The Heavenly Realms

The Heavenly Realms follows the duo’s 2022 project and LP Environmental Meditation Music (released through Hood Faire), which saw hand built instruments placed in the landscape, allowing nature and the elements to play all the music that was captured. Folklore Tapes grow yet another branch of investigation through their new Mystic Series, which begins with the Swedish mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg, who spent the latter portion of his life living in England
The Heavenly Realms unfolded from Folklore Tapes’ residency at Swedenborg House in October 2022. The house, in Bloomsbury Way, London, is the headquarters of the Swedenborg Society, an organisation dedicated to the study and publication of the works of scientist, philosopher and visionary Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772)
Sam McLoughlin and David Chatton Barker were invited to respond creatively to Swedenborg’s legacy, and it will come as no surprise to their followers that the duo took inspiration from Swedenborg’s mystical experiences. Swedenborg’s most renowned work, Heaven and Hell (1764), synthesised years of dreams, trance states and ecstatic communications with angels into a complete vision of the afterlife and the spiritual realms. In it Swedenborg meticulously details a stratified order of the heavens, an ultimate reality within which physical matter relates to spirit through divine correspondences emanating from a highest, purest echelon, God