Stones of Kernow

Anchor 17

The Stones of Kernow is an ongoing audio-visual collaboration between myself and writer, poet, and musician Matthew Shaw.

The works presented here emerge in response to Shaw’s album Mên-an-Tol — a record he describes as “Visiting ancient sites to make music to visit ancient sites with.” Recorded at Mên-an-Tol and across the sacred terrain of Penwith, the compositions are rooted in place, titled in Kernewek, and shaped directly by the stones and atmospheres of Kernow.

Listening to the album, I recognised a shared methodology: walking as research, landscape as collaborator, atmosphere as material. Shaw situates himself within ancient sites to listen and gather sound, later shaping those field recordings into immersive sonic environments. In parallel, I move through these same terrains with a camera, capturing fragments of light, stone, and sky before reprocessing them through analogue feedback systems, signal distortion, and recursive video loops.

The result is not documentation but invocation. Sound and image meet through process rather than illustration — immersive drones, dub-inflected rhythms, and experimental electronics folding into saturated, unstable visual fields shaped by hardware manipulation and live feedback. The visual language draws partly on the writings of Cheryl Straffon and her explorations of megalithic energies and unseen forces, seeking to render magnetism, resonance, memory, and charge in moving image form.

Shaw has further extended Mên-an-Tol through collaborations with Andy Bell under his electronic project GLOK, and with Justin Robertson via his FIVE GREEN MOONS remix — each bringing new tonal dimensions to the source material. These reinterpretations expand the dialogue between ancient monument and contemporary sound culture, deepening the project’s cross-generational, countercultural resonance.

The Stones of Kernow is an evolving body of work — a sustained engagement with the sacred geographies of Cornwall, where stone, sound, and signal converge, and where walking becomes both method and medium.

2026 - Mên-an-Tol

Mên-an-Tol — Audio Visual Collaborations with Matthew Shaw

This body of work emerged in response to a personal call for collaboration with writer, poet, and sound artist Matthew Shaw, following the release of his album Mên-an-Tol. Shaw describes the record as “Visiting ancient sites to make music to visit ancient sites with.” The compositions were recorded at Mên-an-Tol and across numerous stones and sacred locations in Penwith, Cornwall, each piece titled in Kernewek and shaped directly by the land itself. These works are, in every sense, of and from the stones of Kernow.

On first listening, I recognised a deep affinity between Shaw’s process and my own. His practice of walking the landscape in search of remote and ancient places — listening, recording, later shaping sound into immersive compositions — mirrors my own methodology. I too walk, observe, and situate myself within the terrain before filming. The captured footage is then processed and transformed in the studio through analogue and signal-based techniques developed over time.

With these parallels as a starting point, I began aligning my moving-image experiments with selected tracks from Mên-an-Tol, allowing sound and image to meet through shared sensibility rather than literal illustration.

The album moves between long atmospheric drones, ambient acoustics, and passages of experimental electronica that subtly echo early 1990s rave culture. That countercultural resonance felt intuitively aligned with recent visual experiments of my own. I had been reprocessing footage of ancient sites through analogue video hardware, including the Edirol V-4 video effects processor, enabling live manipulation of hue, saturation, negative inversion, mirroring, chroma key, and feedback looping. By directing a camera back into a monitor displaying the processed image, I created recursive feedback systems in which the landscape folds in upon itself.

The resulting visual language — saturated, unstable, pulsing — carries a distinctly early-rave, analogue aesthetic. This felt less like stylistic nostalgia and more like an attempt to render something difficult to articulate: the charged, anomalous atmosphere often reported at prehistoric sites.

My approach was informed in part by the writings of Cornish author Cheryl Straffon, particularly her explorations of megalithic sites and their associations with earth energies, ley lines, magnetism, and unseen forces. I encountered her book Megalithic Mysteries of Cornwall unexpectedly while walking back from Mên-an-Tol to catch a bus near Morvah. That chance discovery deepened my thinking around how image distortion and signal interference might function as visual metaphors for invisible energetic phenomena.

Rather than document these landscapes, the work attempts to conjure them — to suggest radiation, magnetism, resonance, and memory through analogue decay, fragmentation, and repetition. These pieces mark the beginning of an ongoing exploration into the stones and sacred geographies of Kernow, where sound, signal, and landscape intersect.

Matthew Shaw — “Quoit” — GLOK Remix

A Cornish quoit — also known as a dolmen or cromlech — is a Neolithic megalithic structure found primarily in West Penwith and on Bodmin Moor, dating from approximately 3500–2500 BC. Among the oldest surviving stone monuments in Britain, these chambered tombs are often understood as monumental houses of the dead — communal ossuaries built not only for burial, but for ritual return.

This film brings together footage captured at Lanyon Quoit and Chûn Quoit. Both now stand in skeletal form — vast capstones balanced on weathered uprights, exposed to sky and wind. The camera approaches from a walker’s point of view, circling, surveying, moving beneath the heavy stone lintels as if searching for something withheld within their shadow.

The images have been intensely processed through analogue video feedback systems, pushing saturation, signal distortion, and recursive looping toward excess. The result leans into a neo-1990s rave aesthetic — unstable, hallucinatory, charged — as though the act of walking has tipped into altered perception. The viewer is not simply observing the monuments, but entering them in a heightened state.

Set to the GLOK remix of “Quoit,” the sonic landscape shifts dramatically. The track drives forward with experimental electronica and dance-inflected rhythms — pulsing, staggered, and fractured. Its propulsion informed the pacing of the edit: cuts stutter, frames glitch, movement accelerates and collapses back on itself. Sound and image lock into a shared momentum, ritual becoming rave, tomb becoming threshold.

These quoits, poised like vast stone mushrooms in the landscape, feel less like ruins and more like transmitters — calling travellers inward. Beneath their weight, there is shelter, echo, and the suggestion of transcendence.

GLOK is the electronic project of Andy Bell — founding member of the seminal shoegaze band Ride and former member of Oasis. Through GLOK, Bell moves into darker, more textural electronic territory, blending motorik rhythms, analogue synth atmospheres, and immersive club sensibilities. His remix recontextualises Shaw’s composition into something both physical and transportive — grounding ancient architecture in contemporary pulse.

This piece inhabits that collision: Neolithic monument, analogue decay, electronic propulsion — the stone chamber as dance floor, the tomb as portal.

Matthew Shaw — “Krommlegh”

An early morning bus tracing the Cornish coastline to St Just. A pasty and coffee in the market square. Then on foot — uphill, toward Truthwall Common and the open moor.

Tregeseal Stone Circle — also known as the Tregeseal Dancing Stones — sits exposed to wind and weather, a Late Neolithic / Early Bronze Age ring of low-set granite stones measuring roughly twenty-one metres across. A second, ruined circle lies nearby, and beyond that the brooding presence of Carn Kenidjack rises from the moor, long associated with folklore, hauntings, and tales of being “piskey-led” — drawn unknowingly toward the Otherworld.

The morning I arrived was dry and clear — rare conditions that allowed time to settle. The circle was empty. I spent hours there alone, moving slowly, filming and photographing each stone in a one-stop, frame-by-frame rhythm. Circling the ring repeatedly, I began to understand it not as an isolated monument but as part of a wider conversation with the land. A nearby field wall offered elevation — a vantage point from which the circle revealed its geometry against the sweep of moorland.

Yet my attention kept drifting to Carn Kenidjack in the distance. Its jagged granite form felt magnetically linked to the circle, as if the two sites held a silent alignment. Compelled by that intuition, I crossed the moor through heather and brush, walking deliberately between ring and outcrop — physically tracing the connection I sensed. From the summit of the Carn, the circle appeared embedded within rolling terrain, small yet deliberate, a mark pressed into the earth.

This film records those movements — the circling, the crossing, the ascent. Through analogue video feedback, signal disruption, and layered animation processes, the footage is reworked into something less observational and more immersive. Light fractures, edges shimmer, the landscape breathes in saturated pulses. The circle and the Carn begin to oscillate across the screen, not as static monuments but as thresholds — sites held between geology and myth, presence and distortion.

Set to Matthew Shaw’s “Krommlegh,” the piece unfolds as a meditation on alignment — between stone and stone, land and legend, walker and horizon.

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