IEdition of 37 10" Lathe Cut Discs , on Red Vinyl
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1.
The Path Only The Rain Acknowledges 08:51
2.
The Howling, The Howling 04:29
3.
Bagging Area Of Your Mind 04:30
about
Physical copies from Sonido Polifonico: sonidopolifonico.bandcamp.com
Edition of 37 10" Lathe Cut Discs , on Red Vinyl
Badges, print, token, inserts.......
Contact Paul -
paul597x@tiscali.co.uk
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Hands gently resting against your own.
The path only the rain acknowledges.
A whisper among the waves.
This music is a conversation, peopled with fragments and voices, dissolving into sound and surfacing again—soaking wet, shimmering, and alive.
ABOUT THE MUSIC:
The Path Only the Rain Acknowledges:
ELINOR:
This is about remembering and understanding: a letter to lost love written through the fog of self-recognition. It looks back at connections that slipped away before the language existed to name what was really happening: the silence of undiagnosed autism, ADHD, and mental health struggles that made communication and emotional clarity so difficult.
It is not about regret, but grief transformed into understanding. It’s a call to those who were loved and lost, “I see now what I couldn’t then.” It’s also a return to the self, a kind of healing, dissolving not into disappearance, but into awareness, breath, and belonging.
BEN:
The music for this piece was recorded in one session at JT Soar- I unexpectedly had some free time there due to a last minute cancellation. I started with piano and just kept layering things. Normally, I would then spend quite a bit of time editing and removing any mistakes…
I pretty much left this one be as felt just about hung together and I liked the fragility of the parts, not quite knowing where they were going but enjoying the journey.. it was also very much a ‘stimmed’ recording… played with attention to how it felt to manipulate the instruments, rather than aiming for aesthetically pleasing.
I was blown away by Elinor’s words.. they contained such vivid images and very much seemed to resonate with the feel of the music.
The Howling, The Howling:
ELINOR:
The Howling, The Howling is an invocation — a song of awakening, of remembering the wild pulse within the body. It marks a turning point from silence to sound, from dissociation to voice. Where The Path Only The Rain Acknowledges mourned the loss of speech and connection, The Howling, The Howling celebrates their return: the rediscovery of voice, eroticism, and ancestral memory.
Here, the forest becomes a living, breathing archive: a place where all that was hidden or suppressed in women’s histories begins to stir again. The fire flickering through the trees calls forth an ancient chorus of women and witches, healers and heretics, those who were silenced, tortured, or erased. Through the act of singing, chanting, and moving, their stories re-emerge, "burning brightly through the tree branches".
This song is also deeply erotic; not in the sense of desire alone, but in the Audre Lorde sense of the erotic as power: the life-force that connects body, earth, and creation. The voice that once whispered now howls; the body that once hid now dances freely under the moon.
The Howling is a song of reclamation, of body, lineage, and magic. It’s the sound of the forest itself remembering, calling the women, the neurodivergent, the queer, the forgotten, back into their own fierce, luminous voice.
BEN:
A (nearly) instrumental piece of this opens the Elkwort album, but Elinor’s words add so much depth and meaning, it’s great to be able to give this version its own space.
Bagging Area Of Your Mind:
ELINOR:
The Bagging Area of Your Mind is a tender reckoning. It is a song about love, memory, and the quiet act of gathering oneself back together after loss. It looks back at a past relationship from a place of understanding that could only come with time, language, and self-recognition, after learning to see the world through the lens of ADHD, autism and neurodivergent perception.
The song moves like a walk through memory: each image (a coat with many pockets, a button, a pin) becomes an anchor to moments that once slipped away. The pin in particular carries dual meaning: sharp yet binding, painful yet necessary, it holds the fabric of experience together. It pricks with the sting of what’s been lost, but also glimmers, a reminder that repair, like love, requires both tenderness and precision.
The narrative unfolds as both farewell and invocation: a way of saying I’m sorry and I remember you in the same breath. Through its everyday images (markets, coats, airports, wine bars) the song locates grief within the ordinary, transforming it into ritual: the act of picking up, holding, and letting go.
More narrated and grounded than the other two songs, this piece becomes a bridge between the physical and emotional; a hurried journey into self and connection, where time folds and memory softens. In the end, the “bagging area” becomes a metaphor for the mind itself, a space where love, regret, and sensory fragments are gathered, weighed, and released.
BEN:
It’s interesting that Elinor sees this one as ‘tender’ and ‘grounded’… I guess her words are, but the music, to me, is the opposite. Probably the wildest, most gnarly thing I’ve ever done, only just holding itself together. But I like the juxtaposition there.
It came about through that pump organ groove underpinning the second half. It felt liberating to do something more impetuous like this, I’ve always loved bands like Can, The Velvet Underground and more modern bands like Beak, Gnod… so it felt good to do something in this vein.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS:
BEN MCELROY
Ben is an ambient/folk musician originally from The Wirral but now residing in Nottingham. He combines acoustic instruments with computer processing to create folk inspired soundscapes.
Ben has been writing music since his teens, with just a basic grasp of guitar and even more basic recording equipment. Over the years he’s picked up more instruments and slightly better recording gear, and has been venturing out to perform live since 2022.
In 2025 he released the PRS funded short film, Widdershins & Deosil and the album Elkwort which also featureed Elinor. Featured on BBC 6 music's Dreamtime with Zakia and described by Paddy Clarke at the Quietus as "Excellent new album – dissonant and beautiful sonic meditations."
ELINOR ROWLANDS
Elinor is a multidisciplinary artist whose immersive work explores autistic lived experience, queer temporalities, crip time, and hidden women’s histories. Drawing on nature, ritual, and folk histories, she creates sensory environments where sound, texture, and performance reveal alternative ways of being and knowing.
Her practice reflects her experiences as an autistic individual with ADHD and synesthesia, using repetitive and rhythmic gestures to explore stimming, darkness, and the unconscious to the natural world. In her own body, she feels time as a pulse that doesn’t keep regular rhythm—a beat closer to roots and mycelium than to clocks.
By layering natural soundscapes and visual imagery, Elinor crafts phantasmagorical, immersive spaces that invite curiosity, dreamy world-building and connection.
Notable projects include Fragments of Perception: An Autistic Odyssey (Immersive Arts funded, 2025), Biodivergent Sites and Sounds (ACE and Canal and River Trust funded, 2023), and Retelling of the Wild Woods (developed from DYCP ACE funding). This release marks her third collaboration with Ben McElroy, following The Deepenings (2023) and his album Elkwort (2025), and now The Path Only The Rain Acknowledges (2025).
credits
released December 12, 2025
Music: Ben McElroy
Words: Elinor Rowlands
Mastering: Nick Jonah Davis
ARTWORK: Elinor Rowlands
Released on 10 inch vinyl by Sonido Polifonico
Recorded at home and at JT Soar, Nottingham.
Thanks to Paul for getting this one out there!
www.benmcelroy.co.uk
www.elinorrowlands.com
sonidopolifonico.bandcamp.com
