Cobalt Chapel: ‘It feels like there’s a story pretty much everywhere you look’

Singer Cecilia Fage’s relocation from London to rural West Yorkshire means she now lives 30 miles or so north of multi-instrumentalist Jarrod Gosling, who is also one half of the Sheffield electronic duo I Monster.

Their forthcoming second album, Orange Synthetic, refines their intriguing blend of psychedelia, prog, folk and choral music. “Even though there’s more instruments on this one, because there’s guitar and bass guitar, I think it has a more coherent sound,” says Gosling. “One of the other things I think is the length of the album. The first album spread across three sides of a double album, it wasn’t quite a double.”

“We were a bit more ruthless with this one,” adds Fage. “We were just like, ‘For God’s sake, chop it down’.”

“Get it on one side of a C90 (cassette) – not that anyone will these days,” laughs Gosling. “It’s ten tracks, which is a classic (length).”

“We’re not premeditated but I think (it was more the case of) we do want to build on what we’ve done, we don’t want to repeat the same sound as the last album,” says Fage.

The ten songs draw on the history and folklore of Yorkshire.

In the spirit of “trying out a few different things”, the pair visited the Thurgoland tunnel near Barnsley. “There was a programme on Channel 5 last year, which is when I found out about it – this guy travelling round the disused railways of Britain. This tunnel, which was built in the 40s to replace an older one, is now a footpath. It’s about a quarter of a mile long and on this programme they were explaining there was this amazing echo.”

The pair decided to take a clarinet, recorders and some percussion instruments along and try to “cram in” as much recording as they could “between people riding their bikes or horses through the tunnel”.

“We got a lot of the ghostly sounds from that which are on Our Angel Polygon,” says Gosling.

Fage, who “fell in love” with the Yorkshire countryside while touring and then meeting her future husband, who is from Cleckheaton, and settling in Calderdale, says her fascination with the region has steadily grown. Near her home are the Penny Steps, worn down by the clogs of workers en route to the local mill. “It feels like there’s a story pretty much everywhere you look,” she says.

Our Angel Polygon was inspired by the ‘golf balls’ at RAF Fylingdales, the Cold War early warning centre on the North York Moors, while the title track drew on the disastrous Krumlin music festival, wrecked by a storm 50 years ago.

“We work in quite a visual way, so a lot of the themes in the songs start from one of us finding a picture or an image that we find really interesting, and we’ll send it to each other.”

Orange Synthetic is out on January 29. www.facebook.com/cobaltchapel