Leo Chadburn’s latest work expands outwards from a seventeenth-century manual of folk dances to a kinetic exploration of human movement, from St Vitus’ chorea to raving at Castlemorton Common
English Dancing Master is a dance album, but not in the sense you would usually associate with the term. There is no “succession of repetitive beats” (the phrase used by the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 to criminalise outdoor raves), ribcage splintering bass or woozy toplines. Instead, we are treated to a reticent male narrator – voiced by Leo Chadburn – and the Phaedra Ensemble in conversation with each other. In fact, it’s not really an album at all but a singular radiophonic piece broken up into brief episodes that examine the phenomenon of dance. Through a suite of 20 engaging anecdotes Chadburn and the string quartet look beyond the social function of dance towards all kinds of movement.
The record takes its inspiration from John Playford’s seminal manual of folk dances, The English Dancing Master, first published in 1651. Whereas Playford sought to chronicle the popular dances of his day, Chadburn reimagines the guide as a surreal collection of historically referential but largely fictive passages that become increasingly absurd the deeper you go. A significant part of the project, and something that is apparent across Chadburn’s portfolio, is his approach to the speaking voice. It’s a medium for storytelling, sonic material, metronome, dramatic presence. Chadburn’s voice embodies dance to varying degrees and, in his hands, dancing dissolves into the broader theme of movement – an experience universal to all matter.
Just shy of 40 seconds, ‘Because We Love Our Pets’ celebrates, as the lyrics put it, “interspecies participation through superimposition of rhythms” and welcomes bipeds, quadrupeds, hexapods, octapods, decapods and myriapods to join together on the dancefloor as pizzicato strings tumble over each other like countless flailing limbs. ‘The Ice Sheet’ is a “dance of almost imperceptible movements” that leaves plenty of space for the droning cello and viola to elicit images of a glacier moving at a geological pace. ‘Colloid Exchange’, meanwhile, finds the listener “in rhythm with strangers” – gels, foams, emulsions – dispersed in a spinning centrifuge.
Humans also get a look in. ‘St Vitus / St John’ is a historical narrative based on the dancing mania caused by ergot poisoning and social contagion exacerbated by economic stress native to the European medieval period. ‘Castlemorton Common’, on the other hand, references the infamous 1992 free festival that saw up to 40,000 people party for a week in a Worcestershire field and led to the passing of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act cited above. Chadburn’s take on the event is not from the perspective of a raving participant but an impartial motorist encountering the dance from “at least a mile away”. Plucked violins crescendo to resemble the rising volume of approaching sound systems. Revelers and police enter the frame before the music peaks “upon us” and fades away again as quickly as it came.
‘Manual Transmission’ suggests an unfortunate end to the night. Chadburn, like a 90s fitness instructor, commands you to “put your hands in the air”. As the strings swell, his voice becomes increasingly antagonistic, bouncing around the stereo field. It’s clear that we’re no longer in the club, throwing our hands up in abandon. We’re strung out, pulled over on the way home, and about to be frisked by the fuzz.
Following the chemical trail is ‘Old Amsterdam’. Set at the turn of the millennium, it recounts a possibly autobiographical multi-day psychedelic trip where “time began to slip” and “music was the only thing that maintained its form”. Chadburn’s voice is a timekeeper, counting downwards in concert with the quartet’s unnerving glissando. The strings, peeling like wallpaper, paired with a monotonous voice, recount Chadburn’s composition ANTICLOCK (2019) which also explores the ambiguities of time, but with more complex arrangements.
Originally commissioned by the Phaedra Ensemble, English Dancing Master traces its origins to a 2023 Cafe Oto performance. It featured as part of a Gavin Bryars retrospective, performed alongside ‘A Man in a Room, Gambling’, in which Bryars frames a series of Juan Muñoz readings with a string quartet. Chadburn’s collaboration with the Phaedra Ensemble goes back even further, to 2016, when they performed ‘The Indistinguishables’ at London’s Brunel Museum. The ensemble’s co-director Jamie Hamilton mixed last year’s landscape-focused Sleep in the Shadow of the Alternator and produced English Dancing Master. Hamilton gives the strings and voice equal attention, in the sense that the pauses are clearly punctuated and the instruments elaborate on what is being said. Sometimes they are in conflict, sometimes in harmony, but always in dialogue.
In contrast with Chadburn’s previous work, such as the breathless The Subject / The Object (2020), the narrator on English Dancing Master is unreliable and malevolent – his uncanny voice informed by Michel Chion’s notion of the acousmêtre. An additional subtext is the idea of Englishness, which positions the modern multicultural ideal against a fixed and narrow notion of nationhood weaponised by the far-right. ‘International Statues’, for example, reels off English eccentricities as if they were dances in their own right. The “peal of London bells”, in this instance, transforms into “thunder, weather, lightning”. ‘Winter Gardens’, meanwhile, evokes baroque images of “men and women sinking slowly in dark pools in Northern towns” as “taffeta in candlelight” turns endlessly “under crystal raindrops” – metaphors for class inequality, surely.
Unlike the predictable beats of clubland that are designed to move the body, the music on English Dancing Master is forever changing, reptilian in its desire to unsettle. That being said, it’s a record about dance and is extremely varied in how it delivers on the theme. There is a diverse richness in the content and the listener is never sure if the piece is fact or fiction. Perhaps it stretches beyond the binary, like a fleeting current of particles, migrating from one form to the next. In this reading, Chadburn’s nightclub – along with its conceptual extensions – is both the site of free expression and the site of oppression. Despite the dangers posed by the latter, it’s the promise of liberty in the former that encourages us to “keep on moving” (as proposed in the album closer ‘Infinity’) and return to the dance again and again.
Originally published by The Quietus, October 2026
