the Mixes Of A Lost World project HERE). I think he likes it…
“Craven Faults’ interpretation of “I Can Never Say Goodbye” transcends mere remixing, ascending into the realm of spiritual metamorphosis. Where most remixers might have chased the obvious path of beats and drops, this rework boldly ventures into sacred territory, conjuring cathedral-like reverberations and pipe organ atmospherics that transport the listener far beyond the original’s earthly bounds. The patience shown in the composition is remarkable – allowing a full five minutes of instrumental meditation before even considering the introduction of vocals. This masterful exercise in tension-building doesn’t just honor The Cure’s fondness for expansive arrangements; it elevates it to new heights. What’s truly revelatory here is how Craven Faults excavates The Cure’s instrumental DNA, proving that the band’s sonic signature runs far deeper than Robert Smith’s distinctive voice. As ethereal layers build and interweave, the track achieves something rare in remix territory – it doesn’t just reinterpret the original, it discovers an entirely new dimension within it. The closing sequence, with its transcendent layering, doesn’t just transport the song – it achieves a kind of musical apotheosis, carrying listeners into an entirely new sonic realm. In bravely minimizing vocals, Craven Faults has maximized the spiritual potential lurking within The Cure’s composition, creating something that feels less like a remix and more like a religious experience.”