Travelling to the mountains involves more than reaching higher ground. It is a movement away from familiar proportions and into a landscape where paths disappear, distances become uncertain and human intention no longer seems to govern everything.
Part One of this week’s Distraction Therapy begins at that threshold. Its mountains are physical places, but they also belong to ballad, dream and myth. They contain wolves, hares, cuckoos, enchanted figures, distant transmissions, volcanic fire and roads leading towards another world.
The journey begins with Fairport Convention’s “Tam Lin”. There is no gradual departure from ordinary life: the listener is placed immediately within the atmosphere of the traditional ballad. Boundaries between the human and supernatural worlds have become permeable. Transformation is both a danger and a means of release, and love requires the courage to hold fast while familiar appearances fall away.
First Aid Kit’s “Wolf” carries that sense of transformation into a wilder landscape. The wolf can be feared, pursued or recognised as an image of something instinctive that civilisation cannot entirely contain. The mountains begin to represent the point at which the managed world loses its authority and another form of knowledge becomes possible.
Lisa O’Neill’s “Old Note” changes the scale of the journey. Its spaciousness suggests that memory can belong to a place without becoming nostalgic. What remains from the past is not a complete story but a tone, a vibration or a fragment carried through time. It reaches us without restoring what has been lost.
That feeling opens into Fleet Foxes’ “Blue Ridge Mountains”. The landscape widens, but it does not become empty. Distance brings relationships, memory and belonging into sharper focus. The mountain offers perspective while reminding the traveller that perspective is never the same as detachment.
The middle passage moves away from recognisable roads and into the animal imagery of older folk traditions. Pentangle’s “The Cuckoo” and Shirley Collins and Davy Graham’s “Hares on the Mountain” introduce creatures that seem to cross freely between observation and symbol. Their presence cannot be fixed into a single meaning. They belong to seasonal cycles, desire, uncertainty and the persistent life of the non-human world.
These songs create a pastoralism without sentimentality. The countryside is not presented as an uncomplicated refuge from modern life. It is strange, active and psychologically charged. To enter it is to surrender the assumption that everything exists for human use or explanation.
“Farewell Transmission” by Songs: Ohia carries a signal across this landscape. It feels as though something is being sent from a great distance, perhaps from a place already lost. The voice persists against silence, but the transmission remains incomplete. The traveller hears enough to continue, though not enough to be certain of the destination.
Steeleye Span’s “Thomas the Rhymer” returns the programme to the border between human society and the otherworld. In the traditional story, Thomas encounters the Queen of Elfland and is carried beyond ordinary time. Like many mountain and fairy narratives, the tale warns that crossing a threshold changes the person who crosses it. The traveller cannot enter the symbolic world as a spectator and expect to return untouched.
Sufjan Stevens’ “Vesuvius” brings fire into the journey. The mountain is no longer distant scenery but a living pressure: creative and destructive, silent until it is not. It provides an image of forces accumulating beneath a composed surface. The ascent therefore becomes an inward movement as well as a geographical one, approaching energies that the conscious self may prefer to keep contained.
After this intensity, Vashti Bunyan’s “Diamond Day” restores a gentler rhythm of travelling. Its lightness does not cancel the darker passages that precede it. Instead, it allows the ordinary and the mythic to coexist. A road, an animal, a change in weather or a place to rest can carry meaning without needing to become monumental.
The Incredible String Band’s “The Minotaur’s Song” then turns the journey towards the labyrinth. Mountains rise into open air, but caves and labyrinths lead beneath appearances. The Minotaur waits at the centre as the figure that has been hidden, feared and made monstrous. To travel this far is to risk discovering that the creature at the centre cannot be separated completely from the traveller seeking it.
Wardruna’s “Helvegen” closes the programme with a passage beyond the visible landscape. The mountain road has become a route between states of being: departure and return, memory and forgetting, life and whatever may lie outside its familiar boundaries.
This is not a journey ending in conquest or a triumphant view from the summit. The mountains resist possession. They alter scale, awaken instinct and bring the traveller into contact with older patterns of imagination.
Perhaps we travel towards them because they remain indifferent to our certainty. They do not provide simple answers. They give the question a larger landscape in which to live.
Track Listing
Fairport Convention – Tam Lin
First Aid Kit – Wolf
Lisa O’Neill – Old Note
Fleet Foxes – Blue Ridge Mountains
Pentangle – The Cuckoo
Shirley Collins & Davy Graham – Hares on the Mountain
Songs: Ohia – Farewell Transmission
Steeleye Span – Thomas the Rhymer
Sufjan Stevens – Vesuvius
Vashti Bunyan – Diamond Day
The Incredible String Band – The Minotaur’s Song
Wardruna – Helvegen
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