released February 28, 2024

The Boatman on the Downs (Final Muzik 2023)
Conceived 23 years ago as one of many side projects by Martyn Bates, singer and guitarist of the duo Eyeless in Gaza (active since 1980) and Alan Trench (Orchis Temple Music), Twelve Thousand Days began its prolific existence in 2000 ( 7 albums to date) on an Italian label (Musica Maxima Magnetica) already responsible for the Murder Ballads trilogy another side project and collaboration between M.J Harris and Martyn Bates: between 1994 and 1997. In the Garden of Wild Stars, 16 tracks with 2 traditional tracks (The Moon is Down, Sally Free and Easy) and the cover of The Wandering Aengus by W.B Yeats ). A second album The Devil and the Grain followed, released by Trisol, the German label which released one of Orchis' albums and which welcomed and encouraged a wave of dark folk in the early 2000s.
In the wake or almost in 2006, Twelve Thousand Days released two albums including a maxi on a Polish label Shining Day "From The Walled Garden, and At The Landgate" with at least one traditional piece (Cruel Mother) and the deepening of the collaboration between the two musicians in a flute/guitar version and various rather medieval instruments (listen again to Who Lives There, you'll understand).
Then a silence of almost 12 years for Twelve Thousand Days. Indeed, Martyn Bates resumed a solo career from 2012 with the album Unsung produced by Alan Trench, followed by three other gems (Arriving Fire in 2014, Fireworks & Jewels in 2015 and I Said to Love in 2017) all published by A -Scale label from Eyeless in Gaza, forming a sort of testament to the singer on guitar. The period is also interspersed with four less convincing albums of Eyeless in Gaza as a duo (with Peter Becker) that we feel is losing momentum and looking for itself again between field recordings and pop music with guitars, in particular and almost too heavily with Ink Horn / One Star of 2019: rather disappointing album of the group's forty years and last to this date of the group on the label.
The reappearance of Twelve Thousand Days therefore was made with another Italian label Final Muzik which already has a serious catalog of good quality, with the album Insect Silence in 2018 and three similarly linked albums - Fields End (2020), The Birds Sing As Bells (2021) and this last one Boatman On The Downs (the boatman in the dunes-or the marshes!) from 2023.
This reappearance or rebirth is coupled with another project (let's keep it simple) which seems to take the place of Eyeless in Gaza for good: "Kodax Strophes" three albums to date including one on Klanggalerie in 2020, Austrian label sharp, and two by Martyn Bates alone or in any case solitary leader of the project.
For the album The Boatman On The Downs, Martyn Bates states that this album came to him in a dream in which he saw "glaciers sculpting the earth, opening the wave submerging the cities, the fields with the creator boatman wielding the helm of his boat in precarious balance and making the world»
We are a little halfway between Charon the ferryman of the underworld and guide of the souls of those who received the funeral rites across the border between the world of the living and that of the dead and an initiatory journey in the night and to the south of England with its marshes and dunes populated by will-o'-the-wisps, fleeting spirits and filled with dark sonorities and marked by desire, sadness and the passage from spring to summer, curiously the inner booklet which gives the lyrics seems printed on another document that is not very visible but full of hidden (or secret) terms, we find the words: troubadour, devil, oath, king slayer, mystagogue (a priest who initiates into the sacred mysteries) as well as references such as William IX, count from Poitou, first listed minstrel of the Middle Ages, crusader and who wrote 11 courtly songs in Occitan around 1101, Face of Lucca is a statue of the figure of Christ in wood in Tuscany. All this not being posed by chance, we can clearly see the continuation of this album with the previous one which announced the passage from autumn to winter.
The 10-track album of more than 50 minutes begins with Comely, a title that takes us to an enchanted and magical twilight to accompany a loved one or something, both sparkling and soft, and to detail the seasons for dance and finally know the name of the chosen one; the second track A Frankish Casket makes the journey towards the night introduced by the song of an owl and the scents of dark folk in an April rain ending like the beauty of fire in the beauty of embers. Then, Arthur McBride, an old Irish bodhran song, is a feverish dream filled with fear, with menacing rumbles due to Trench's electric guitar which overwhelms the voice by installing a kind of heartbreak at the end of the piece. Tale from a Silver City to a text by John Masefield also extends into a kind of somnambulistic dream but the more crystalline sound gives it a pastoral aspect, as if the dreamer were traveling inside his own anxieties and desires. We continue with The Summer Tree, Martyn Bates saying that he was not satisfied with the lyrics but that Trench would have insisted on not putting the piece aside by inviting the Greek bassist Petros Lampridis to put his very successful touch on it. The rest of the tracks seem to be a journey towards the light aligning dark moments to better bury them in a tunnel and cover them with softness, reverberations and travels. Under What Scars very melodic and with a hidden meaning: "What are you hiding behind your scars, I know you told me something opaque…”. The Boatman and its words of expectation (love?) and the end announcing the morning and its sun of renewal towards summer perhaps: As the Sun coupled with Brides of May closing the album with a long, somewhat messy track.
The Boatman on the Downs is in the splendid sequel to the four previous albums, we find and rediscover stories of djinns and haunted magician spirits who accompany our two troubadours armed with their mellotrons and analog synths, singing as we close our eyes to better hear the inner voice in the depths of the soul, mixed with the outer voice closer to the lips and fingers, like a tremor, a shiver to take the listener (conquered, in love) on a journey that brings together all the emotions towards a radiant summer along the crossroads of these minstrels that we would like to follow forever, forever and for a long time yet.
Xavier Beal