The Heartwood Institute Maps Richard Adams’s Cumbria on _Plague Dogs_

Few projects commit to a sense of place as literally as The Heartwood Institute does on Plague Dogs. Jonathan Sharp, the musician behind the project, constructed the album from field recordings gathered in the exact Cumbrian locations that frame Richard Adams’s 1977 novel. This is not background ambience. Sharp walked the same fells and lake edges that, in the book, two escaped research dogs named Rowf and Snitter traverse while a panicking state apparatus closes in.

The album comes via Folk Police Recordings and sharpens Sharp’s long-running interest in what he calls hauntronica — a practice where electronic sound meets the layered ghosts of place and past. In Cumbria, he spent afternoons capturing audio that would later become both raw texture and the basis for synthesizer patches. Some recordings appear largely untouched. Others were dismantled and rebuilt from scratch in his studio, their contours shaped into new sounds that feel like fractured memories of the originals.

Adams is best known for Watership Down, but Plague Dogs carries a darker charge: an animal testing station, a media frenzy, a pursuit without mercy. Sharp’s chosen sites are the bridge between a real northern English landscape and the psychological terrain of the novel. The music reflects that crossing. It moves through uneasy drones, disintegrating rhythms, and tones that resemble the aftermath of a bad experiment — like listening to a subject’s psyche dissolve into the chaos of escape.

That Sharp lives in the region gives the work a rare authority. He isn’t parachuting into a concept. The album functions as both a cartographic exercise and a speculative reading, tracing exact locations while reaching into the fictional dread that Adams layered over them. The result is a record that takes psychogeography beyond metaphor: you hear the exact place, and you hear what a story did to it.