Uploaded April 2023 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Back during the tail end of the Covid-19 pandemic composer and musician HforSpirit and photographer Nick Hadfield were, like the rest of us, longing for escape. They conceived of this an opportunity, not only to extract themselves from the psychic torment of months spent in quarantine, but also to rewrite the blueprint for more magical acts of celebration, separated from the commodified hedonism of London’s club scene they had both long grown weary of. Drawing together a shared interest in tracing the potency of the ritual energy of rave, connecting it back to pagan practices excavated from Anglo-Celtic folklore, the collaborators planned a retreat into the hills, to the post-industrial setting of Skull Quarry alongside a gathering of artists and friends. A short film, part documentary, part contemporary folklore, emerged.
“UnTyMe revealed a collective intention to find a new sense of belonging,” writes Nick Hadfield. “Prompted by feelings of dissociation from contemporary club culture, we sought out the ancient rhythms of the land. The making of this film became an exploration of ritual movement, symbols, and silhouettes inspired by the ancestral myths of Britain.” Working in collaboration with HforSpirit as first-time filmmakers, Hadfield captures their escape with the lush saturation of folk horror and the hazy blur of ’90s rave archives, positioning the film’s ravers as a band of modern pilgrims, bearing their sound system aloft like a sacred totem.
“Much like the old Irish adage it takes its name from, UnTyMe is a collaborative multimedia project that unravels further meanings with each reading,” says HforSpirit, who stars in the film and contributes its visceral, electro-acoustic score. “It has given rise to an exhibition series at The White Hotel, THEE BIRTH, exploring ritual participation and rave cults, as well as a forthcoming physical release of the music on Toothgrinder Press containing artefacts used in the film.” He continues, “the film itself is a fly on the wall of an invitation to dance – an overture that cadences with an unhinged crescendo into the action of life.”
You can find Nick Hadfield on Instagram. For more information about HforSpirit and their work, you can find them on Instagram.
UnTyMe Credits:
Director, Photography – Nick Hadfield
Director, Music – HforSpirit
Words – Edwin Bennett, Zoe Bedeaux
Costume – Olubiyi Thomas
Movement – Salome Pressac
Design – Jonathan Castro, Delphine Lejeune
Support from Emulsion Magazine
Featuring – HforSpirit, Salome Pressac, Jet Sweeney, Olivia Stewart, Olubiyi Thomas
Producer – Scarlett Anderson
Director of Photography – Milo Belgrove
Editing – Nick Hadfield, HforSpirit
Art Director – Molly Martinez Hackney
Art Assistant – Eleanor Jeffrey
Styling Assistant – Olivia Stewart
Hair – Chloe Frieda
Make Up – Siti Haval
Catering – Hayett Belarbi McCarthy
Percussion – James Larter
Female vocals – Zoe Bedeaux
Recording – Luke Gardner at The Studi/o, Manchester
Sound mix – HforSpirit, Bitter Gold, Alexander Green
Mastering – Tony Cousins at Metropolis Studios, London
Creative direction assistant – Mikey Opie O’Grady
Title – Jonathan Castro
Title animation – Ali Raybould
Back during the tail end of the Covid-19 pandemic composer and musician HforSpirit and photographer Nick Hadfield were, like the rest of us, longing for escape. They conceived of this an opportunity, not only to extract themselves from the psychic torment of months spent in quarantine, but also to rewrite the blueprint for more magical acts of celebration, separated from the commodified hedonism of London’s club scene they had both long grown weary of. Drawing together a shared interest in tracing the potency of the ritual energy of rave, connecting it back to pagan practices excavated from Anglo-Celtic folklore, the collaborators planned a retreat into the hills, to the post-industrial setting of Skull Quarry alongside a gathering of artists and friends. A short film, part documentary, part contemporary folklore, emerged.
“UnTyMe revealed a collective intention to find a new sense of belonging,” writes Nick Hadfield. “Prompted by feelings of dissociation from contemporary club culture, we sought out the ancient rhythms of the land. The making of this film became an exploration of ritual movement, symbols, and silhouettes inspired by the ancestral myths of Britain.” Working in collaboration with HforSpirit as first-time filmmakers, Hadfield captures their escape with the lush saturation of folk horror and the hazy blur of ’90s rave archives, positioning the film’s ravers as a band of modern pilgrims, bearing their sound system aloft like a sacred totem.
“Much like the old Irish adage it takes its name from, UnTyMe is a collaborative multimedia project that unravels further meanings with each reading,” says HforSpirit, who stars in the film and contributes its visceral, electro-acoustic score. “It has given rise to an exhibition series at The White Hotel, THEE BIRTH, exploring ritual participation and rave cults, as well as a forthcoming physical release of the music on Toothgrinder Press containing artefacts used in the film.” He continues, “the film itself is a fly on the wall of an invitation to dance – an overture that cadences with an unhinged crescendo into the action of life.”
You can find Nick Hadfield on Instagram. For more information about HforSpirit and their work, you can find them on Instagram.
UnTyMe Credits:
Director, Photography – Nick Hadfield
Director, Music – HforSpirit
Words – Edwin Bennett, Zoe Bedeaux
Costume – Olubiyi Thomas
Movement – Salome Pressac
Design – Jonathan Castro, Delphine Lejeune
Support from Emulsion Magazine
Featuring – HforSpirit, Salome Pressac, Jet Sweeney, Olivia Stewart, Olubiyi Thomas
Producer – Scarlett Anderson
Director of Photography – Milo Belgrove
Editing – Nick Hadfield, HforSpirit
Art Director – Molly Martinez Hackney
Art Assistant – Eleanor Jeffrey
Styling Assistant – Olivia Stewart
Hair – Chloe Frieda
Make Up – Siti Haval
Catering – Hayett Belarbi McCarthy
Percussion – James Larter
Female vocals – Zoe Bedeaux
Recording – Luke Gardner at The Studi/o, Manchester
Sound mix – HforSpirit, Bitter Gold, Alexander Green
Mastering – Tony Cousins at Metropolis Studios, London
Creative direction assistant – Mikey Opie O’Grady
Title – Jonathan Castro
Title animation – Ali Raybould
![Aurélien Bernard - (reed) [Feat. Shabaka Hutchings]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/K3VzakaaY-Q/mqdefault.jpg "Aurélien Bernard - (reed) [Feat. Shabaka Hutchings]
“I am a big advocate of entry points – when you end that circle you always reach the center point,” says London jazz visionary and band leader Shabaka Hutchings in (reed), a meditative portrait of the musician and treatise on ritual and creativity from filmmaker Aurélien Bernard. “The center point is a point of communality in the way that there is no sense of strain in the sound,” continues Hutchings. “It feels like it is a very direct connection between inhalation and exhalation.” The non-linear trajectory between the entry point and the centre, mapped out by the musician with the audience in tow in the moment of performance, is the space Bernard explores in (reed), tracing how a simple ritual, like preparing a saxophone’s reed, can serve as a window into som of the inexplicable power of sound.
“Since sounds differ in their outer expression, this results in space stretching between function and
existence, between performance and effect,” explains Bernard. “It seems the deeper we explore the mystery of sound, the more we are able to trace what’s connecting them. These links are what the musician acknowledges as harmony, which asks how repetition and movements could impact, through rhythm and expression, the search for this harmony.” Though the path of this search might be uncertain, Hutchings’ ritualistic approach to performance enables an initial certainty, the first firm foothold of complex climb, something Bernard picks out in monochromatic close focus, foregrounding his his fingers, his lips and his throat.
Setting Hutchings’ playing in counterpoint against the foggy ambience of Space Afrika‘s 2018 modern classic, Somewhere Decent To Live, Bernard exposes the process of finding solid forms within clouds of what the musician describes as “an undefined source of energy, or power, or knowledge, whatever you want to describe it as.” As though coaxing raw blasts of blistering saxophone from Space Afrika’s dubbed-out smudges, (reed) itself serves as a glimpse into Hutchings’ process, winding its way from words, the nascent sparks of inspiration, through measured inhalation into an urgent exhalation, a burst of sound that arrives through the musician’s ritual, from grounded reed to transcendent frequency.
You can find Aurélien Bernard on Instagram. You can find Shabaka Hutchings on Instagram and his website. You can find Space Afrika on Instagram and at Bandcamp.")
