I thought the brainrot was over but since S3 was announced it’s back with a vengeance.

Listening to this delicious cover of Leonard Cohen’s Lover Lover Lover by my darling Lunatraktors and thinking of those two.

Yulatraktors – Solstice Wyrd - an alternative seasonal album from Lunatraktors

Peel back the colourful paper — the enforced gaiety and extravagance of a consumerist Christmas, or the vestiges of Christianity — and there’s something very different underneath. For many people, the holiday season is burdened by unwelcome emotions. Anxiety, grief and loneliness feel all the more overwhelming because there’s an assumption that ‘negativity’ shouldn’t be shared. Lunatraktors believe we should stop shutting out the shadows. Holly, ivy and fir trees, wreaths, fires and mistletoe: these things go back a long, long way. There’s a reason Christmas used to be a time to tell ghost stories. Yule is the dark heart of the year, the midwinter solstice and the longest night. Let’s go out into the night, let’s free our feral selves to howl our pain and defiance, to dance in the frozen moonlight and the flickering of the fire. We call our music ‘broken folk’ — it’s folk music for queers and lunatics, misfits and nonconformists. People exiled from family, society or homeland, with little patience for nationalistic fantasies of the pure tradition. A pagan rave where all are welcome, the weirder the better. Lunatraktors explores tradition as a folding or layering of time: present troubles echoing through history, and pre-figuring events in the future. A haunted landscape, where psychic patterns from past eras are unceasingly dug up and re-buried. Icons are hacked down and half-forgotten, only to sprout from the ground again decades or centuries later. This is the Wyrd of the British Isles, the twisted knot of fate. Anachronism as folk horror. Now in its sixth year, the project is only getting deeper and weirder. Yulatraktors explores a crop of popular carols that — beneath their veneer of Christian doggerel — dance to a different beat. There’s something pulsing through Good King Wenceslas and God Rest You Merry Gentlemen that has very little to do with piety, an echo of their origins in mediaeval folk dance tunes. In 2022, from their new base in Ireland, we put together a 44 minute recording and video for the solstice, building up layers of full-take improvisations onto a heavy DJ set with Zen Delay and Moog Subharmonicon, an unusual polyrhythm synth based on the subharmonic series. In 2023, we remixed the recording, adding samples from live Yulatraktors shows at the Tom Thumb. The result is a psychedelic take on Yuletide ‘like Mike Oldfield on ketamine’. Solstice Wyrd is due to be released on 12.12.23, St. Lucy’s Eve, and is best listened to in the dark.  Carli: Vocals, Frame Drum, Tuned percussion, RAV Vast, Moog Subharmonicon, Zen Delay, Chimes, Shakers, Singing Bowl, Ayoyotes, Gong, Hooves, Jingle Bells Clair: Vocals, Rhodes, Moog Subharmonicon, Zen Delay, Korg Monologue, Lyre Harp, Low Whistle, D Whistle, Duduk, Bass Accordion

Lunatraktors – Rigs Of The Times (Official Video)

Watch "Invisible Alderley, At Blue Lake - Nayan Kulkarni & Lunatraktors" on YouTube

Very excited to have been selected for “Ten Songs for a Lar”, an ambitious global artist commission inspired by an almost 2000 year old ‘Lar’ statuette , held in the collections at The Guildhall Museum, Rochester (UK). 

Ten selected artists ( Anil Sebastian; Ariel Chan; Cyanotape; Freddie Murphy & Chiara Lee; Iain Chambers; Lunatraktors; Donna McKevitt & Jan Noble; Quiet Boy; Stergin; Yeji Yeon) will create a unique audio-artefact inspired by the Lar. Through modern composition, musique concrete, spoke word, field recording, pop and folk, artists will explore themes of identity, loss, family, home, protection, silence, time travel and animism.

Starting from September 2020, one audio response will be released every month.

It’s also International Workers’ Day (or just Labor Day).

“Rigs of the Times” Lunatraktors

https://www.folkradio.co.uk/2021/04/video-premiere-lunatraktors-rigs-of-the-times/

ACTÆON - comic and music video - Clair Le Couteur (Lunatraktors) & Greek Myth Comix

Comic:

Video:

The story of Actaeon, in piano and song.

The track comes from the 2017 album New Myths, by Clair Le Couteur (of https://www.youtube.com/@Lunatraktors)

I drew the comic for Clair when they shared the song with me in 2014 (which is why it’s a bit scratchy, and yes I put 2017 as the comix date at the end because that’s when the album came out and I got confused!) and always wanted to make it into a video. I finally got round to it! Even after all this time, it still gives me chills.

The album New Myths also has tracks telling the Ancient Greek stories of the Minotaur (Three Labyrinths), Aesacus and Hesperie (Cormorant Song), as well as modern and other fables, all with heartstopping beauty. Details are below.

See the original comic: https://greekmythcomix.com/comic/actaeon-clair-le-couteur-lej/

Listen to / purchase New Myths: https://lunatraktors.bandcamp.com/album/new-myths

See Lunatraktors' discography: https://lunatraktors.bandcamp.com

Lunatraktors' website: https://www.lunatraktors.space