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Day #327/365: A fever dream of Haunted Air…

Ossian Brown-Haunted Air-A Year In The Country-2File under: Trails and Influences: Recent Explorations.
Case #46/52.

I’d come across Ossian Brown’s Haunted Air book a while ago, I suspect while wandering through the aisles of an ether shopping warehouse/conglomerate (it’s easy to get lost and to have lost many hours in amongst those aisles, staggering from one corner to another with baskets bulging)…

Anyway, my mind had noted them, noted a certain almost deliberately staged jokiness – as though they belonged to a contemporary art project/fim rather than being found objects that had fallen through the years via boxes of well-thumbed fellow travellers – but I hadn’t explored further…

Torn from album pages, sold piecemeal for pennies and scattered, abandoned to melancholy chance and the hands of strangers.” Geoff Cox

Ossian Brown-Haunted Air-A Year In The Country-3…and then when I did forage and peruse for but a moment I came across Mr Brown’s other/former work – that as a toiler/creater amongst England’s hidden reverse with Messrs Balance and Christopherson in latter-day Coil and also in his own popular music combo Cyclobe.

Hmmm, not a surprise really, although it is somewhat interesting that work with those roots has been sent forth into the world bound and cared for by a more overground concern (one Jonathan Cape)…

…although I suppose in a way it’s not as Mr Christopherson and cohorts were often active above ground via the illustrative work of Hipgnosis and indeed an early (for myself) Coil discovery – the flipside/semi-hidden reverse to The Unreleased Themes 10″ which featured various advert soundtracks that they created, titled simply Airline, Liquer, Perfume, Video Recorder, Airline 2, Natural Gas, Cosmetic 1, Cosmetic 2, Analgesis, Road Surface, Accident Insurance…

Anyway, back to Haunted Air. There’s something genuinely unsettling about these photographs, a kind of arthouse knowingness to them but as they are but found images, it is something that has somehow crept in after the fact…

“”I was somewhere else. I thought I was someplace but now I didn’t know what place. I seemed to be inside foreign worlds where there was some kind of troubling camaraderie — as if a haunting joke was known to everyone but me and yet faintly I knew it too.” (David Lynch)

Ossian Brown-Haunted Air-A Year In The Country

Ossian Brown-Haunted Air-A Year In The Country-5

Ossian Brown-Haunted Air-A Year In The Country-6

Ossian Brown-Haunted Air-A Year In The Country-4

…it’s something that can seem to happen to light catchery over the years, some other layers of meaning wander upon them…

…they seemed to have a glee for somehow stitching a laugh to darkness.” David Lynch

Axel Hoedt-Fasnacht-Once A Year-Der Steidl-German folklore-A Year In The Country-2…or maybe its that just occasionally the norm is not so norm (and in that way they put me in mind of Charles Frégers Wilder Mann – see Day #69/365 and Axel Hoedt’s folkloric club kid rogues – see Day #271/365. See also non-hauntological hauntology: The Auteurs – The Rubettes.)

Charles Freger-Wilder Mann 056-A Year In The CountryDay 10-The Auteurs-The Rubettes-A Year In The Country

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