Burrow by Flaer

Artist and multi-instrumentalist Realf Heygate aka Flaer’s new EP Burrow peels back the layers of myth and memory embedded in the English countryside. Taking its name from the iron age hillfort and ancient earthworks that loomed above the valley where Heygate grew up, Burrow hovers somewhere between “the bleak and the beautiful, the familiar and the strange”, threading a sensitivity for melody and incidental sound into six haunting sonic set-pieces.

Recorded in 2021 and 2022, and continuing the path taken by Flaer’s 2023 mini-LP Preludes, Burrow recalls the mood of painter Paul Nash’s surrealist visions of pastoral England, onto which Heygate too has imagined vast monoliths, such as that of the EP’s cover. Evoking the embedded histories of place – whether in the resonance of Whit Monday dances or the snippets of Grand National commentary, which drift into focus like half-waking dreams of British ruralism - the music of Burrow is elegiac without being sentimental, articulating something ineffable in Heygate’s connection to the environment.

“The hill has quietly loomed over me through my life,” he explains. “I feel immense comfort in its presence … I hope that the music conveys some small part of the landscape’s essence, even from afar.”

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