> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.hwaelmag.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Kitchen Cynics & Margery Daw :: Last of the Turnspit Dogs - URL: https://www.hwaelmag.com/kitchen-cynics-margery-daw-last-of-the-turnspit-dogs/ - Published: 2026-10-07T12:06:49.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-07T12:08:20.000Z - Description: Avant-folk miniatures where old melodies return as gestures of care. - Author: Hwael Mag - Tags: Album Reviews, 2026, Experimental, Psych Folk, Folk, Tape Music ### The turnspit was a dog bred for a wheel. Short-legged and long-bodied, it ran inside a wooden drum fixed to the kitchen wall, and the drum turned the spit over the fire. --- By the end of the nineteenth century the mechanical jack had done away with the job, and the breed went with it. There is no better animal for a record by Kitchen Cynics, the name under which Alan Davidson of Aberdeen has been recording since the days of the portastudio. He has said he acquired it in the late eighties or early nineties and was “enthralled by” it, building up “a hissy but much-loved song” one bounced track at a time. He had started earlier still, at school around 1972, placing amplifiers at different distances from a microphone to get a usable balance. The lesson he took from those years, that it was easy to record your own stuff, has produced one of the largest catalogues in British underground folk. In 2007 he recorded a song a day. Margery Daw is the other half, her recording name borrowed from the nursery rhyme. The two have worked together steadily: *No Bigger Fools* in 2023, then *Weeping Stones* and *To the Green Round*, both with Grey Malkin, on Cruel Nature in 2024 and 2025\. *Last of the Turnspit Dogs*, their first tape as a duo, is out on the same label on 2 October 2026\. On this record, Daw’s zither, erhu and phono-fiddle sit alongside theremin and small synthesizers; Davidson brings guitars, bowed bass, viola, banjo and a scattering of wind instruments. The credits suggest a room where almost anything within reach might be given a part. > **“Front Door” opens and “Back Door” closes: the record becomes a house with eighteen rooms.** [Last Of The Turnspit Dogs by Kitchen Cynics & Margery Daw](https://cruelnaturerecordings.bandcamp.com/album/last-of-the-turnspit-dogs?ref=hwaelmag.com) “Félicette” leaves the ground. The synths fray into something cosmic, fireflies loose in the dark of the capsule, and above them comes the voice, warm and grained in the old prog-folk manner, a hymn for a small passenger who would come home. It is hard to imagine the song done better. The electronics never take over the room. “Last of the Turnspit Dogs” comes in at an angle, through the wow and flutter of tape reels, on a hypnotic acoustic arpeggio, and it could have slipped out of the soundtrack to *The Wicker Man*. As so often on the album, the singing steers clear of a chorus and leaves the song hanging in the air: brief, and quite beautiful. GROUND SECTION / 01 SELECT A LAYER 01 THE WHEEL turnspit / kitchen labour / extinct breed 02 THE CAPSULE Félicette / France / 1963 03 THE TAY humpback / winter 1883 / Dundee 04 THE REEDS Montrose Basin / water rails / Angus coast 05 THE MOUTH diddling / dance tunes / North East Scotland A working animal gives the record its name. The turnspit dog ran inside a wheel connected to a roasting spit. Its place in the kitchen depended on a particular job; as mechanical devices replaced that labour, the breed disappeared. The album retrieves an animal remembered chiefly through the work it performed. The passenger returned alive. Félicette was sent into space by France on 18 October 1963, aboard a Véronique sounding rocket. She survived the flight and was recovered after a parachute descent. This is the historical animal behind “Felicette”, before the song gives her journey its cosmic scale. A whale became a public spectacle. A humpback entered the Firth of Tay in 1883\. It was harpooned, escaped and was later found dead off the coast. Its body was exhibited for paying visitors; its skeleton eventually entered Dundee’s museum. The label names the dead Tay whale among the album’s subjects, suggesting the historical ground of “Baleen”. The landscape has local inhabitants. The label’s account places water rails at Montrose Basin, on the Angus coast. Read beside “The Reeds Whisper”, that reference gives the album’s waterscape a particular location: reeds, tidal water and birds whose presence may be heard before it is seen. The voice carries the dance. Diddling is North East Scottish mouth music: dance tunes sung on rhythmic syllables. When no fiddler is to hand, the singer can supply the melody and its pulse. Among the album’s many instruments, “Diddling” recalls what can be made with a mouth alone. WHAT REMAINS These references come from the album’s titles and the label’s account of its subjects. The links between “Baleen” and the Tay whale, and between “The Reeds Whisper” and Montrose Basin, are readings of those clues rather than track-by-track explanations supplied by the musicians. Here and there come instrumentals in an older folktronica, reinvented without straying far from its roots; once, it would simply have been called experimental. The synths seem to paint living things, places forever in the making, and it is a rare gift, turning the beauty of the earth into sound. The pieces play like stories: the waterscape of “Slight Drift”; “Sea Glass”, whose arpeggio and skewed, off-key synths still arrive at an ethereal harmony; “The Reeds Whisper”; and “Baleen”, where you can hear the whales sing. If I ever set out to build a playlist of folktronica, avant-folk and miniatures, cohesive enough to stand on its own, this record already is that playlist, and it will not leave my rotation any time soon. Every vocal part adds something, carrying the essence of each piece and condensing the album’s cosmology into something human. It all holds together in one small room. The hiss stays in, the air of a kitchen where the tape was left running; the songs read like entries in a local almanac. Daw’s zither and bowed strings join Davidson’s guitar and bowed bass in a household band, and the synths, with more than a touch of Kosmische Musik about them, take their place at the table without disturbing it. Eighteen pieces, sketches beside finished songs, make a notebook to leaf through. Somewhere in the middle of it, the turnspit is still running in its wheel. ---