m-orchestra – Rosaleen – track-by-track guide
I’ve released Rosaleen by m-orchestra today – some more of my Fortean electronica. Yay!
It isn’t really an album, because it is only 20-ish minutes long. And it isn’t really an EP, because it has seven tracks. I guess if I had been pressing it on vinyl I would have probably done it as a 10″ with an old-style 1986 sticker on it saying “A 20 minute 7 track mini-LP. Pay no more than £3.29 in Our Price”.
Anyway, you can listen to it here, and here’s a breakdown of the tracks:
1. Overleigh: A man obsesses over long ago deaths while reading local gravestones
I remember last year a friend asking me how my music was going, and explaining that I’d been working really hard to make everything sound like I’d just discovered it on a knackered old TDK90 in a box in my loft, oversaturated and distorted. “But I’m worried,” I said, “that people will just think I am terrible at recording things”. “They will,” he agreed. This is one of those tracks, with the narration of a man touring his local graveyard and reading the details from the stones.
2. Go To Sleep, Margaret: A man uses a tape recorder to capture the voices of the dead, and receives the message ‘Ve a dormir, Margarete’
This has a lovely little melancholy almost childlike lullaby tune to it, and I guess in the olden times I probably would have written some words for it. However it has stayed as an instrumental, with the title inspired by the experiments of Latvian parapsychologist Konstantīns Raudive.
3. The Ghost In Love With You: A woman lies awake at night, and feels the presence of a long lost rejected lover
This kind of sounds like a rejected b-side by a supergroup comprised of off-cuts from Depeche Mode, New Order and the Cure, and I’m kind of relaxed about that.
4. King Of The Coven Tree: A woman conducts rituals to bring through the king of the coven tree
The centrepiece of this release is two tracks about Rosaleen Norton, an Australian artist and self-described witch who was active in the 1940s and 1950s and repeatedly persecuted by authorities who deemed her art obscene and who also discovered she had posed for pornographic pictures as part of the sex magick rituals she was involved in.

[Rosaleen Norton working on her art]
The first of the two tracks combines some clips of Norton performing a ritual, with the kind of arch arms-length commentary of news pieces of the time. It was played as an exclusive a few months ago on Kev’s Homebrew Electronica show.

[Artwork by Rosaleen Norton]
5. Rosaleen Speaks: A woman explains how it came to be that she always knew she was a witch
The talking on this is from an actual interview clip with Rosaleen Norton, where she is talking about how she discovered witchmarks on herself as a child, and the allure of being a witch to contemporary Australian teens. I was slightly worried about this one, as the main melody hook that comes in is very reminiscent of something I recorded in the late 1990s with a friend who worked at Mute Records at the time, but then I realised that as it was never released I’m the only person who is going to think that.

[Rosaleen Norton being interviewed]
6. She Cursed Me In Peru: A woman explains how en route to visit a reputedly haunted place, she believes a woman has placed a curse on her
This track is actually a few years old, I originally recorded it as one of the inserts in the Grim Circus broadcasts I was doing during lockdown. Because it was an interlude/insert, it doesn’t really follow any conventional song structure, but it suddenly struck me that it fitted in thematically and tonally to this release and so it finally gets to see the light of day.

[A still from the 2021 m-orchestra She Cursed Me In Peru video]
7. Less Of Us Now: With a sense of dread, a group of young people visiting a derelict old mansion, damaged by fire, come to realise that one by one they disappear
Sometimes you write and record something, and it immediately sounds like it would work as a closing track live or on a release, and this is one of those. At the mastering stage it suddenly struck me to have the trick of making it in mono for the opening section, and then have it suddenly burst out into stereo after the first breakdown. The title comes from the fact that it moodily reminded me somehow of the Will Maclean novel The Apparition Phase.
Rosaleen is available on all good digital stores, and also the terrible ones who withhold any royalties until you reach a certain threshold of streams despite because of the company making $1bn profit last year.
You will be able to catch me at my first live show of 2025 as part of the Manchester Folk Horror Festival on Saturday.