Review: The Worm – Furry-Tarot-Dori
Immediately, Furry-Tarot-Dori conjures the image of a village community: perhaps all living in houses that stud the hillsides, perhaps in Medieval dress, perhaps roaming as one communal spirit and chasing pipers as they gallop across the fields. And yet synthesisers? Lopsided drumkit lurches reminiscent of 90s Pram records? Forthright lyrical humour? This “one-worm band” roams the paths paved by these contradictions. Often it’s found performing impromptu at ancient sites of magical importance, unannounced and finding a rambling audience by happenstance, as though The Worm was momentarily beamed in from elsewhere to share its amalgam of experience – the deep past, the 90s domestic, the modern worry, the unplaceable – before slipping back out into the alchemical corridors that cut behind the walls of reality.
“This project began at The Worm’s Head island in South Wales where I was inspired and felt the need to make music outdoors,” The Worm explains. This notion of the outdoors emerges again and again: literally through field recordings of birdsong; again through the irresistible rural unspooling of duetting pipes and swooping strings; again as an analogue to the album’s effortless sense of non-allegiance, breaking free from the codes of interior spaces to cross-pollinate in the open air, with Breton music blustering into everything from cyclical minimalism to lo-fi synthesisers to melting, vocal-processed poetics. “And I was in a traffic jam at Stonehenge” is one choice lyric – a microcosm of the album’s stranding between hither and thither, between personal agitations and human history.