Foundling

Live presentation of Artemisia – immersive harp, voice, flute and electronics.

For Manchester Folk Horror 8, Foundling summons a live work shaped around Rainer Maria Rilke’s declaration that “beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror.” Here, beauty is not ornament, but a pointing to something ancient, vast, fragile, and concealed. A hint of cosmic workings glimpsed only briefly, before it overwhelms.
Working between composition and improvisation, Foundling (the project of Canadian-born, Berlin-based sound artist Erin Lang) weaves harp, voice, percussion, and resonance into a slow, ceremonial unfolding. Tones are sustained like held breath; melodies surface and dissolve; voices hover between invocation and warning. The music engulfs.
This is folk horror as reunion. The return of something long buried. The terror does not arrive with violence, but with quiet recognition. Beauty appears as a reflection, moving from radiance to unease as darkness rises.
The performance moves as a rite rather than a concert. Time loosens. Silence thickens. Sound becomes a veil, then a tearing of it. Angels and monsters are indistinguishable here, both are singing with terrifying clarity.
Foundling offers this music as an act of remembrance and surrender: a passage into wonder, and the quiet terror that follows when we let go into the shadowy parts of myth and memory.