Kitchen Cynics & Margery Daw :: Last of the Turnspit Dogs

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.

“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.

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.