HARK! The Sound of Stories: haunting histories

HARK! brings you live music inspired by stories of haunted history, in a library setting! With the readings from the stories that inspired the music.

Spooky season is upon us, so join us for our stunning and atmospheric return to Darlington Library, featuring music from some of the North’s finest artists! Four years on, we’re thrilled to be bringing The Shining Levels back to our first show in the newly and beautifully refurbished Darlington Library, bringing you music inspired by gristly history, Greek war, and patron saint spirits!

THE SHINING LEVELS return! Following their 2019 set, featuring songs inspired by Ben Myers’ The Gallows Pole songs, we’ve had so many requests to bring them back – and so we’re proud to present them playing songs from their atmospheric, sublime and spooky album The Silence of The Girls, based on Pat Barker’s award-winning novel, as well as more new music based on Ben Myer’s Cuddy. Tonight, the dead speak in song.
Readings from the books will be interwoven with the music.
The Shining Levels are an alt folk group based in the North East of England. Their songs feature beautiful arrangements of soaring harmonies in lush soundscapes. Their first album ‘The Gallows Pole’ was a musical companion to the novel by Benjamin Myers in 2019. And their new 2022 album ‘The Silence of The Girls’ is influenced by the bestselling novel by Pat Barker.

Bringing her eerie and emotive music to Darlo, FRANKIE ARCHER is fresh on the scene and shaking up genres and traditions, sharing the lesser-told sides of stories, championing women, challenging perspectives and calling for a fairer future, all to a unique mix of synths, manipulated samples, drum tracks and earthy Northumbrian fiddle and voice. Frankie’s imaginative and bold mash of electro alt-trad shows her Northumbrian fiddle roots, her deep love of electronic music and her immersion in soulful folk songs from the North East of England and around the world. Mark Radcliffe (BBC Radio 2) described her music as “fascinating and intoxicating”.

Reading: Darlington musician and songwriter Sarah Wilson reads from Robert Woodhouse’s collection of historical hauntings, Haunted Darlington

Opening the show is harmonious trio WE THREE THINGS. We Three Things are Matthew Sturgess, Tim Marshall and Nick Wood, writing and performing songs about life and death and other things. They have written a Mass Murder Ballad especially for the night. It deals with the events of August 1st 1966, when the first mass shooting occurred in the USA. The band’s literary influences are broad, including the letters of John Keats, the bleak realism of Cormac McCarthy, the poetry of David Berman and the small compendiums of Yorkshire ghost stories you could buy in Whitby in the 1980s.

Reading: Durham author Anna Barker reads from Sylvia Clement’s wonderful compilation of contemporary ghostly experiences, Supernatural Darlington.

Between sets we encourage our audience to wander our beautiful library, explore the books – and of course get a drink from the fabulous pop-up bar provided by local micro-brewery Crafty Merlin’s!