Little Sodbury, South Gloucestershire – Thankful Village #06 from Darren Hayman on Vimeo.

The sixth instalment of Darren Hayman’s Thankful Villages project

It was blowing up a storm as I entered Little Sodbury. It’s very hard to record in wind that strong. I recorded the wind in any case. The wind made a distorted sound as it entered the microphone; a harsh white noise.

The church door was unlocked, and during my travels for this project I found that many of them were.

I sat on a pew and tried to get my clumsy hands to master my new concertina. A local called Steve entered the church and asked if he could watch. Talk turned from concertinas to synthesisers. Steve used to make music for computer games.

Steve said he didn’t like how churches were often made to be the natural place of remembrance for war. He didn’t think churches – with their lists of the dead and the graves of victims and survivors alike – and war, belonged together.

When I got home I added a synthesiser to the song for Steve.

View the previous Thankful Villages posts here.