Life’s natural rhythms

On a rainy Wednesday afternoon, four children are making a racket – but what a glorious racket. Eleanor, Tom, Archie and Jenson, all aged between seven and nine, are hammering piano notes through delay effects, bowing homemade string instruments to create low, eerie drones, and smashing and shimmering triangles and gongs, all to create atmospheric stories in sound.

They are all members of the Primitive Percussion Youth Orchestra (PPYO), founded in 2014 by former primary school teacher, sound artist, film-maker and educator Mark Williamson. The PPYO runs in schools where Williams has taught, as well as in workshop form at arts centres and festivals. This version of the orchestra practises as an after-school club in a patched-up Victorian classroom in the village of Cornholme, West Yorkshire, an isolated former cotton-weaving community two miles – and an hourly, expensive bus ride – west of Todmorden.

As he sets up amplifiers and microphones next to the times tables charts, Williamson tells me how he was originally inspired by a BBC documentary featuring Cheshire-born composer Brian Dennis, who ran the Shoreditch Experimental Music School in the late 1960s. Dennis studied with Karlheinz Stockhausen and later wrote experimental music textbooks for schools, which were widely used in the UK during a period of greater adventurousness in state education. “Here he was with ordinary kids working with tape loops and doing really crazy musique concrète [using everyday sounds], and saying no one has to be a musician to be instantly making music. It got me thinking: ‘This is so accessible.’”

In its current and previous incarnations, PPYO has, among other things, gone straight from a workshop to a performance at Supernormal Festival, supported Richard Dawson at Tor Fest at Todmorden Unitarian Church, and created Music for Ghost Trains for a model railway club at the Full of Noises arts venue in Barrow-in-Furness. Their first online release, 2024’s We Demand… Everything Now!, was a winner in the children’s category of the 2024 Sound of the Year awards. It was also featured on the Radio 3 New Music Show, and reviewed on the website The Quietus and in the magazine The Wire.

The school’s setting in the dramatic Calder Valley hills has inspired a new CD, out this month. Gabble Ratchets is a musical reimagining of a piece of local folklore: a ghostly pack of hell hounds run a wild hunt each Halloween from the local outcrop Eagle Crag to Stoodley Pike, rumoured to once have been the site of a prehistoric burial mound. The album’s cover art features the kids standing in a local playground in their everyday clothes, their faces obscured by creepy, colourful masks – all handmade, as is the evocative, atmospheric music they make.

Today the four-piece ensemble listen closely to Williamson, and are spirited around him – no mean feat for tired children after six hours at school. “Inevitably, when they come in, they just want to beat everything up,” he says. “But once we get going, they’ve really got the idea of not playing, stopping for a bit, and letting things happen.” Today, he tells them a new story about a standing stone near where I live in Wales, on the River Usk. It’s rumoured to mark the path along which men carried stones from the Preseli Mountains to Stonehenge. “Imagine these ancient people dragging these big heavy stones across the land – what could you do with your bows or your drums to sound like them?”

The kids look at me, and back to Mark. He reassures them, saying, “Remember, everything doesn’t have to be perfect. Music can’t be right, because there’s no wrong. Trying new things is cool.”

And they’re off. Tom’s drums become footsteps, slow and low, before they ominously begin to gain pace. Archie’s xylophone adds a rush of rain. Mark reminds the children to face each other and asks them what the most important thing they have to do is when they’re making music together. Four hands shoot up. “Listen to each other!” Eleanor says, with a grin.

I ask them what they enjoy most about being in PPYO. “Playing lots of different instruments,” says Archie. Jenson, who’s also learning the trombone, nods. “You don’t even need to learn!” How is it when they play quieter sounds? “I would describe it like a deep sound,” Eleanor adds, a little shyly, “and it’s soothing”.

Tom, a gentle soul who provides a steady beat on the drums, lights up when I ask him how he feels at the end of the sessions. “It’s really fun. It’s like waking up.”

“I just treat them like musicians,” Williams says after they’ve left – they even pack up at the end of the session, every child helping, winding up cables like old pros. “And then sometimes I see them out with their family on the weekends, out of uniform, and think, oh my God, you’re so little. But they prove to me that kids can do anything.”

Illustration Oscar Ingham