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The Restless Field: Audio Visual Archive 33/52

Artwork from The Restless Field.

 

The Restless Field is a study of the land as a place of conflict and protest as well as beauty and escape; an exploration and acknowledgment of the history and possibility of protest, resistance and struggle in the landscape/rural areas, in contrast with sometimes more often referred to urban events.

It takes inspiration from flashpoints in history while also interweaving personal and societal myth, memory, the lost and hidden tales of the land.

References and starting points include: The British Miners Strike of 1984 and the Battle Of Orgreave. Gerrard Winstanley & the Diggers/True Levellers in the 17th century. The first battle of the English Civil War in 1642. The burying of The Rotherwas Ribbon. The Mass Tresspass of Kinder Scout in 1932. Graveney Marsh/the last battle fought on English soil. The Congested Districts Board/the 19th century land war in Ireland. The Battle Of The Beanfield in 1985.

(From text which accompanies the album.)

 

Includes work by Field Lines Cartographer, Vic Mars, Bare Bones, Assembled Minds, Grey Frequency, Endurance, Listening Center, Pulselovers, Sproatly Smith, Polypores, Depatterning, Time Attendant, A Year In The Country and David Colohan.

 

“The Restless Field is something quite special, a concept album that shows its references but lets you do the thinking. We Are Cult highly recommend spending a little time in the long grass with it.” (Martin Ruddock writing at We Are Cult)

 

Elsewhere at A Year In The Country:

  1. Artifact Report #18/52a: The Restless Field Released
  2. Artifact Report #14/52a: The Restless Field at Simon Reynold’s blissblog and the sunday experience
  3. Artifact Report #16/52a: The Restless Field at Flatland Frequencies, Syndae and whisperandhollerin
  4. Artifact Report #17/52a: The Restless Field at Sunrise Ocean Bender and John Coulthart’s Feuilleton
  5. Artifact Report #19/52a: The Restless Field Transmissions and Reviews
  6. Artifact Reports #36/52a: The Restless Field: A Return Visit – Further Reviews and Transmissions

 

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The Quietened Bunker: Audio Visual Archive 30/52

Artwork from The Quietened Bunker album.

 

“The Quietened Bunker is an exploration of the abandoned and/or decommissioned Cold War installations which lie under the land and that would have acted as selectively populated refuges/control centres if the button was ever pushed; a study and reflection on these chimeric bulwarks and the faded but still present memory of associated Cold War dread, of which they are stalwart, mouldering symbols.” (Quoted from text which accompanied the album.)

The album includes work by Keith Seatman, Grey Frequency, A Year In The Country, Panabrite, Polypores, Listening Center, Time Attendant, Unknown Heretic and David Colohan.

 

“A most alluring waltzing orbital sorrowfully sighing in the starry outlands mournfully transmitting crystalline cosmic distress calls from forgotten far off outposts to its long since fallen creator as it observes the heavenly nightlights in states of gracefall dulling, diminishing and disappearing…” (Quoted from a review at The Sunday Experience.)

 

Elsewhere at A Year In The Country:

 

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Echoes And Reverberations – Preorder

Preorder today 23rd July 2019. Released 16th August 2019.

The CDs are now sold out but the album is available to download at our Bandcamp page, Amazon, The Tidal Store, 7digital etc and can be streamed on Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer, YouTube etc.

Echoes And Reverberations is a field recording based mapping of real and imaginary film and television locations.

It is in part an exploration of their fictional counterparts’ themes; from apocalyptic tales to never-were documentaries and phantasmagorical government-commissioned instructional films via stories of conflicting mystical forces of the past and present, scientific experiments gone wrong and unleashed on the world, the discovery of buried ancient objects and the reawakening of their malignant alien influence, progressive struggles in a world of hidebound rural tradition and the once optimism of post-war new town modernism.

The album is also a reflection on the way in which areas – whether rural, urban, or edgeland – can become permeated with such tales and undercurrents, creating a landscape of the imagination where fact and fiction intertwine. The resulting layering may at times create ongoing echoes and reverberations which personally, culturally and possibly literally leave their marks on the history and atmospheres of places, with these locations becoming a source of inspiration and cultural pilgrimage.

Each track contains field recordings from one such journey and their seeking of the spectral will-o’-the-wisps of locations’ imagined or often hidden flipsides.

Features music and accompanying text on the tracks by Grey Frequency, Pulselovers, Dom Cooper, Listening Center, Howlround, A Year In The Country, Sproatly Smith, Field Lines Cartographer, Depatterning and The Heartwood Institute.


Dawn Rising Edition. Limited to 208 copies. £11.95.
Hand-finished white/black CD album in textured recycled fold-out sleeve with fold-out text insert, print, sticker and badge. Limited edition of 208.

Top of CD.                                                   Underneath of CD.

Further packaging details:
1) Custom printed by A Year In The Country using archival giclée pigment ink.
2) Includes badge, secured with removable glue on string bound tag.
3) Folded sheet of accompanying notes on textured laid paper, hand numbered on back.
4) Print on cotton rag textured fine art paper.
5) Round vinyl-style sticker.

Tracklisting:
1) Grey Frequency: King Penda
2) Pulselovers: The Edge Of The Cloud
3) Dom Cooper: What Has Been Uncovered Is Evil
4) Listening Center: From Bull Island To Avondale
5) Howlround: Smashing
6) A Year In The Country: Not A Playground
7) Sproatly Smith: Gone Away
8) Field Lines Cartographer: Mr Scarecrow
9) Depatterning: The Ogham Stones
10) The Heartwood Institute: Ribble Head Viaduct

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Echoes And Reverberations – Preorder and Release Dates

Preorder 23rd July 2019. Released 16th August 2019.

The CDs are now sold out but the album is available to download at our Bandcamp page, Amazon, The Tidal Store, 7digital etc and can be streamed on Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer, YouTube etc.

Echoes And Reverberations is a field recording based mapping of real and imaginary film and television locations.

It is in part an exploration of their fictional counterparts’ themes; from apocalyptic tales to never-were documentaries and phantasmagorical government-commissioned instructional films via stories of conflicting mystical forces of the past and present, scientific experiments gone wrong and unleashed on the world, the discovery of buried ancient objects and the reawakening of their malignant alien influence, progressive struggles in a world of hidebound rural tradition and the once optimism of post-war new town modernism.

The album is also a reflection on the way in which areas – whether rural, urban, or edgeland – can become permeated with such tales and undercurrents, creating a landscape of the imagination where fact and fiction intertwine. The resulting layering may at times create ongoing echoes and reverberations which personally, culturally and possibly literally leave their marks on the history and atmospheres of places, with these locations becoming a source of inspiration and cultural pilgrimage.

Each track contains field recordings from one such journey and their seeking of the spectral will-o’-the-wisps of locations’ imagined or often hidden flipsides.

 

Features music and accompanying text on the tracks by:
Grey Frequency
Pulselovers
Dom Cooper
Listening Center
Howlround
A Year In The Country
Sproatly Smith
Field Lines Cartographer
Depatterning
The Heartwood Institute

 

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The Watchers – Reviews, Broadcasts and Journeys amongst The Haunted Generation, The Unquiet Meadow, the Witching Hour and Other Flipside Furrows


A selection of reviews and broadcasts of The Watchers album:

“Individual trees provide very personal inspiration for some of the artists participating. Vic Mars takes Hertfordshire’s 900-year-old Eardisley Oak as the muse for his gentle, pastoral instrumental The Test of Time, and The Winter Dream of Novel’s Oak by Howlround is created from field recordings of an 800-year-old tree in Tilford, Surrey. It’s a warm, touching tribute to the receding wild woodlands of the British countryside, and – for maximum listening pleasure – perfect for an early summers’ evening constitutional through the copse or thicket of your choice.” Bob Fischer writing in his The Haunted Generation column in issue 381 of Fortean Times.

The Haunted Generation column also features Jonathan Sharp’s (whose work as The Heartwood Institute is included on The Watchers) Divided Time album which is released on Castles In Space. This was inspired by a cache of faded 1970s family snapshots that he discovered and which have a particularly intriguing character – the cover image conjures a spectral pastoral sense and seems to have tumbled backwards and forwards in time and has an “I can’t quite place what era it’s from” air to it. The Divided Time album can be visited here

…and in an interconnected manner with all things spectral and otherly pastoral the cover article for the issue is written by Gail-Nina Anderson and titled “Folk Horror Revival – Exploring the Haunted Landscape of British Cinema and Television”.

Bob Fischer also has a relatively new blog also called The Haunted Generation, which accompanies his column in Fortean Times and where you can find articles and interviews with Jonny Trunk, Drew Mulholland’s Three Antennas in a Quarry and Frances Castle/Clay Pipe Music’s Stagdale, to name just a few. Visit the blog here.

“Full of the trademark otherworldly pastoralism we’ve come to love from A Year In The Country releases, The Watchers opens with the haunting drone of Grey Frequency’s In A Clearing… There’s twinkling synths (Field Lines Cartographer’s A Thousand Autumns) and almost psychedelic oscillations (The Heartwood Institute’s The Trees That Watch The Stones’)… [and] Howlround’s A Winter Dream Of Novel’s Oak, an eerie echo peppered with birdsong…” Finlay Milligan, Electronic Sound magazine issue 54

“A Year In The Country continue to release their sumptuous CDs… A Thousand Autumns by Field Lines Cartographer celebrates an ancient oak, its cyclical shedding of thousands of leaves providing nutrients for next year’s leaves. The twinkling synth sounds like the falling leaves in the shafts of Autumnal sunlight… Sproatly Smith arrive with Watching You another song from the point of view of these ancient trees, bird song, female voice, synth and acoustic guitar. Tracing the journey from acorn to mighty hollowed oak, a bucolic folk tune… Vic Mars is next with The Test Of Time this song takes its inspiration from the great Eardisley oak tree, one of the oldest in Britain. A purely electronic piece of music which is both cathartic and gentle in nature, it’s stately and develops into a bucolic pastoral piece… This could be the label’s finest release yet.” Andrew Young, Terrascope

“Combines the enchanted ambience of Field Lines Cartographer and Vic Mars with the druidic declamations of Widow’s Weeds ft Kitchen Cynics and Sproatly Smith, the dark frequencies of Depattering and The Heartwood Institute with Pulselovers pulsations…” Raffaello Russo, Music Won’t Save You

“The music portrays a gentle patience, from the field recordings sprinkled throughout the album to delicate chimes and folksong.” Richard Allen, A Closer Listen

“A Year in the Country’s latest uncanny release is The Watchers, a celebration of Britain’s trees that mixes electronica with eerie folk…” Jude Rogers, writing in the Folk Column of The Guardian

As an aside I would highly recommend a visit to Jude Rogers’ article 2018’s Best Folk Folk Albums, also for The Guardian, where you can find the likes of You Are Wolf, Olivia Chaney, Trembling Bells, Lisa O’Neill and Stick In The Wheel. Well, recommend and also urge caution due to the potential wallet injuring nature of it. That can be visited here.

And then onto some of the radio etc broadcasts of the album:

Episode 260 of More Than Human’s radio show featured Depatterning’s Ook/Dair and Pulselover’s Circles Within Circles. Original broadcast on CiTR FM, the show is archived here. Their record label has featured releases by the likes of Ekoplekz, Jon Brooks, Kemper Norton, Pye Corner Audio and sometimes A Year In The Country travellers Time Attendant and can be visited here.

The Geography Trip and Front & Follow’s The Gated Canal Community Radio Show included Vic Mar’s The Test Of Time. Originally broadcast via Reform Radio the show is archived here and their Facebook page can be found here.

And as a further aside Front & Follow recently released The Blow Volume 6 collaborative album featuring work by also fellow sometimes A Year In The Country travellers Polypores and Field Lines Cartographer, which rather intriguingly “initially drew from long conversations about alternate realities and altered states of consciousness”. The album can be visited here.

Phantom seaside radio show and sometimes fellow A Year In The Country travellers The Séance included Phonofiction’s Xylem Flow. Originally broadcast on Brighton’s Radio Reverb, totallyradio and Sine FM the playlist for the show can be found here and the show is archived at Mixcloud here.

Grey Frequency’s In A Clearing and Pulselover’s Circles Within Circles were included in an episode of record label Sunrise Ocean Bender’s eclectic and rather finely esoteric show. Broadcast on WRIR FM the playlist can be found here and the show is archived at Mixcloud here.

Sproatly Smith’s Watching You and Grey Frequency’s In A Clearing were featured on two episodes of the spectrally hauntological and undercurrents of folk wanderings of The Unquiet Meadow. Orginally broadcast on Asheville FM the playlists for the show can be visited here and here. Their Facebook page can be found here.


And as another aside a recent episode of The Unquiet Meadow also featured the A Year In The Country released Man Of Double Deed by The Hare And The Moon, from the album From The Furthest Signals and She Rocola’s Molly Leigh Of The Mother Town – the playlist for that particular show can be visited here.

Grey Frequency’s In A Clearing was included on the podcast Wyrd Daze Six: Then Space Began To Toll, which was released for Wyrd Daze’s sixth birthday. That and it’s accompanying digital ezine can be viewed and listened to here.

In A Clearing was also featured on fellow A Year In The Country traveller Mat Handley of Pulselovers and Woodford Halse’s You, the Night and the Music radio show. Originally broadcast on Sine FM the show is archived at Mixcloud here.

Johnny Seven played Grey Frequency’s In A Clearing on episode 408 of Pull The Plug, alongside tracks by the previously mentioned Jonathan Sharp, sometimes A Year In The Country fellow traveller Listening Center and Jane Weaver. Originally broadcast on Resonance FM the show is archived here.

Howlround’s The Winter Dream Of Novel’s Oak was included in episode 86 of Mind De-Coder, alongside various psychedelic, folk and acid folk wanderings (both old and new), including Anne Briggs, Rowan : Morrison and Shide and Acorn. The accompanying post can be found here and the show is archived at Mixcloud here.

And finally Verity Sharp played Sproatly Smith’s Watching You on the “Lost voices, found in song” episode of BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction, in amongst the show’s ongoing witching hour audio explorations. The show is archived here.

The Watchers features music and accompanying text on the tracks by Grey Frequency, Field Lines Cartographer, Widow’s Weeds ft Kitchen Cynics, Depatterning, A Year In The Country, Phonofiction, Pulselovers, Sproatly Smith, Vic Mars, The Heartwood Institute and Howlround.

It is inspired by ancient trees and their very stately, still form of time travel and the way in which they are observers over the passing of the years, centuries and even millennia, with some of these “mighty oaks” and their companions having lived through invasions of their island home undertaken by wooden ships, sword and arrow, the final days and passing of the old ways and the times of magic and witchcraft, the coming of the industrial revolution and the dawning of the digital era.

More details on the album can be found here.

 

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The Watchers – Released

Released today 7th June 2019.

The CDs are now sold out but the album is available to download at our Bandcamp page, Amazon, The Tidal Store, 7digital etc and can be streamed on Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer, YouTube etc.

Both CD editions are hand-finished and custom printed using archival giclée pigment ink by A Year In The Country.

Features music and accompanying text on the tracks by Grey Frequency, Field Lines Cartographer, Widow’s Weeds ft Kitchen Cynics, Depatterning, A Year In The Country, Phonofiction, Pulselovers, Sproatly Smith, Vic Mars, The Heartwood Institute and Howlround.

 

Amongst Britain’s trees there are thought to be over 3,000 ancient oaks – those which date back 400 years or more – and of those trees more than 115 are 800 to 1,000 years old or more. They are part of a tree population that also includes ash trees that have lived for hundreds of years and a yew that is estimated to be between 2000-3000 years old or possibly many thousands of years older and that some consider to be the oldest living thing in Europe.

These are living organisms which could be seen to be undertaking a very stately, still form of time travel, to be watchers and observers over the passing of the years, centuries and even millennia.

Some of them have lived through invasions of their island home undertaken by wooden ships, sword and arrow, the final days and passing of the old ways and the times of magic and witchcraft, the coming of the industrial revolution and the dawning of the digital era.

Throughout it all they have stood by and watched the endeavours of humans and the encroaching of their lands as the tales passed through traditional folklore evolved into the sometimes dizzying swathes of today’s cultural landscape, with these “mighty oaks” and their companions now coming to be living amongst the invisible hubbub of modern day wirelessly transmitted communications.

The numbers of these longstanding inhabitants of this once largely green and unpaved land have dwindled due to the march of progress but a few stalwartly continue their journeys through time. The Watchers reflects on those journeys and these ancient trees’ residing over growing layers of history.

 

Dawn Light Edition. Limited to 104 copies. £11.95.
Hand-finished white/black CD album in textured recycled fold out sleeve with fold-out insert and badge.


Top of CD and underneath of CD.

Further packaging details:
1) Custom printed using archival giclée pigment ink.
2) Includes 2.5 cm badge, secured with removable glue on string bound tag.
3) 1 x folded sheet of accompanying notes, hand numbered on back.

 

Nightfall Edition. Limited to 104 copies. £22.95
Hand-finished box-set contains: album on all black CD, 2 x sheets of accompanying notes, 2 x prints, 3 x stickers and 3 x badges.


Top of CD and underneath of CD.

Further packaging details:
1) Cover, notes and prints custom printed using archival giclée pigment ink.
2) Contained in a matchbox style sliding two-part rigid matt card box with cover print.
3) Fully black CD (black on top, black on playable side).
4) 2 x folded sheets of accompanying notes, printed on textured laid paper – one sheet hand numbered on back.
5) 2 x prints on textured fine art cotton rag paper.
6) 2 x 2.5 cm badge, 1 x 4.5 cm badge.
7) 1 x 5.6 cm sticker, 1 x 3.5 cm sticker, 1 x 12cm sticker.

 

Tracklisting:
1) Grey Frequency – In A Clearing
2) Field Lines Cartographer – A Thousand Autumns
3) Widow’s Weeds ft Kitchen Cynics – The Brave Old Oak
4) Depatterning – Ook/Dair
5) A Year In The Country – Radicle Ether
6) Phonofiction – Xylem Flow
7) Pulselovers – Circles Within Circles
8) Sproatly Smith – Watching You
9) Vic Mars – The Test Of Time
10) The Heartwood Institute – The Trees That Watch The Stones
11) Howlround – The Winter Dream Of Novel’s Oak

“A Year In The Country continue to release their sumptuous CDs… ‘A Thousand Autumns’ by Field Lines Cartographer celebrates an ancient oak, its cyclical shedding of thousands of leaves providing nutrients for next year’s leaves. The twinkling synth sounds like the falling leaves in the shafts of Autumnal sunlight… Sproatly Smith arrive with ‘Watching You’ another song from the point of view of these ancient trees, bird song, female voice, synth and acoustic guitar. Tracing the journey from acorn to mighty hollowed oak, a bucolic folk tune… Vic Mars is next with ‘The Test Of Time’ this song takes its inspiration from the great Eardisley oak tree, one of the oldest in Britain. A purely electronic piece of music which is both cathartic and gentle in nature, it’s stately and develops into a bucolic pastoral piece… This could be the label’s finest release yet.” Andrew Young, Terrascope

“The music portrays a gentle patience, from the field recordings sprinkled throughout the album to delicate chimes and folksong.” Richard Allen, A Closer Listen

“A Year in the Country’s latest uncanny release is The Watchers, a celebration of Britain’s trees that mixes electronica with eerie folk…” Jude Rogers, The Guardian

 

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Broken Folk, Is it Clearer? and Akiha Den Den – Audio Undercurrents Part 2: Wanderings 21/52

Part 2 of a round-up of some of the flipside and undercurrents of music released in the last year or so that has caught my ear and eye (visit Part 1 here).

First up is Seatman and Powell’s (featuring Belbury Poly) Broken Folk EP, which contains tracks from Keith Seatman’s last two albums and vocals by Douglas E. Powell, alongside a Belbury Poly remix of the title track.

It includes Boxes with Rhythms In, which features the following lyrics:

I’ve been messaging to send more oxygen… And all your sending is… Boxes with rhythms in.

The track is something of a favourite around these parts and previously at A Year In The Country I wrote the following about it:

This is a Space Oddity for contemporary times. In a very few words set to a buzzing, whooshing, flittering in and out synth background it conjures up a whole world and scenario of its own particular Major Tom… However, whereas Space Oddity seemed quite grounded in a recognisable reality, here, as with the album as a whole, the atmosphere it creates is something more otherly, one that while connected to our own reality also runs along its own separate path… And although this is quite experimental, far from mainstream music, boxes with rhythms in has an underlying pop sensibility, accessibility and an ear for a catchy refrain/chorus.

And is it just me or is there something about the inflection on the vocals on the EP, alongside the gently woozy synthesized instrumentation and a sense that the songs also hint at some other hidden cultural meaning that bring to mind here and there the later recordings of Coil such as The Ape of Naples album?

Vocalist Douglas E. Powell normally works in the folk music genre but the Broken Folk EP, although not overly retro, is reminiscent in part of futurist pop:

This five song 10 inch EP combines the plaintive English voice of Powell placed amongst Germanic analogue organ, synths and sequencers creating the type of dark Cold War soundscapes favoured by the Radiophonic Workshop to the Human League. Floydian incidental music for a late 70s post nuclear meltdown drama.” (Quoted from a review of the EP in Shindig! magazine.)

And there is also something of a melancholic air to the music on the EP, a sense of loss or yearning, which is referred to in accompanying text, alongside the low-key spectral undercurrents of the music:

“Melancholic and subtly psychedelic, these songs are redolent of supernatural short stories and winter afternoons out on English landscapes. They are dark rustic reveries, occupying the overlapping territory between haunted electronica and wyrd folk.

The EP was released by Keith Seatman’s KS Audio label in conjunction with Jim Jupp of Belbury Poly’s Belbury Music label – which he launched in 2018 and that he runs alongside Ghost Box Records. It is rather beautifully packaged, with cover art also by Jim Jupp that recalls the hardback cover of a pastorally inflected novel from maybe the 1940s or 1950s that you might discover quietly nestled away in a second-hand bookshop.

In terms of format it could be considered a 12″ single (or maybe somewhere between that, an EP and a mini-album). Out of the various formats I have bought music on over the years I think 12″ singles have been one of my favourites; more substantial seeming than a 7″, space for a few tracks, remixes and experimentation while avoiding that dreaded 8 or so track album spread over two vinyl discs syndrome that made some vinyl albums back when seem like, well, rather a faff to play and not really like an album.

12″ singles seem to have become fairly infrequently released nowadays, I suppose in part because they don’t actually cost anything less to manufacture than a full length album and so can’t be sold for as temptingly cheap prices as they once were (although I expect a fair few of the £2.99 or so 12″s I bought back in the day were in part released as loss-leader promotional items for forthcoming albums etc).

Visit the Broken Folk EP at Belbury Music here and the digital version at Keith Seatman’s Bandcamp page here.

Next up is Reet Maff’l’s Is it Clearer? on the album That’ll Be.

This is an at times rather unnerving piece of music which consists of ambient electronica accompanied by surreal spoken word vocals and brings to mind satirist Chris Morris’ Blue Jam album released in 2000.

The vocals initially and for quite an extended period appear to be a fairly straightforward recording of an optician carrying out an eye test.

However, after a while the standard “Is it clearer in one or two? How about now?” etc becomes “Are you happier in one or two? Are you happier now? Happier? Does the sadness seem sharper in one or two? One or two? Do you feel any sadder now? Okay, how about now? Any sadder? How about now?” and eventually just becomes a looping and quietly threatening “Now, now, now, now and now, okay and now, now, now and now”.

In the final few seconds the optician returns to a quite normal and perky “And now read the top line”, which breaks the spell somewhat in a way that I’m never sure if I should feel relieved about or not.

That’ll Be is released by Bloxham Tapes, a cassette and digital label which has a rather nice and eye-catching cohesive visual aesthetic:

Visit Is it Clearer? at Bloxham Tapes here.

And then we come to Akiha Den Den which:

“…collects electronic music created for an abandoned space: Akiha Den Den, the crumbling amusement park at the centre of a surreal radio drama.”

This is part of a multilayered, interwoven project that includes darkly ambient, Radiophonic and at times John Carpenter-esque ominous haunted electronica, dilapidated ghost train rides, the musings of a talking thought-mining cockroach and a radio ham picking up the transmissions from Akiha Den Den and has been described as:

“...a fever dream of radio waves and half heard transmissions…” (Quoted from text which accompanies the album.)

Akiha Den Den is what could be described an enigma wrapped in a riddle, one that you can only try and solve as you tumble down the darkening rabbit hole of the world it creates…

The project’s vinyl album, CD, booklet and 7″ have been released by Castles in Space, with artwork by Nick Taylor. I would say it’s a lovely package and set of artifacts, which it is, but lovely does not seem quite appropriate for the unsettled dreamscape of Akiha Den Den.

The music for the project was created by Simon James, who has previously worked as The Simonsound (with Matt Ford) and released the dark-pop and sometimes explorations-of-the-preternatural-in-suburbia Black Channels (with Becky Randall).

Visit Akiha Den Den at Castles in Space’s website here, at Simon James’ Bandcamp page here, more details on the project and the radio drama written and directed by Neil Cargill at the Akiha Den Den site here and the Akiha Den Den theme here.

 

Part 1 of this post focused on releases by Howlround, Woodford Halse, Rowan : Morrison and Grey Frequency. It can be visited here.

 

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The Watchers – Preorder

Preorder today 14th May 2019. Released 7th June 2019.

The CDs are now sold out but the album is available to download at our Bandcamp page, Amazon, The Tidal Store, 7digital etc and can be streamed on Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer, YouTube etc.

Both CD editions are hand-finished and custom printed using archival giclée pigment ink by A Year In The Country.

Amongst Britain’s trees there are thought to be over 3,000 ancient oaks – those which date back 400 years or more – and of those trees more than 115 are 800 to 1,000 years old or more. They are part of a tree population that also includes ash trees that have lived for hundreds of years and a yew that is estimated to be between 2000-3000 years old or possibly many thousands of years older and that some consider to be the oldest living thing in Europe.

These are living organisms which could be seen to be undertaking a very stately, still form of time travel, to be watchers and observers over the passing of the years, centuries and even millennia.

Some of them have lived through invasions of their island home undertaken by wooden ships, sword and arrow, the final days and passing of the old ways and the times of magic and witchcraft, the coming of the industrial revolution and the dawning of the digital era.

Throughout it all they have stood by and watched the endeavours of humans and the encroaching of their lands as the tales passed through traditional folklore evolved into the sometimes dizzying swathes of today’s cultural landscape, with these “mighty oaks” and their companions now coming to be living amongst the invisible hubbub of modern day wirelessly transmitted communications.

The numbers of these longstanding inhabitants of this once largely green and unpaved land have dwindled due to the march of progress but a few stalwartly continue their journeys through time. The Watchers reflects on those journeys and these ancient trees’ residing over growing layers of history.

Features music and accompanying text on the tracks by Grey Frequency, Field Lines Cartographer, Widow’s Weeds ft Kitchen Cynics, Depatterning, A Year In The Country, Phonofiction, Pulselovers, Sproatly Smith, Vic Mars, The Heartwood Institute and Howlround.

 

Dawn Light Edition. Limited to 104 copies. £11.95.
Hand-finished white/black CD album in textured recycled fold out sleeve with fold-out insert and badge.



Top of CD and underneath of CD.

Further packaging details:
1) Custom printed using archival giclée pigment ink.
2) Includes 2.5 cm badge, secured with removable glue on string bound tag.
3) 1 x folded sheet of accompanying notes, hand numbered on back.

 

Nightfall Edition. Limited to 104 copies. £22.95
Hand-finished box-set contains: album on all black CD, 2 x sheets of accompanying notes, 2 x prints, 3 x stickers and 3 x badges.



Top of CD and underneath of CD.

Further packaging details:
1) Cover, notes and prints custom printed using archival giclée pigment ink.
2) Contained in a matchbox style sliding two-part rigid matt card box with cover print.
3) Fully black CD (black on top, black on playable side).
4) 2 x folded sheets of accompanying notes, printed on textured laid paper – one sheet hand numbered on back.
5) 2 x prints on textured fine art cotton rag paper.
6) 2 x 2.5 cm badge, 1 x 4.5 cm badge.
7) 1 x 5.6 cm sticker, 1 x 3.5 cm sticker, 1 x 12cm sticker.

 

Tracklisting:

1) Grey Frequency – In A Clearing
2) Field Lines Cartographer – A Thousand Autumns
3) Widow’s Weeds ft Kitchen Cynics – The Brave Old Oak
4) Depatterning – Ook/Dair
5) A Year In The Country – Radicle Ether
6) Phonofiction – Xylem Flow
7) Pulselovers – Circles Within Circles
8) Sproatly Smith – Watching You
9) Vic Mars – The Test Of Time
10) The Heartwood Institute – The Trees That Watch The Stones
11) Howlround – The Winter Dream Of Novel’s Oak

 

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The Quietened Mechanisms – Audio Visual Archive 19/52

Print artwork from The Quietened Mechanisms album.

The album is an exploration of abandoned and derelict industry, infrastructure, technology and equipment that once upon a time helped to create, connect and sustain society.

It wanders amongst deserted factories, discarded machinery, closed mines, mills and kilns and their echoes and remains; taking a moment or two to reflect on these once busy, functioning centres of activity and the sometimes sheer scale or amount of effort and human endeavour that was required to create and operate such structures and machines, many of which are now just left to fade away.

 

Features music and accompanying text on the tracks by Howlround, Grey Frequency, Listening Center, Sproatly Smith, Embertides, Keith Seatman, Time Attendant, A Year In The Country, Dom Cooper, Field Lines Cartographer, Vic Mars, Depatterning, Pulselovers, Quaker’s Stang, The Heartwood Institute and Spaceship.

 

“A Year In The Country and a selection of their regular musical contributors here turn their attention to abandoned factories and technology, spending an enraptured hour or so wandering among their ghosts… each track reflects a specific location, combining field recordings, musique concrete and spooked electronica into a strangely transporting whole.” Ben Graham, Shindig! magazine, issue 84

 

Elsewhere at A Year In The Country:

 

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The Quietened Village – Writing, Broadcasts and Traces of Ghosts

A selection of broadcasts, reviews etc of The Quietened Village reissue…

Pulselovers “The Coast In Flux” and Polypores “Playground Ritual” were included in the “You Will Improve Or Disappear” and “Anything, Anyone” episodes of Sunrise Ocean Bender, alongside their other eclectic and intriguing wanderings.

(As an aside the first of those episodes takes its title from Grey Frequency’s Ufology album, which I have written about previously. If “lo-fi drones, dark ambient textures, and cassette-looped field recordings” and an album themed around 20th century UFO folklore pique your interest then the album can be found here.)

The Heartwood Institute’s “Armboth & Wythburn” was on the playlist for episode 400 of Pull The Plug where it can be found in amongst the likes of tracks by Art Of The Memory Palace and sometimes fellow A Year In The Country travellers Listening Centre.

You, the Night & the Music played The Soulless Party’s “Damnatorum”, Cosmic Neighbourhood’s “Bunk Beds”, A Year In The Country’s “47 Days And Fathoms Deep” and The Rowan Amber Mill’s “Separations” on two separate shows originally broadcast on Sine FM, which can be visited here and here.

(As a further aside the gent who hosts that show also works as Pulselovers and has created the Woodford Halse released Undululating Waters compilations which I have also mentioned at A Year In The Country before and which are well worth a visit.)

Cosmic Neighbourhood’s “Bunk Beds” and Sproatly Smith’s “Lost Villages Of Holderness” were included in two episodes of the flipside of folk and spectral hauntological selections of The Unquiet Meadow. Visit the playlists for those here and here and the show’s page at Asheville FM here.

Verity Sharp played A Year In The Country’s “47 Days And Fathoms Deep” on BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction – a show which is rather aptly described as involving “Journeys in music, ancient to future. The home for adventurous listeners.”

Visit the episode of the show here.

Cosmic Neighbourhood’s “Bunk Beds” and Sproatly Smith’s “The Lost Villages Of Holderness” were also played on episode 84 of Mind De-Coder:

“Sproatly Smith’s contribution addresses the strange lands lying east of Hull to the North Sea known as Holderness. This area has the fastest eroding coastline in Europe, losing 2 metres every year. The soft cliffs had supported villages and communities that have been swallowed by the tides. Elegiac, but never less than lovely, the track inhabits the slightly mournful quality of the shipping forecast alongside the wyrdfolk otherlysness of all their music.”

Visit the episode’s blog page here and its Mixcloud here, where you are likely to find “the sort of music that has slipped away into the cracks between reality”. Sounds good to me.

Dave Thompson reviewed the album at his Spincycle column, which can be found at Goldmine magazine’s site:

“The collection conjures its own memories – a landlocked version of Gavin Bryars’ The Sinking of the Titanic, perhaps.  Each track unfolds like a snatch of soundtrack to a documentary that ought to be made; each one conveys a sense of the desolation it honors, whether at the moment of its destruction, or at some point on either side.  Even those tracks that reach more for the feel of the theme, as opposed to the mood of a specific place, cannot help but touch the walls, or trace the ghosts, of these forgotten places.  And remind us that maybe they’re not as quiet as people think.”

The Quietened Village is a study of and reflection on lost, disappeared and once were villages and hamlets that have wandered off the maps or that have become shells of their former lives and times.

The album features music and accompanying text on the tracks by The Straw Bear Band, Field Lines Cartographer, The Heartwood Institute, Howlround, The Rowan Amber Mill, Polypores, Pulselovers, The Soulless Party, Time Attendant, A Year In The Country, Sproatly Smith and Cosmic Neighbourhood.

More details on it can be found here.

 

As always a tip of the hat and thanks to all concerned.

 

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Audio Albion – Audio Visual Archive 17/52

Features work by Bare Bones, David Colohan, Grey Frequency, Field Lines Cartographer, Howlround, A Year In The Country, Keith Seatman, Magpahi, Sproatly Smith, Widow’s Weeds, Time Attendant, Spaceship, Pulselovers, The Heartwood Institute and Vic Mars.

Audio Albion is a music and field recording map of Britain, which focuses on rural and edgeland areas.

Each track contains field recordings from locations throughout the land and is accompanied by notes on the recordings by the contributors.

The tracks record the sounds found and heard when wandering down pathways, over fields, through marshes, alongside rivers, down into caves and caverns, climbing hills, along coastlands, through remote mountain forestland, amongst the faded signs of industry and infrastructure and its discarded debris.

Intertwined with the literal recording of locations, the album explores the history, myths and beliefs of the places, their atmospheres and undercurrents, personal and cultural connections – the layered stories that lie amongst, alongside and beneath the earth, plants and wildlife.

(Quoted from text which accompanies the album.)

“…’music and field recording map of Britain’ featuring 15 tracks that incorporate found sounds from rural walks, semi-industrial ‘edgeland’ and liminal spaces between this world and the next… The compositions often suggest unseen images and unrevealed narrative…” Ben Graham in Shindig! magazine, issue 79

 

Elsewhere at A Year In The Country:

 

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The Watchers – Album Preorder and Release Dates

Preorder 14th May 2019. Released 7th June 2019.

Amongst Britain’s trees there are thought to be over 3,000 ancient oaks – those which date back 400 years or more – and of those trees more than 115 are 800 to 1,000 years old or more. They are part of a tree population that also includes ash trees that have lived for hundreds of years and a yew that is estimated to be between 2000-3000 years old or possibly many thousands of years older and that some consider to be the oldest living thing in Europe.

These are living organisms which could be seen to be undertaking a very stately, still form of time travel, to be watchers and observers over the passing of the years, centuries and even millennia.

Some of them have lived through invasions of their island home undertaken by wooden ships, sword and arrow, the final days and passing of the old ways and the times of magic and witchcraft, the coming of the industrial revolution and the dawning of the digital era.

Throughout it all they have stood by and watched the endeavours of humans and the encroaching of their lands as the tales passed through traditional folklore evolved into the sometimes dizzying swathes of today’s cultural landscape, with these “mighty oaks” and their companions now coming to be living amongst the invisible hubbub of modern day wirelessly transmitted communications.

The numbers of these longstanding inhabitants of this once largely green and unpaved land have dwindled due to the march of progress but a few stalwartly continue their journeys through time. The Watchers reflects on those journeys and these ancient trees’ residing over growing layers of history.

 

Features music and accompanying text on the tracks by:
Grey Frequency
Field Lines Cartographer
Widow’s Weeds ft Kitchen Cynics (The Hare And The Moon)
Depatterning
A Year In The Country
Phonofiction (Dom Cooper / The Straw Bear Band / David Hood)
Pulselovers
Sproatly Smith
Vic Mars
The Heartwood Institute
Howlround

 

The CDs are now sold out but the album is available to download at our Bandcamp page, Amazon, The Tidal Store, 7digital etc and can be streamed on Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer, YouTube etc.

 

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The Quietened Cosmologists – Audio Visual Archive 15/52

The Quietened Cosmologists is a reflection on space exploration projects that have been abandoned and/or that were never realised, of connected lost or imagined futures and dreams, the intrigue and sometimes melancholia of related derelict sites and technological remnants that lie scattered and forgotten.

It takes as its initial starting points the shape of the future’s past via the discarded British space program of the 1950s to 1970s; the sometimes statuesque and startling derelict artifacts and infrastructure from the Soviet Union’s once far reaching space projects; the way in which manned spaceflight beyond Earth’s orbit/to the moon and the associated sense of a coming space age came to be largely put to one side after the 1969 to 1972 US Apollo flights.

(Quoted from text which accompanies the album.)

Includes work by Field Lines Cartographer, Pulselovers, Magpahi, Howlround, Vic Mars, Unit One, A Year In The Country, Keith Seatman, Grey Frequency, Time Attendant, Listening Center, Polypores and David Colohan.

“The ruins of Britain’s own contribution to the Space Race—especially those like the abandoned launch-pad at High Down on the Isle of Wight—are all the more poignant for the gulf between their past ambition and present state of decay.” John Coulthart writing about the album and related themes at his feuilletion site.

 

Elsewhere at A Year In The Country:

 

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From The Furthest Signals: Audio Visual Archive 13/52

From The Furthest Signals takes as its initial reference points films, television and radio programs that have been in part or completely lost or wiped during a period in history before archiving and replication of such work had gained today’s technological and practical ease.

Curiously, such television and radio broadcasts may not be fully lost to the wider universe as they can travel or leak out into space and so may actually still exist far from their original points of transmission and places of creation, possibly in degraded, fractured form and/or mixed amongst other stellar noises and signals.

The explorations of From The Furthest Signals are soundtracks imagined and filtered through the white noise of space and time; reflections on those lost tales and the way they can become reimagined via hazy memories and history, of the myths that begin to surround such discarded, lost to view or vanished cultural artefacts.

(Quoted from the text which accompanies the album.)

Includes work by Circle/Temple, David Colohan, Sharron Kraus, A Year In The Country, Time Attendant, Depatterning, Field Lines Cartographer, Grey Frequency, Keith Seatman, Polypores, The Hare And The Moon, Pulselovers and Listening Center.

Above is the review of the album in Electronic Sound magazine.

 

Elsewhere at A Year In The Country:

 

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The Restless Field: Audio Visual Archive 12/52

The Restless Field is a study of the land as a place of conflict and protest as well as beauty and escape; an exploration and acknowledgment of the history and possibility of protest, resistance and struggle in the landscape/rural areas, in contrast with sometimes more often referred to urban events.

It takes inspiration from flashpoints in history while also interweaving personal and societal myth, memory, the lost and hidden tales of the land.

References and starting points include: The British Miners Strike of 1984 and the Battle Of Orgreave. Gerrard Winstanley & the Diggers/True Levellers in the 17th century. The first battle of the English Civil War in 1642. The burying of The Rotherwas Ribbon. The Mass Tresspass of Kinder Scout in 1932. Graveney Marsh/the last battle fought on English soil. The Congested Districts Board/the 19th century land war in Ireland. The Battle Of The Beanfield in 1985.

Includes work by Field Lines Cartographer, Vic Mars, Bare Bones, Assembled Minds, Grey Frequency, Endurance, Listening Center, Pulselovers, Sproatly Smith, Polypores, Depatterning, Time Attendant, A Year In The Country and David Colohan.

 

“… another exquisitely packaged affair… murky and ominous as befits the guiding thematic: places that are spectrally imprinted with past conflicts and struggles.” (Simon Reynolds writing at blissblog)

 

Elsewhere at A Year In The Country:

  1. Artifact Report #18/52a: The Restless Field
  2. Artifact Report #14/52a: The Restless Field at Simon Reynold’s blissblog and the sunday experience
  3. Artifact Report #16/52a: The Restless Field at Flatland Frequencies, Syndae and whisperandhollerin
  4. Artifact Report #17/52a: The Restless Field at Sunrise Ocean Bender and John Coulthart’s Feuilleton
  5. Artifact Report #19/52a: The Restless Field Transmissions and Reviews
  6. Artifact Reports #36/52a: The Restless Field: A Return Visit – Further Reviews and Transmissions

 

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The Quietened Bunker: Audio Visual Archive 9/52

“The Quietened Bunker is an exploration of the abandoned and/or decommissioned Cold War installations which lie under the land and that would have acted as selectively populated refuges/control centres if the button was ever pushed; a study and reflection on these chimeric bulwarks and the faded but still present memory of associated Cold War dread, of which they are stalwart, mouldering symbols.” (Quoted from text which accompanied the album.)

It includes work by Keith Seatman, Grey Frequency, A Year In The Country, Panabrite, Polypores, Listening Center, Time Attendant, Unknown Heretic and David Colohan

“…the drifting drones of ‘Drakelow Tunnels’ is music for ghosts. Created by Grey Frequency the track is stark and beautiful, you can almost see the figures that endlessly walk the abandoned corridors, lost souls frozen in time.” (Quoted from a review at Terrascope.)

 

Elsewhere at A Year In The Country:

  1. The Quietened Bunker – Night and Dawn editions released
  2. Week #30/52: The Quietened Bunker Archives #1; A Lovely Day Out / Not Your Average Des Res
  3. Week #31/52: The Quietened Bunker Archives #2; Songs For The Bunker – The Once Was Ascendance Of Apocalyptic Pop
  4. Week #32/52: Bunker Archives #3: Wargames, Hollywood phantoms and phantasms and the only winning move is not to play
  5. Week #33/52: Bunker Archives #4; Paul Virilio’s Bunker Archaeology and accidental utilitarian art
  6. Audiological Transmission #29/​​​​52​​: The Quietened Bunker – Lower Level Clock Room
  7. Audiological Transmission #30​/​​​​​52​​: The Quietened Bunker – Drakelow Tunnels
  8. Audiological Transmission #31/​​​​52​​: The Quietened Bunker – Aggregates II
  9. Audiological Transmission #32/​​​​​52​​: The Quietened Bunker – Crafty Mechanics
  10. Audiological Transmission #33​/​​​​​​52​​: The Quietened Bunker – Waiting For The Blazing Skies
  11. Audiological Transmission #50​/​52: The Quietened Bunker – Comms: Seen Through The Grey / Revisitation #4a
  12. The Quietened Bunker – A Gathering Of Transmissions
  13. The Quietened Bunker – A Timely Gathering Of Transmissions
  14. The Quietened Bunker, Waiting for the End of the World, Subterranea Britannica, Bunker Archaeology and The Delaware Road – Ghosts, Havens and Curious Repurposings Beneath our Feet: Chapter 17 Book Images

 

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The Debatable Lands, Undulating Waters, In The Sunshine We Rode The Horses and Ufology – Audio Undercurrents Part 1: Wanderings 8/52

Something of a round-up of some of the flipside and undercurrents of music released in the last year or so that has caught my ear and eye…

First up is The Debatable Lands, the sixth studio album from tape-wranglers Howlround… well, strictly speaking I suppose it was recorded in a form of improvised home studio:

“In December 2017, Howlround (Robin the Fog) was invited to perform at “The Winter Solstice Soundscapes” event for the recently opened record store “Vinyl Café” in his home town of Carlisle, Cumbria. Inspired by the reception to his first ever performance in the great border city, he covered his parent’s dining room table with the same equipment, stretched loops of tape around his mum’s seasonal candlesticks when she wasn’t looking… and this LP is the result. The only equipment used on the album is two 1/4” reel-to-reel tape machines and one microphone. The sounds created are entirely at the discretion of the machines (much of them derived from ‘closed-input’ recordings) and all tracks were produced in a single take. There are no edits, no overdubs and no additional effects.”

The method of recording brings to mind tales of Delia Derbyshire running tape loops round the corridors of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop after most people had gone home, which seems a rather appropriate line of connection considering that Howlround’s first album The Ghosts of Bush was in part a tribute to Bush House, the now closed previous home for the BBC’s World Service and also the way in which Howlround’s recording techniques could be considered part of a lineage that connects back to the experiments of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.

In comparison with some earlier work The Debatable Lands features quite a heavy take on the Howlround sound, which at times brings to mind a form of accidental hazy pulsating and almost gabba-like techno (or “tapeloop techno” to use a phrase from the Howlround site). That sense of gabba-like tapeloop techno is particularly present on the track Black Path which with its crunching distorted industrial-esque beats could well have been found on an unmarked white label 12″ bought from the “Fringe & Experimental” section of an independent dance music record shop in London’s Soho a decade or two ago and which has mysteriously resurfaced via Howlround’s tape wrangling and channeling of recordings’ lost and hidden echoes on this album.

Details on the album can be found at Howlround’s site and at the Touch Shop.

Next up are the compilations Undulating Waters 1 and 2, released by Woodford Halse, which is a project created by Mat Handley who broadcasts the radio show You, the Night & the Music and releases music as Pulselovers.

The two cassette and digital album releases could be considered a physical embodiment of the eclectic selections in the radio show and includes the flipside, undercurrents and sometimes hauntologically spectral sides of electronic, psychedelic, experimental and folk music.

The albums are beautifully packaged and there is a sense of them being a particular labour of love; the slip cases are individually screen printed, die cut and indented, while the inner j-card is also indented and has a die cut “window” through which you can see the included collector’s card.

Pulselovers have had a number of tracks on the A Year In The Country music releases and there is a further crossover with the Undulating Waters albums as they also feature various other contributors to the AYITC albums, including the likes of Spaceship, The Heartwood Institute, Polypores, Grey Frequency, Time Attendant and Field Lines Cartographer. These are joined by amongst others Revbjelde, Pictogram, House of Daggers, Floodlights, 62 Miles From Space, Boll Foreman, Panamint Manse and Midwich Youth Club, with design by Nick Taylor of Spectral Studio.

The collector’s cards also feature text by Paul Bareham, which are short pieces of intriguing and enigmatic fiction that bring to mind the imaginary landscapes of Hookland and Rob Young’s swirling dreamscape fictional writing which was included in Belbury Poly’s album The Belbury Tales.

Trading under the name Woodford Halse, this new adventure into sound perfectly compliments the shows musical ethic / remit in so much as casting a deserving searchlight upon the secretive crooks and crannies of the expansive labyrinth of so sounds stationed on the outer edges of the various electronic / kosmische / psychedelic spectrums. As to the sounds, well pretty much keeping in with the retro / futuro vibe so in common with the likes of ghost box, café kaput, a year in the country, castles in space and of course, polytechnic youth, to name but a few. One for late night attention methinks, ‘Undulating Waters I’ features twelve tracks gathered here for your discerning listening ear, a few names familiar a few not so, guaranteed a little something for all…” (Quoted from a review by Mark Barton, writing at The Sunday Experience).

If you should appreciate the releases by the likes of Ghost Box Records, Castles In Space, Polytechnic Youth etc which are mentioned in the above text by Mark Barton then I expect you will find much to enjoy in these Woodford Halse releases. Or just if you enjoy wandering through the undercurrents and “crooks and crannies” of contemporary music while also appreciating creative album packaging and design as you explore.

Visit Undulating Waters 1 and 2 at the Woodford Halse Bandcamp page here. Visit the You, the Night & the Music radio show’s archive here, Pulselovers Bandcamp page here and The Sunday Experience reviews of the albums here and here.

Then we have Rowan : Morrison’s album In The Sunshine We Rode The Horses.

This is an album of rather lovely what could loosely be called acid or psych folk. It is not purely a retro retreading but brings to mind in part a sense of being a recently unearthed privately pressed folk album from some undefined point possibly in the very late 1960s or during the 1970s, tracks from which might be featured on the compilation album Early Morning Hush: Notes From the Folk Underground 1969-76, which collected such things or filed alongside the likes of the privately pressed 1970s folk albums Shide & Acorn’s Under The Tree and Oberon’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream:

…this is a beautifully packaged yet somehow understated album destined, it seems, for ‘lost classic’ status, to be rediscovered and cherished by generations of pilgrims on the old straight track. Somehow we think they would approve.” (Quoted from a review of In The Sunshine We Rode The Horses at Terrascope).

Released by Miller Sounds the album is a themed concept album, the narrative of which:

“…takes a snapshot of an imagined history of the land. It explores the conflict taking place at the same area (The Ridgeway) through time periods between the land and man with their developing technologies. These events take place throughout time, from pre-history through to the near-future. In a very 1970s ‘Play for Today’ sort of way, they start to bleed into each other as over time, the earth begins to enter a period of hibernation to heal itself from the destruction wrought upon it.” (Quoted from the album’s accompanying notes.)

The mention of A Play For Today in the album’s notes provides a line of connection with The Book of the Lost that was co-created by Rowan, working as Rowan Amber Mill with Emily Jones, which is also a themed concept album, taking as its inspiration an imagined set of lost folk horror movies and which was an early reference point for A Year In The Country’s own wanderings.

Visit Rowan : Morrison hereThe Rowan Amber Mill hereThe Book of the Lost hereMiller Sounds here and the Terrascope review here.

And finally there is Grey Frequency’s fourth full length album release Ufology.

It is described as “an audio exploration of British UFO sightings from the second half of the twentieth century” and each piece “focuses on a specific encounter from UFO folklore and reinterprets it as an excursion in unsettling sound and atmosphere”.

The album’s focusing on UFO encounters from previous decades, the use of the phrase “UFO folklore” and the images of period suburbia and UFO sightings on vintage film stock/slide mounts that accompany Ufology seem to connect it with a hazy hauntological long-ago and now semi-forgotten sense of previous decade’s interest in such phenomena.

In part the album could be seen to connect with a heightened interest in unexplained, super and preternatural phenomena during the 1970s in sections of society and accompanying coverage in the mainstream media, press, book publishing etc. This is a period Ufology at times draws from as one track mentions 1977 in its title, while The Dechmont Woods Encounter appears to refer to a UFO incident in 1979, although the album also takes its inspiration from events ranging from the 1950s until at least the 1980s.

The album can serve as something of an intriguing semi-obscured signposting to events which have become part of British UFO folklore, as searching for events that inspired it such as the track “You Will Improve Or Disappear” leads to the likes of a “British Roswell” where a small metal disc was discovered on Silpho Moor in 1957 and which some thought was of extra-terrestrial origin. It was alleged to have contained copper sheets with hieroglyphic markings, part of which was translated as meaning “You Will Improve Or Disappear” – hence  I assume the track title on the Ufology album.

Those who believed in its extra-terrestrial origins included Air Chief Marshal Lord Dowding, who apparently had an on ongoing belief that the object was extra-terrestrial and said he had personally examined it in 1959 and found it to be a “miniature flying saucer”.

Thought by the UFO community to have been lost or deliberately scrapped, in 2018 sections of the disc were found to have been stored at the British Museum.

The tracks on Ufology are built from “lo-fi drones, dark ambient textures, and cassette-looped field recordings” and as with much of Grey Frequency’s work they have both an experimental and accessible quality.

I was particularly taken by The Dechmont Woods Encounter, in which undefined mechanical creakings and vaguely Forbidden Planet-esque noises link into subtly ominous pulsing sounds which seem to imply the approach of extra-terrestrial abductors, which are said by the man who reported it to have been part of the UFO event that inspired the track, before it segues into an “after the event” almost restful or drifting end section.

Available on cassette and digitally, Grey Frequency’s Ufology can be found at their Bandcamp page here.

 

As something of a postscript, the above gathering of albums reminds me of something Kim Harten wrote at Bliss Aquamarine when reviewing the A Year In The Country released album The Corn Mother, of which she said:

“(On the album) the apparently disparate genres of folk music and experimental electronica sit perfectly well together as different expressions of the same basic idea.”

 

Further “Audio Undercurrents” will be explored in in Part 2 of this post…

 

Elsewhere at A Year In The Country:

  1. Day #142/365: Fog Signals/Ghost signals from lost transmission centres
  2. The Seasons, Jonny Trunk, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and Howlround – A Yearning for Library Music, Experiments in Educational Music and Tape Loop Tributes: Chapter 38 Book Images
  3. Day #167/365: Wandering back through the darkening fields and flickerings to imaginary soundtracks…
  4. Tales from the Black Meadow, The Book of the Lost and The Equestrian Vortex – The Imagined Spaces of Imaginary Soundtracks: Chapter 9 Book Images
  5. Day #192/365: When Do We Dream? Cold Geometries and Grey Frequencies
  6. Cuckoos in the Same Nest – Hauntological and Otherly Folk Confluences and Intertwinings: Chapter 4 Book Images

 

Index: Year 5

Click the links below to peruse the indexes for the different years of A Year In The Country:

All Years     –      Year 1     –      Year 2      –      Year 3      –     Year 4      –      Year 5      –     Year 6      –     Year 7      –     Year 8

 

The Changes / The Disruption – Notes on a Flipside of the Pastoral Conversation – Part 1: Wanderings 1/52 (And the Start of a New Yearly Cycle)
Grey Frequency’s Immersion: Audio Visual Archive 1/52
The Changes / The Disruption – Notes on a Flipside of the Pastoral Conversation – Part 2: Wanderings 2/52
Hand of Stabs – Black-Veined White: Audio Visual Archive 2/52
Robert Macfarlane, Benjamin Myers, The Eeriness of the English Countryside and Unravelling of Dizzying Mazes: Wanderings 3/52
Michael Tanner’s Nine of Swords: Audio Visual Archive 3/52
When Haro Met Sally, John Hughes, Stranger Things, Twins of Evil, Hauntology and Dark Seed – Parallel World Reimaginings and Phantasms: Wanderings 4/52
The Quietened Village – Preorder and Release Dates
She Rocola’s Burn The Witch / Molly Leigh Of The Mother Town: Audio Visual Archive 4/52
Night of the Comet Part 1 – Shopping and Respect in “Empty Cities” at the End of the World: Wanderings 5/52
Howlround – Torridon Gate: Audio Visual Archive 5/52
Luciana Haill’s Apparitions – A Modern-Day Conjuring of Phantasms and Peering Down the Corridors of Time: Wanderings 6/52
Twalif X – Racker&Orphan: Audio Visual Archive 6/52
Night of the Comet Part 2 – Post-Apocalyptic Positivity in “Empty Cities” at the End of the World: Wanderings 7/52
The Quietened Village – Preorder
A Year In The Country – Airwaves: Songs From The Sentinels: Audio Visual Archive 7/52
The Debatable Lands, Undulating Waters, In The Sunshine We Rode The Horses and Ufology – Audio Undercurrents Part 1: Wanderings 8/52
Fractures: Audio Visual Archive 8/52
The Delaware Road, Mo’Wax, UNKLE, DJ Shadow, Tricky, Portishead, Massive Attack, Boards of Canada, Moon Wiring Club, DJ Food, Belbury Poly, The Memory Band, Grantby, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and Andrea Parker – Universe Creation and Spectral Lines in the Cultural Landscape: Wanderings 9/52
The Quietened Bunker: Audio Visual Archive 9/52
John Carpenter’s Christine Part 1 – Anthropomorphisation, Magical Realism and Rock’n’Roll Dream Lovers: Wanderings 10/52
A Year In The Country – Spectral Fields – Wyrd Kalendar Mix 3 and the “What is hauntology? And why is it all around us?” BBC Archive Film
No More Unto the Dance: Audio Visual Archive 10/52
The Quietened Village – Released
John Carpenter’s Christine Part 2 – Autonomous Zones, Night Time Edgelands and the Restoration of the Natural Order: Wanderings 11/52
The Forest / The Wald: Audio Visual Archive 11/52
Hot Fuzz aka Rural Weapon Part 1 – Flash and Spectacle Amongst the Bucolia: Wanderings 12/52
The Restless Field: Audio Visual Archive 12/52
Hot Fuzz aka Rural Weapon Part 2 – The Village Gone Rogue: Wanderings 13/52
From The Furthest Signals: Audio Visual Archive 13/52
Reflections on Brutalism Part 1 – This Brutal World and a Study of The Shape of the Futures Past: Wanderings 14/52
Undercurrents – Audio Visual Archive 14/52
Reflections on Brutalism Part 2 – This Brutal World, Industrial Inspirations for Blade Runner, Memories of the Space Age and the Future Takes a Tumble: Wanderings 15/52
The Quietened Cosmologists – Audio Visual Archive 15/52
Reflections on Brutalism Part 3 – J. G. Ballard and Ben Wheatley’s High-Rise and All Mod Con Dystopias: Wanderings 16/52
All The Merry Year Round – Audio Visual Archive 16/52
Reflections on Brutalism Part 4 – A Return to the Experimentations and Aesthetics of This Brutal World and Paul Virilio’s Bunker Archaeology: Wanderings 17/52
The Watchers – Album Preorder and Release Dates
Audio Albion – Audio Visual Archive 17/52
Reflections on Brutalism Part 5 – A Curious Collector’s Piece and a Return to Acts of Enclosure: Wanderings 18/52
The Shildam Hall Tapes – Audio Visual Archive 18/52
Michael Radford’s 1984 Part 1 – The Privations of an Alternative Past, Present and Future, V for Vendetta and the Last Inch: Wanderings 19/52
The Quietened Village – Writing, Broadcasts and Traces of Ghosts
The Quietened Mechanisms – Audio Visual Archive 19/52
Michael Radford’s 1984 Part 2 – Pop Music Controversies and Pastoral Escape/Non-Escape: Wanderings 20/52
The Watchers – Preorder
The Corn Mother – Audio Visual Archive 20/52
Broken Folk, Is it Clearer? and Akiha Den Den – Audio Undercurrents Part 2: Wanderings 21/52
Grey Frequency – Immersion: Audio Visual Archive 21/52
A Midsummer Night’s Happening, Weirdshire and The Delaware Road: Ritual & Resistance – A Spectral Summer is a-Coming in: Wanderings 22/52
Hand of Stabs – Black-Veined White: Audio Visual Archive 22/52
The Fountain in the Forest – Further Explorations of Hidden History, Timeslip, the Ending of Arcadian Idylls and Pulp Fiction Subversion: Wanderings 23/52
No More Unto The Dance: Audio Visual Archive 23/52
The Watchers – Released
Stand By Me – The Undercurrents of an Unsupervised Journey Away from the White Picket Fences: Wanderings 24/52
Michael Tanner – Nine of Swords: Audio Visual Archive 24/52
Brick High-Rise – A Rather Curious Lego Simulacra of Ballardian Transgression: Wanderings 25/52
She Rocola – Burn The Witch / Molly Leigh Of The Mother Town: Audio Visual Archive 25/52
Looker and the Imagined Omnipotence of the 1980s Computer – Part 1: Wanderings 26/52
Howlround – Torridon Gate: Audio Visual Archive 26/52
The Watchers – Reviews, Broadcasts and Journeys amongst The Haunted Generation, The Unquiet Meadow, the Witching Hour and Other Flipside Furrows
Electric Dreams and the Imagined Omnipotence of the 1980s Computer – Part 2: Wanderings 27/52
Echoes And Reverberations – Preorder and Release Dates
Racker & Orphan – Twalif X: Audio Visual Archive 27/52
The Folk Horror Revival: Urban Wyrd Books – Exploring Hidden Narratives from Between the Forgotten Cracks: Wanderings 28/52
A Year In The Country – Airwaves: Songs From The Sentinels: Audio Visual Archive 28/52
Wolfen – Urban Decay, Sidestepping Genre Expectations, Lost Visions and a Brief Visit to The Keep’s Dreamscape: Wanderings 29/52
Fractures: Audio Visual Archive 29/52
A Very Peculiar Practice and Battles with the Old Guard: Wanderings 30/52
Echoes And Reverberations – Preorder
The Quietened Bunker: Audio Visual Archive 30/52
Day of the Triffids Part 1 – The Farmers Becoming the Hunted: Wanderings 31/52
The Forest / The Wald: Audio Visual Archive 31/52
Day of the Triffids Part 2 – Post-Apocalyptic Debate / Optimism: Wanderings 32/52
The Marks Upon The Land: Audio Visual Archive 32/52
The Prisoner Part 1 – A Visit to a Real Life High-Definition Dream: Wanderings 33/52
The Restless Field: Audio Visual Archive 33/52
Echoes And Reverberations – Released
The Prisoner Part 2 – Ongoing Battles and a Circle of Escape: Wanderings 34/52
From The Furthest Signals: Audio Visual Archive 34/52
The Quiet Earth – Loneliness and Redemption in the Empty City Film: Wanderings 35/52
The A Year in the Country: Straying from the Pathways Book – Release Date 8th October 2019
Undercurrents: Audio Visual Archive 35/52
The Folklore on Screen, Folk Horror in the 21st Century, The Geographies of Folk Horror and Contemporary Folk Horror in Film and Media Conferences – A Return to Investigations of the Spectral Landscape: Wanderings 36/52
The Quietened Cosmologists: Audio Visual Archive 36/52
Andrew Niccol’s Gattaca, In Time and Anon – Striving for the Stars in a Brutalist Retro Future and Other Near Future Tales: Wanderings 37/52
All The Merry Year Round: Audio Visual Archive 37/52
The Dangers of Straying from the Path and Tales of Lycanthropy Part 1 – The Cautionary Warnings of Little Red Riding Hood and The Company of Wolves: Wanderings 38/52
Audio Albion: Audio Visual Archive 38/52
A Year In The Country at The Haunted Generation and Kites and Pylons
The Dangers of Straying from the Path and Tales of Lycanthropy Part 2 – The Company of Wolves, the Thwarted Pop Career of Danielle Dax and the Bridging of Worlds: Wanderings 39/52
The Shildam Hall Tapes: Audio Visual Archive 39/52
The Dangers of Straying from the Path and Tales of Lycanthropy Part 3 – Hollywood Dons the Red Cloak Once More and Reveals “What They Did Next”: Wanderings 40/52
Echoes And Reverberations Reviews and Broadcasts (and Something of a Revisiting of The Quietened Village, The Corn Mother, The Quietened Bunker, The Watchers, The Quietened Mechanisms and All The Merry Year Round)
The Quietened Mechanisms: Audio Visual Archive 40/52
The Dangers of Straying from the Path and Tales of Lycanthropy Part 4 – A Consideration of Red Riding Hood, Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters, The Company of Wolves and their Varying Degrees of Separation from Folk Horror: Wanderings 41/52
The A Year In The Country: Straying From The Pathways Book – Released
The Corn Mother: Audio Visual Archive 41/52
The Nightmare Man Part 1 – Cold War Paranoia, The Island as Restorative Balm and Unsettling “Other”: Wanderings 42/52
Grey Frequency – Immersion: Audio Visual Archive 42/52
The Nightmare Man Part 2 – Frankenstein-like Meddling, Vodaynoid Myths and Exploratory Portals: Wanderings 43/52
Racker & Orphan – Twalif X: Audio Visual Archive 43/52
Constructing The Wicker Man and Explorations of the Bright, Beautiful and Serene Anti-Horror of Summerisle from Back When: Wanderings 44/52
The Quietened Journey – Preorder and Release Dates
A Year In The Country – Airwaves: Songs From The Sentinels: Audio Visual Archive 44/52
Designed in the USSR 1950-1989 and Further Wanderings Amongst a Bear’s Ghosts: Wanderings 45/52
Fractures: Audio Visual Archive 45/52
Seph Lawless’ Abandoned Theme Park Images and the Duality of a Library of Loss: Wanderings 46/52
The Quietened Journey – Preorder
No More Unto The Dance: Audio Visual Archive 46/52
In the Company of Ghosts – The Poetics of the Motorway Part 1 and The Joy of Motorway Service Stations – Considerations of Faded Futuristic Glamour: Wanderings 47/52
The Forest / The Wald: Audio Visual Archive 47/52
In the Company of Ghosts – The Poetics of the Motorway Part 2 – The Romance of the Open Road in 1970s Chocolate Bar Adverts and the Stark Glamour of Radio On: Wanderings 48/52
A Year In The Country: Straying From The Pathways – Wanderings Amongst a “Haunted House of a Book”
From The Furthest Signals: Audio Visual Archive 48/52
British Rail: Designed 1948-97 – Notes from an Impossibly Far Off History: Wanderings 49/52
Audio Albion: Audio Visual Archive 49/52
The Quietened Journey – Released
Woodshock – A Rudderless Tumbling Down the Rabbit Hole: Wanderings 50/52
The Shildam Hall Tapes: Audio Visual Archive 50/52
Strange Invaders – Paranoia, Safety and a Gently Skewed 1950s via the 1980s: Wanderings 51/52
The Quietened Mechanisms: Audio Visual Archive 51/52
The Corn Mother: Audio Visual Archive 52/52
Edge of Darkness, Lost Futures, Mark Fisher, Look Around You, Moon Stallion and Universal Harvester – The End of a Yearly Cycle and Something of a Round Up: Wanderings 52/52

 

Click the links below to peruse the indexes for the different years of A Year In The Country:
Year 1     –      Year 2      –      Year 3      –     Year 4      –      Year 5      –     Year 6      –     Year 7      –     Year 8

 

Gallery: Year 5

Click the links below to view artwork from the various A Year In The Country galleries:

Year 1      –   Year 2      –     Year 3      –     Year 4      –     Year 5     –    Year 6     –     Year 7     –    Year 8

 

 

Year 5:
The images below are of artwork from the A Year In The Country released albums etc, some of which has not previously been displayed anywhere other than in the albums’ packaging.

Grey Frequency – Immersion: Audio Visual Archive 1/52

Hand Of Stabs – Black-Veined White: Audio Visual Archive 2/52

Michael Tanner – Nine Of Swords: Audio Visual Archive 3/52

She Rocola – Burn The Witch / Molly Leigh of the Mother Town: Audio Visual Archive 4/52

Howlround – Torridon Gate (artwork by Howlround): Audio Visual Archive 5/52

Twalif X – Racker&Orphan: Audio Visual Archive 6/52
(The imagery for the release was created using photographs taken during the outing by Racker&Orphan which were than collaged and intertwined with original artwork by A Year In The Country.)

A Year In The Country – Airwaves: Songs From The Sentinels: Audio Visual Archive 7/52

Fractures: Audio Visual Archive 8/52

The Quietened Bunker: Audio Visual Archive 9/52

No More Unto The Dance: Audio Visual Archive 10/52

The Forest / The Wald – Audio Visual Archive 11/52

The Restless Field – Audio Visual Archive 12/52

From The Furthest Signals – Audio Visual Archive 13/52

Undercurrents – Audio Visual Archive 14/52

The Quietened Cosmologists – Audio Visual Archive 15/52

All The Merry Year Round – Audio Visual Archive 16/52

Audio Albion – Audio Visual Archive 17/52

The Shildam Hall Tapes – Audio Visual Archive 18/52

The Quietened Mechanisms – Audio Visual Archive 19/52

The Corn Mother – Audio Visual Archive 20/52

The Corn Mother – Audio Visual Archive 21/52

Hand of Stabs: Black-Veined White – Audio Visual Archive 22/52

No More Unto The Dance: Audio Visual Archive 23/52

Michael Tanner – Nine of Swords: Audio Visual Archive 24/52

She Rocola – Burn The Witch / Molly Leigh Of The Mother Town: Audio Visual Archive 25/52

Howlround – Torridon Gate (artwork by Howlround): Audio Visual Archive 26/52

Racker & Orphan – Twalif X: Audio Visual Archive 27/52

A Year In The Country – Airwaves: Songs From The Sentinels: Audio Visual Archive 28/52

Fractures: Audio Visual Archive 29/52

The Quietened Bunker: Audio Visual Archive 30/52

The Forest / The Wald: Audio Visual Archive 31/52

The Marks Upon The Land: Audio Visual Archive 32/52

The Restless Field: Audio Visual Archive 33/52

From The Furthest Signals: Audio Visual Archive 34/52

Undercurrents: Audio Visual Archive 35/52

The Quietened Cosmologists: Audio Visual Archive 36/52

All The Merry Year Round: Audio Visual Archive 37/52

Audio Albion: Audio Visual Archive 38/52

The Shildam Hall Tapes: Audio Visual Archive 39/52

The Quietened Mechanisms: Audio Visual Archive 40/52

The Corn Mother: Audio Visual Archive 41/52

Grey Frequency – Immersion: Audio Visual Archive 42/52

Racker & Orphan – Twalif X: Audio Visual Archive 43/52

A Year In The Country – Airwaves: Songs From The Sentinels: Audio Visual Archive 44/52

Fractures: Audio Visual Archive 45/52

No More Unto The Dance: Audio Visual Archive 46/52

The Forest / The Wald: Audio Visual Archive 47/52

From The Furthest Signals: Audio Visual Archive 48/52

Audio Albion: Audio Visual Archive 49/52

 

Click the links below to view artwork from the various A Year In The Country galleries:

Year 1      –   Year 2      –     Year 3      –     Year 4      –     Year 5     –    Year 6     –     Year 7     –    Year 8

 

 

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Rounding the Circle

Well, the end of the year is upon us, as is this particular yearly cycle of A Year In The Country

So, just to say thanks to anybody who has “tuned in” to the A Year In The Country site, who has supported the A Year In The Country: Wandering Through Spectral Field book and the A Year In The Country albums and to Suzy Prince and Ian Lowey for their help in putting together the book.

And a thank you to everybody who has written about, broadcast and in other ways supported the various A Year In The Country releases. To mention just a few: We Are Cult, John Coulthart, Shindig!, The Sunday Experience, Bliss Aquamarine, Verity Sharp and Rebecca Gaskell of Late Junction, Norman Records, DJ Food, Fortean Times, Terrascope, Gideon Coe, Flatland Frequencies, state51, Dave Thompson / Goldmine, Gated Canal Community Radio, Wyrd Daze, More Than Human, Electronic Sound, Chris Lambert, Mind De-coder, Sunrise Ocean Bender, The Unquiet Meadow, Folk Horror Revival, Music Won’t Save You, Simon Reynolds, Johnny Seven / Pull the Plug, On The Wire, Graham Dunning, Jude Rogers, The Séance, Starburst and You, the Night & the Music.

It being the end of the year, now would seem like a good time to gather together a few more recent broadcasts and appropriately, appearances in end of year lists of this year’s A Year In The Country releases:

The A Year In The Country: Wandering Through Spectral Fields book was included in Electronic Sound magazine’s end of year book round up, in some rather fine company including Mars by 1980: The Story of Electronic Music, Tangerine Dream: Force Majeure and All Gates Open: The Story of Can.

“A written word accompaniment to the prolific hauntological label of the same name… A 340 page offering spread across 52 chapters, each one representing a week of the year. Bewitching stuff.”

The book was also including in Dave Thompson’s “Spin Cycle’s Best of 2018” list at Goldmine magazine’s site, where it can be found amongst a smorgasbord that includes the likes of Beautify Junkyards, Rowan: Morrison, Comus, Curved Air, The Upsetters, Alison O’Donnell, Soft Cell, Tangerine Dream and Roxy Music just for starters…

Visit that here.

The Audio Albion album was also in Electronic Sound’s round up of compilations of the year, alongside amongst other albums Minimal Wave’s The Bedroom Tapes and Prophecy + Progress: UK Electronics 1978-1990:

“Found sounds and electronic discovery from out in the wild… delightful rolling project, commissioning musicians to make field recordings around Britain’s ‘edgelands’…”

Visit issue 48 of Electronic Sound here.

Psychogeographic Review has included two of the A Year In The Country albums in it’s monthly reviews:

“Blending music and field recordings Audio Albion maps out the countryside and edgelands of this island and immerses us in the myths and legends that inhabit even the most mundane landscapes. The album comprises the work of fifteen different artists. But this is not a collection of tracks: it is a carefully constructed aural journey.” Psychogeographic Review

“Shildam Hall Tapes is an imagined soundtrack for the film and includes tracks by several artists who have featured on other A Year in the Country releases… steadily building up a body of work that presents an alternative view of rural Britain. A Year in the Country’s lens both distorts and illuminates its subject matter… the project’s output is consistently fascinating.” Psychogeographic Review

Gavino Morretti’s Dawn Of A New Generation from The Shildam Hall Tapes was on the Golden Apples of the Sun radio show. Always worth a visit, this particular episode also includes the likes of Death and Vanilla, Lee Hazelwood, Jonny Trunk and Seefeel. The show is archived here.

Grey Frequency’s Nottingham Canal and Time Attendant’s Hidden Parameters from The Quietened Mechanisms was on the 4th November 2018 episode of the You, the Night & the Music radio show, alongside Mat Handley of Pulselovers other rather fine eclectic selections. Originally broadcast on Sine FM, the show is archived here.

Which just leaves me to say thank you to all who have contributed music to this year’s A Year In The Country albums; Howlround, Grey Frequency, Listening Center, David Colohan, Sproatly Smith, Embertides, United Bible Studies, Magpahi, Keith Seatman, Time Attendant, Circle/Temple, The Straw Bear Band, Dom Cooper, Field Lines Cartographer, Vic Mars, Depatterning, Pulselovers, The Soulless Party, Quaker’s Stang, The Heartwood Institute and Spaceship.

It is all much appreciated. A tip of the hat to you all.

Thanks!