Category: AYITC: Trails and Influences: Year 3 Wanderings

(File under: Trails and Influences / Year 3 Wanderings)

One of the albums/cultural items that quite possibly first set me on the path towards A Year In The Country and/or was an early touchstone was the Bob Stanley curated Gather in the Mushrooms: The British Acid Folk Underground 1968-1974.

On listening to it I thought “Ah, so folk can be this then? This isn’t what I expected.” (More of such things in a mo’).

There was playfulness, experimentation, darkness, psychedelia, intimate tales and more to be found in the album… a world away from some of my more traditional ideas of folk music.

It was one of those points when it’s almost as if new pathways (and future pathways) have opened up in your mind, as though the world has changed in some way once you have experienced it.

It was actually the first album/cultural item that I wrote about as part of A Year In The Country – way back in Year 1, Day #3/365.

Back then I said:

“A few years ago for a while I had quite a few of one of my friends records and CDs stored at my house.

In amongst his platters and shiny digital discs he had quite a few folk albums. Now, to be honest I think I had tended to write folk off as all being a bit fiddle-di-di, knit your own jumper, earnest kinds of things.

I was drawn to this album, Gather in the Mushrooms and I’m glad I was. I knew next to nothing about the music, hadn’t read the sleevenotes but for some reason it had ended up on my iPod.

The first time I can really remember it grabbing me was on a late night walk through the mostly deserted backstreets of a slightly industrial city. A curious place to discover an interest in oddball folk music maybe…

I think it was Forest’s Graveyard or maybe Trader Horne’s Morning Way that first grabbed my attention and made me realise that something other than my preconceptions about folk music was going on here. The first lines on Morning Way are “Dreaming strands of nightmare are sticking to my feet…”, followed close after by a somewhat angelic female voice in counterpart and well, I thought “This is odd, I like this…””

And so, in those darkened semi-industrial backstreets, some kind of journey started…”

Anyways, over the years since, every now and again I’ll find myself having a wander and browse to see if anything similar has slipped/escape into the world, any new foraging and collecting of semi-lost tracks.There are a few similar albums that delve amongst the undercurrents of folk from back when but they appear only very occasionally and I suspect that much of the seams of such things have been thoroughly mined, gems discovered and so forth.

Anyways, I thought as it is the end of the year, it would be good to round the circle, to revisit Gather in the Mushrooms and its fellow companions.

I thank you all for wandering this way, visiting, perusing, contributing. It has been much appreciated.

A tip of the hat to all.

Thanks.

I’m quite taken by the books published under the Shires imprint.

They are generally slim, almost pocket money priced reference books that focus on one particular subject and which apply the same level of importance to all their subjects, whether that be allotments, amusement park rides, beach huts and bathing machines, biscuit tins, British film studios, British tea and coffee cups, bungalows, buttonhooks and shoehorns, haunted houses, thatch and thatching, straw and straw craftsmen…

From the concerns, equipment and activities, of kings and queens to coalminers, these books are a great leveller…

…and also, whatever their subject, as a series they seem to quietly conjure up or hark back to some almost imagined, parallel, simpler, less troubled time; there’s a sort of cosy chocolate box-ness to the series of books, without them becoming twee.

Two of my favourites are Pillboxes and Tank Traps by Bernard Lowry and Prefabs by Elisabeth Blanchett.

In a way, prefabs could be seen as a form of brutalist, utilitarian architecture/building but there’s something very welcoming about them… when I was a younger chap and visited folk in them, they always felt quite magical, to have a certain character all of their own that I was drawn to and fascinated by.

And although pillboxes were built at a time of great national worry, conflict and alarm, there is something about how they are presented in the Shires book which seems to respect that but also to regard them with a certain fondness or affection, to acknowledge their history but also to incorporate them amongst the more bucolic aspects of the land.

(File under: Trails and Influences / Year 3 Wanderings)

Intertwined wanderings around these parts:
Day #228/365: Studys and documentation of the fading shadows from defences of the realm…

Wanderings #7/365a: Brutalist Breakfasts

Elsewhere in the ether:
Elisabeth Blanchett along with Jane Hearn is the co-founder of The Prefab Museum. Well worth a visit here. Shire books can be visited here, their history here.

So, I was watching The Good Life, the 1975-1978 BBC sitcom where a chap who lives in suburbia decides he’s had enough of the rat race, quits his job and along with his wife decides to try and live self-sufficiently…

But not self-sufficiency on a small holding out in the countryside. No, rather, this is self-sufficency attempted in a normal house in suburbia, next to their more conventional, affluent neighbours.

As a programme it is enjoyable, lightweight comedy that has aged reasonably well; not quite a Fawlty Towers or Rising Damp but more than reasonably watchable.

What is curious about it is the theme, of self-sufficiency, of a sort of middle-class back-to-the-land utopianism that at the time probably seemed pretty out there.

(In the 1970s, as has been mentioned around these parts before, there was a movement or urge within society to look towards the land, folk culture/music and an attempt to find a more authentic meaning to life  and The Good Life could be seen as part of this.)

With the passing of the years, many of the ways that the main characters, Tom and Barbara, get by and adopt have become quite mainstream; recycling, eating what are essentially organic foods that they grow and harvest themselves and so on.

Although generally the taking up of such things have more been incorporated into modern life through being often organised or offered by councils, supermarkets and the like rather than the wholesale dropping out of the Good Life.

Another thing that strikes me is that although some of the ideas presented within the series are quite radical and although much of the comedy is derived from the conflict between the self-sufficient lifestyles of Tom & Barbara and their more normal neighbours/setting, this is gentle, uncynical comedy – a form of bucolia in suburbia.

I think you could draw a line from it to Detectorists, the more recent television comedy series based around metal detecting, which also has a gentle, uncynical air to it.

Another point on that line would probably be the 1973-1975 animated television series The Wombles, which again was ahead of its time in the way that it dealt with themes of recycling and waste.

(File under: Trails and Influences / Year 3 Wanderings)

Intertwined wanderings around these parts:
Day #316/365: The Detectorists; a gentle roaming in search of the troves left by men who can never sing again

Elsewhere in the ether:
Encyclopedic views; The Good Life. Detectorists. The Wombles.
Flickerings; The Good Life. Detectorists. The Wombles.

A while ago I came across Ralph Mireb’s photographs of an abandoned Soviet era space shuttles and related infrastructure.

Even in amongst the many thousands or more photographs of abandoned and derelict projects, buildings, industry etc that can be found online, these still stand out.

They bring to mind a very modern take or attempt at space travel, to seem to belong nearer to a modern day convenience or consumer take on space exploration than the more imperialistic seeming golden age of space travel traditional rocket designs.

The wooden wind tunnel model is particularly eye and mind catching – putting me in mind of something nearer to a folk art project than an institutionally/nationally funded attempt at space exploration.

One of the things that strikes me when looking at such projects is the scale of the infrastructure and buildings that surround them – it beggars belief almost, even more so when you think that they have been abandoned after such a huge amount of work and effort went into creating them.

When I was wandering amongst those photographs, as is often the way, I found myself taking a few other routes and diversions and soon came out in another cul-de-sac that could well be called “The Shape of the Future’s Past”…

In particular the Aérotrain prototypes such as the one above, which were a form of hover/maglev transport that at one point was being developed in France.

These are from 1977 but seem to belong more to some midcentury modern, atomic age take on how the future was to be.

And then there are the abandoned Soviet era hydrofoils, made from the mid-1950s to mid-1970s; there’s a bravery, an optimism, a genuine progressive modernism, a venturing and adventuring onwards and outwards to designs like these that seems to have been lost somewhere along the way, surrendered to a more day-to-day practicality in design.

They seem nearer to something that you would see in say a science fiction series such as Space 1999, to belong to the realms of imagination rather than actual working transportation vehicles.

(File under: Trails and Influences / Year 3 Wanderings)

Intertwined wanderings around these parts:
Day #229/365: A Bear’s Ghosts…

Week #34/52: Restricted Areas – Further Wanderings Amongst A Bear’s Ghosts

Day #346/365: Audiological Reflections and Pathways #1; a library of loss

Elsewhere in the ether:
Space shuttles (photography by Ralph Mirebs).
Wooden space shuttle (photography by Alexander Marksin).
Other forgotten vehicles (photography by baseguru (?)).

So, I was wandering around the ether a while ago and I came across a few places that variously caught my eye, intrigued me and/or made me think “I’m glad somebody’s gathered those together”…

Ghost Signs UK: for a while I used to collect images of these myself, I lived in an area where there seemed to be a fair few such things.

I particularly like/was drawn to the ones that are barely still there, that are literally ghosts of their former selves.

These painted, faded signs seem to form part of a semi-forgotten history of places, layers of how we once lived, worked and traded.

…and then there’s The Vault Of The Atomic Space Age…

There’s nothing quite like a good old bit of mid-century modern take on how the future once was…

And finally Avantgardens… a gathering of experimentation and exploration in, well, gardens (amongst other places).

The shepherd cottages from Slovenia are a thing to behold. They put me in mind of former Soviet Union folk art such as you might find in the Home-Made; Contemporary Russian Folk Artifacts book or the design of Soviet bus stops in Christopher Herwig’s book of the same name.

(File under: Trails and Influences / Year 3 Wanderings)

Intertwined wanderings around these parts:
Day #335/365: Folk art – a wandering from these shores to other shores and back again…

Week #9/52: Christopher Herwig’s Soviet Bus Stops, echoes of reaching for the cosmos, folkloric breakfast adornment and other artfully pragmatic curio collectings, encasings and bindings…

Elsewhere in the ether:
Ghost Signs UK. The Vault of the Atomic Space Age. Avant Gardens.

A while ago I came across the phrase solargraphy and the photographic work of Austin Capsey and Wendy Bevan-Mogg in the periodical Ernest Journal.

(Solargraphy refers to a form of long exposure photography and the phrase comes from solar = sun and graphy = writing).

Their work involves leaving pinhole cameras and sometimes an antique more conventional camera to take a single exposure out in the landscape at turning points of the year and returning often hours, a day or months later.

In the Ernest Journal they wrote the following on the process:

“With ultra-long exposures, usually from solstice to solstice, it captures images that describe the movement of the sun, the enduring nature of the landscape, and hold an entire season in a single frame. The exposures are so long that neither animals nor humans are visible; only the tracks of the sun remain. These tracks trace a new new path each day as days lengthen towards the summer solstice – trails sometimes broken by intermittent cloud, and some missing altogether on days shrouded under grey skies.”

The photographs are taken on black and white stock and contain all kinds of imperfections and colour tinting which results from atmospheric conditions, mould and a literal tarnishing of the metallic silver crystals contained in the photographic film.

Such results occur through the actions of nature, created by the cameras’ time out amongst the elements and although they are essentially random the resulting photographs seem to represent some kind of melding of nature’s hand/art and a humanly directed expressive art project.

There is a strange, entrancing beauty to the images, with them capturing a sense of the passing seasons and cycles of the world.

(File post under: Trails and Influences / Year 3 Wanderings)

Elsewhere in the ether:
Solargraphy at Knapp Ridge Films
Ernest Journal

It was a curious thing, the way that in the early 1970s, some bands/musicians adopted quite medieval styles of dress, persona and even elements of such ways in day-to-day life.

(To quote myself quoting Rob Young, this was a form of “imaginative time travel” and as has been mentioned around these parts before, may well have also been part of a yearning to return to some imagined pastoral idyll, possibly as a form of escape from the strife and troubled times back then).

In terms of imagery, an album cover such as Steeleye Span’s Below The Salt from 1972 goes the full (medieval) hog…

…although if you look back at photographs of them from the early 1970s, the medieval aspects are just part and parcel of an overall way of dressing that was equally post-1960s psychedelic gone more loose, a touch hippie and to a modern day eye appears to be style that wouldn’t have been out of place worn by say a more hip children’s television presenter from back when (which is said with affection, that’s not a bad look).

Although stage personas and costumes are nothing unsual, there seemed to be a tendency for this, sometimes, to go further than that and elements of such ways and times were adopted in day-to-day life (hence Vashti Bunyan and her partners’ horse drawn ride across to the country, aiming towards a destination where they intended to live more according to ways gone by).

As an aside, I was recently(ish) at a carboot sale and although these aren’t sometimes the old vinyl record and CD foraging bonanza they once were, there were a few stalls that had vinyl records on them – probably about four stalls, with around a hundred or so records all told.

On every stall that had a selection of vinyl there seemed to be a Steeleye Span record or few, which was quite curious.

Was it just coincidence? Is it just that people don’t want these records so much anymore or more precisely in that part of the world/culture they don’t and so they are left behind?

Hmmm.

File under: Trails and Influences / Year 3 Wanderings

Intertwined wanderings around these parts:
Day #122/365: A trio or more of Fine Horsemen via Modern Folk Is Rubbish and through to patterns layered under patterns…

Day #157/365: The Dalesman’s Litany; a yearning for imaginative idylls and a counterpart to tales of hellish mills

DJ Food and Pete Williams’ Further event has a second installment on November 18th (ticket info can be found here), the first one of which I wrote about a while ago…

At this second event DJ Food and Pete Williams will be once again creating their multi-projection Further environment, which from the images I have seen seems to have an immersive, layered, enveloping atmosphere and accompanying them will be audio-visual live sets by Simon James and Sculpture.

The preview videos for Simon James’ performance feature gentle, dreamlike patterns, which at times puts me in mind of abstracted sea creatures, possibly sea anemone’s… and also, while it has a character all of its own, at points it shares similar territory with some of the film work Julian House has produced for Ghost Box Records, creating imagery where hazy geographic shapes and forms seem to contain some kind of hidden, otherly message that you can’t quite decode.

And just as there often can be with filmed recordings of some sea creatures, there is a drift to these images and they hypnotically draw you in as they are accompanied by ambient spectral synthesized music.

(Simon James has also worked as part of Black Channels, whose particularly rare cassette release Two Knocks For Yes is well worth seeking out in one form or another – it’s still available digitally. Amongst other things it is an intriguing mixture of Radiophonic-esque synthesis, poltergeist exploration and recordings of ghost reports. He has also created the Akhai Den Den album and project, which is a soundtrack and radio drama set in a crumbling amusement park, which I expect I may well visit further around these parts at a later date.)

Sculpture is the duo of Dan Hayhurst and Reuben Sutherland whose audio-visual work utilises a wide array of analogue alongside digital techniques to create an at points cut-up-esque swirling montage of sounds and images.

The picture discs they have released come alive and full of animation once they begin to spin on the turntable, recalling the early pre-celluloid days of moving images, along which lines they describe themselves as utilising a “library of zoetropic prints” (zoetropes were a mechanical form of producing moving images via spinning cylinders that were initially created in the 19th century).

…while at other times their work includes cosmic, surreal, nature infused images…

…which intermingle with what could well be escapees created from either/or/both the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and the Berberian Sound Studio.

There are a number of different cultural themes and strands within the Further events but looking at related images and videos for this second event a word that kept occurring to me, particularly in terms of the visual work, was psychedelia.

Not psychedelia in a retro, retreading, style, rather a contemporary take, exploration or progression of such things.

Taken as a whole and loosely gathered together, such work as that at the second Further event made me think of Trish Keenan of Broadcast’s quote/comment on her interest in and connection with psychedelia:

“I’m not interested in the bubble poster trip, ‘remember Woodstock’ idea of the sixties. What carries over for me is the idea of psychedelia as a door through to another way of thinking about sound and song. Not a world only reachable by hallucinogens but obtainable by questioning what we think is real and right, by challenging the conventions of form and temper.”
(Taken from an article on/interview with Broadcast by Joseph Stannard in Wire magazine, issue 308, October 2009. It can also be found in an unedited version online at Wire magazine’s site.)

I don’t want to make the Further events sound all overly serious though. What they seem to be in part are an attempt to create a night-time space that moves beyond a purely youthful focus and preoccupation, somewhere you can go out, enjoy a bit of exploratory/experimental music and visual culture and also kick back a bit.

Or to quote DJ Food and Pete Williams themselves when describing the first event, the flier for which is above, Further is:

“An irregular event held in different places, it’s not a club night, it’s not monthly, there’s no dance floor. It HAS got all the things we love in it though: experimental music and film, food and drink, socialising and a bit of record hunting. Taking old analogue image making techniques from the 20th century and recontextualising it into new spaces for today.”

(File post under: Trails and Influences / Year 3 Wanderings)

Intertwined wanderings around these parts:
Ether Signposts #14/52a: Further – A Temporary Audio Visual Space

Elsewhere in the ether:
Further related posts at DJ Food’s main site.
Further related videos.
Tickets for the second Further event.

Akhai Den Den: the main site and transmissions from the deep darkness.
Akhai Den Den: radio waves, half-heard transmissions and electronic music boxes.
Black Channels, Two Knocks For Yes and “otherworldly vibrations and oscillations”.

Sculpture’s main site and collection of videos.

Over the year I’ve wandered several times to photography that takes an aerial or birds eye view of the land, that highlights the sometimes almost abstract art-like, natural calligraphy of the coasts, trees, natural features etc.

Along which lines, aerial archeology.

Apparently tiny differences in ground conditions caused by buried features can be emphasised by a number of factors and then viewed from the air:

Slight differences in ground levels will cast shadows when the sun is low and these can be seen best from an aeroplane. These are referred to as shadow marks.

Buried ditches will hold more water and buried walls will hold less water than undisturbed ground, this phenomenon, amongst others, causes crops to grow better or worse, taller or shorter, over each kind of ground and therefore define buried features which are apparent as tonal or colour differences. Such effects are called cropmarks.

Frost can also appear in winter on ploughed fields where water has naturally accumulated along the lines of buried features. These are known as frostmarks.

Slight differences in soil colour between natural deposits and archaeological ones can also often show in ploughed fields as soilmarks.

Differences in levels and buried features will also affect the way surface water behaves across a site and can produce a striking effect after heavy rain.

I find related photographs interesting in part because they literally record the marks upon and under the land, they are quite literally a documenting of the layers of history that without aviation would be more or less impossible to view.

There have been a number of books published on the subject and having something of a weakspot for cultural artifacts from around 1973, Flights Into Yesterday by Leo Deuel caught my eye.

File under: Trails and Influences / Year 3 Wanderings

Intertwined wanderings around these parts:
Wanderings #15/52a: Other Views / The Patterns Beneath The Plough, The Pylons And Amongst The Edgelands #1

Wanderings #31/52a: The Shadow Of Heaven Above

Wanderings #40/52a: Further Natural Calligraphy / Carving The Land

When I first came across Masahisa Fukase’s photography book The Solitude of Ravens it was out of print and as seems to often be the way with what is sometimes known as fine art photography, earlier editions of the book have become particularly collectible and copies could easily fetch in the hundreds of pounds…

…and it was a struggle not to think to myself “Hmmm, what day-to-day necessities could I forgo so that I would be able to afford a copy?”.

There’s an entrancing beauty to the images I’ve seen, with sometimes the birds being shown only as abstract grain filled silhouettes or their clawprints in the snow forming what are at first unidentifiable patterns.

However, at points they also give me the absolute heebie jeebies and despite the photographs in part capturing elements of what essentially are day-to-day natural world occurrences, there is at times something almost claustrophobically, indefinably unsettling about them.

While the birds are a recurring motif throughout the book, these are interspersed with enigmatic and unexplained other photographs including an intimate night time scene, silhouettes of people on the coast with their hair flying in the wind, flowers and other items possibly exploding or caught in some kind of extreme turbulence, weather that has become cosmic ambient streaks of light and a man sat on the ground, seemingly drinking alone in what may be a litter strewn park.

Taken as a whole the book appears to tell some unknown or unknowable story – to almost be an essay, the subject of which is just out of reach.

I’d say lovely stuff about now but I don’t think that’s quite appropriate here.

Beguiling, beautiful, disturbing, unsettled, unsettling, lovely stuff might be heading in the right direction.

As a postscript, since I started to write about the book, it has been reissued by the publisher Mack in what looks like a rather fine slipcase edition, with one of the iconic images from the book silkscreen printed in a subtle, almost hidden manner on the cover.

File under: Trails and Influences / Year 3 Wanderings

Elsewhere in the ether:
View a selection of images from the book here, here, and here. The Mack edition can be visited here.

Well, I was reading a copy of Sight & Sound magazine from a while ago when I came across a feature on Ghost Box Records.

Nowt too odd in that you may well think.

No, except this is the British Film Institute’s monthly film magazine, not the British Film Institute’s film and occasionally music monthly magazine.

Although it’s not really that odd, considering the role soundtracks and sound design play in film and particularly considering the film/television points of interest that feed into the Ghost Box world (or parallel worlds), it was just unexpected I guess.

The article in question is a concise revisiting and gathering by Daniel Barrow of the influences, strands of interest,  hauntological/spectral world or mythology the Ghost Box label/project has created around the time of their In A Moment retrospective ten year compilation that was released in 2015.

However the article ends with “…perhaps now the ghosts are all fled in the blinding light of commerce”.

This is in reference to the way in which areas of culture that fed into Ghost Box which were once more a cult reserve (for example odd 1970s British children’s television, folk horror films such as The Wicker Man, Quatermass, Public Information Films, Radiophonic-esque electronica etc) have now become just another part of the general media, cultural and related commercial landscape and that using and weaving with such source material has possibly therefore to a degree run its course.

I think it’s an interesting point that has merit and is worth consideration but at the same time it makes me think “Well, maybe the thing to do at such times of possible widespread over harvesting and visiting, is just to keep doing what you do/are interested in”; along with if needs be/the will takes you that way, being careful of not becoming too caught purely in your own furroughs without ever straying to new fields or looking for new seedlings.

These things go in cycles, sometimes the media and cultural/commercial spotlight will shine on a particular area of culture, that area can then become over mined or familiar and then the spotlight moves on.

To once again quote Jeanette Leech, author of Seasons They Change, when discussing such things in relation to the brief more overground interest in what was known as freak folk, underground folk and other descendants of acid/psych folk in the early 2000s:

“When light is not on a garden, many plants will wither. But others won’t. They will grow in crazy, warped, hardy new strains. It’s time to feed from the soil instead of the sunlight.”

Hmmm. Food for thought.

File under: Trails and Influences / Year 3 Wanderings

Intertwined wanderings around these parts:
Day #52/365: The Advisory Circle and ornithological intrigueries…

Day #65/365: Mr Jim Jupp’s parish circular

Day #72/365: Arthur magazine and the brief flickering of freak folk

Day #85/365: Weirdlore: Notes From The Folk Underground and legendary lost focal points…

Day #93/365: Seasons They Change and the sweetly strange concoctions of private pressings…

Week #29/52: Hauntology and the genre that dare not speak its name

Wanderings #15/52a: The Unexpected Arrival Of Spectral Containment Systems #1

Elsewhere in the ether:
Peruse the issue of Sight & Sound in question here. Mr Barrow. In A Moment considerations and light catchery. The aforementioned spectral containment systems home in the ether.

I’ve mentioned before about trees and the patterns they make as being a form of natural calligraphy.

The images in The Coast Of England & Wales In Pictures by J.A. Steers from 1960 could be seen as a similar thing but rather they are patterns created by the land and tides themselves.

What such things put me in mind of in part, are the artworks created in the landscape that can be seen in Troublemakers: The Story Of Land Art, which is a documentary on a number of people in the 1960s onwards who literally carved, excavated and poured often huge, landscape sized work out in the desert, along the coast etc…

Blimey might be an appropriate phrase about now. Installation art on a grand scale…

File under: Trails and Influences / Year 3 Wanderings

Intertwined wanderings around these parts:
Week #52/52: An Arboreal Collection Or Two And Hello And Goodbye…

Wanderings #15/52a: Other Views / The Patterns Beneath The Plough, The Pylons And Amongst The Edgelands #1

Wanderings #31/52a: The Shadow Of Heaven Above

Elsewhere in the ether:
Troublemakers: The Story Of Land Art at its home in the ether and the accompanying trailer.

Issue 59 of Shindig! magazine has as its main cover image electronic music innovator Delia Derbyshire and the strapline Tape Leaders – The BBC Radiophonic Workshop & Beyond – The History Of Early British Electronic Music.

In many ways this issue could well be seen as a companion piece to issue 32 which featured Broadcast on the cover alongside articles on Ghost Box Records, giallo film, Berberian Sound Studio, Mike Heron of The Incredible String Band, Children’s Film Foundation, synthesizer and new age music innovators Emerald Web etc.

While experimental electronic music, hauntology and the outer reaches of folk often make an appearance/are intertwined in amongst the more 1960s-esque, psychedelic, prog and garage rock side of Shindig!, in these two issues those aspects are more overtly foregrounded.

Along which lines Issue 59 also features the likes of an article by Vic Pratt on cult undead-in-the-British-countryside-and-provincial-town biker film Psychomania from 1973, around the time it had a restored brush’n’scrub up release by the BFI’s Flipside imprint and 1960s/1970s baroque folk artist Bridget St John.

While the magazine’s lead article is Out Of The Ordinary which is an intriguing and layered overview of the history of British electronic music.

The article was written by Mark Brend, author of The Sound of Tomorrow: How Electronic Music Was Smuggled Into The Mainstream and takes as its starting point the release of Ian Helliwell’s book and CD Tape Leaders: A Compendium of Early British Electronic Music.

Just to add to this issue’s hauntological aspect and related interest in certain aspects of previous era’s television, there is an article by David Dent on once semi-lost late 1960s television series The Tyrant King (directed by Mike Hodges of Get Carter, with more than a touch of psychedelia, a dash of Swinging London and a then rather hip soundtrack courtesy of Pink Floyd, The Moody Blues, Cream, The Rolling Stones and The Nice).

You’ll also find in amongst its pages the likes of sometimes Finders Keepers/Bird Records songstress and fringes of folk explorer Emma Tricca, sometimes Finders Keepers/lead Bird Records songstress and sometime cosmic aquatic folklorist Jane Weaver and the crystaline folk of Anne Briggs…

…oh and even an album which takes as its theme decommissioned and abandoned Cold War infrastructure… or more precisely The Quietened Bunker, which was put out by our good selves.

…the issue also features a piece called Evolution: Revolution, where Shindig!’s editor-in-chief Jon “Mojo” Mills considers two decades of records where pop was reshaped by electronic music, taking in the likes of Joe Meek to early Human League, via Pink Floyd, The Rolling Stones, The Radiophonic Workshop and the Delia Derbyshire/David Vorhaus collaborative album An Electric Storm by White Noise.

It’s interesting how all such things have come to travel alongside and intertwine with one another… from Radiophonic-esque electronica, to hauntology, to acid/psych/exploratory folk via psychedelia and so on… not necessarily obvious bedfellows but somehow these quite separate cultural strands come together and compliment one another.

In part, maybe they are all elements or expressions of the undercurrents, sometimes more hidden aspects and reverse of pop and culture in general…

File under: Trails and Influences / Year 3 Wanderings

Intertwined wanderings around these parts:
Day #6/365: The Fallen By Watchbird – Jane Weaver Septieme Soeur; the start of a journey through cosmic aquatic folklore, kunstmärche and otherly film fables…

Day #100/365: Ms Delia Derbyshire and a day of audiological remembrance and salute

Day #150/365: Parade Of Blood Red Sorrows

Day #178/365: The cuckoo in the nest: sitting down with a cup of cha, a slice of toast, Broadcast, Emerald Web, Ghost Box Records and other fellow Shindig travellers…

Day #303/365: Towards Tomorrow; a selection of cuttings from The Delian Mode, sonic maps, the corporation’s cubby holes and the life of an audiological explorer…

The Quietened Bunker – Night and Dawn editions released

Further considerations of a curious intertwining:
Ether Signposts #39/52a: Daphne Oram Diorama, A Further Addition To A Family Of Electronic Innovators And Pastoral Confluences

Elsewhere in the ether:
Shindig! and issue 59

Although I was never especially drawn to the free party scene for a night (day or week or two?) out, each to their own and I have found myself somewhat entranced by Molly Macindoe’s photographs and her book Out Of Order.

The book is a collection of her photography from the free party scene from over a number of years.

The images in it seem to represent a culture that belongs to a true edgelands and quite possibly to that genuine rarity nowadays – a subculture that hasn’t been incorporated or subsumed within or by mainstream commerce.

To a degree it put me in mind of Tomorrow’s People book of photographs from free festivals in the 1970s but Molly Macindoe’s photographs seem to represent something much rawer, wilder, frontier like and unregulated.

And although often the parties are shown as happening in the countryside, the photographs also seem to often be a document of partying/gathering amongst the ghosts and the discarded brutalist architecture of a more overtly industrial phase of Western society.

File under: Trails and Influences / Year 3 Wanderings

Intertwined wanderings around these parts:
Week #6/52: Tomorrow’s People, further considerations of the past as a foreign country and hauntology away from its more frequent signifiers and imagery…

Elsewhere in the ether:
Peruse the book amongst the ether here and at Molly Macindoe’s home in the ether here..

Now, there has been an ever increasing amount written about The Wicker Man and it could be possible to be a tad oversaturated with more considerations of the film…

…but I recently(ish) read Vic Pratt’s article Long Arm Of The Lore about the film in a 2013 edition of Sight & Sound, at the time of one of the DVD/Bluray brush’n’scrub ups of The Wicker Man…

And actually, it was a refreshingly calm, considered, reflective, contextual piece that made me pause for thought, consider and re-appreciate the film and its own stories and myths once again.

In many ways it and the issue of the magazine could be a companion to the 2010 Sight & Sound with The Films Of Old, Weird Britain cover and The Pattern Under The Plough article Rob Young (and leading on from that, that article could also be seen as a companion to his Electric Eden book).

Both articles explore a sense of an otherly Albion, of the undercurrents and layers of folk tales, customs and histories and their reflections within film, television, culture and music at various points in time.

Vic Pratt’s article is particularly good at placing The Wicker Man in the context of the early 1970s, the what-happened-next of 1960s utopianism and a yearning to return to more authentic, rooted ways – the interest in variations on folk culture being an aspect of such things.

I particularly liked this sequence, its analogies and the way it intertwines folk, the romance of analogue recording techniques and the myths of The Wicker Man itself:

“The archivists among us surely long to see a fully restored version of the film derived from 35mm elements, and the new Final Cut should almost provide that, bar a few mainland minutes. Yet folklorists must surely enjoy the flawed long version; that old variation in quality, the sudden grainy sequences, are textural scars that remind us of a checkered past. The multigenerational flaws of decades-old transfer technologies are embedded in the images. Forever incomplete, with something added, something removed, like an old folk ditty with lyrics honed and melodies reshaped by time, The Wicker Man remains splendidly imperfect, the perfect folk film artefact.”

The article is available to read online but I must admit I enjoyed being able to stop a moment and read it in its original printed form (although it seems to be one of the more hard to find back issues of Sight & Sound, not unsuprisingly considering the cult status of The Wicker Man).

(File under: Trails and Influences / Year 3 Wanderings)

Intertwined wanderings around these parts:
Day #4/365: Electric Eden; a researching, unearthing and drawing of lines between the stories of Britain’s visionary music

Day #80/365: The Films Of Old Weird Britain… celluloid flickerings from an otherly Albion…

Day #90/365: The Wicker Man – the future lost vessels and artifacts of modern folklore

Week #25/52: Fractures Signals #4; A Behemoth Comes Once More A Knocking…

Elsewhere in the ether:
Read the article here (which also includes an interview with director Robin Hardy).

So, All Creatures Great And Small…

Over the last few years I’ve been slowly reading the various books in the series of James Herriot’s memoirs of his time and life as a country vet, beginning in the 1930s and progressing over the years…

I’ve found them interesting as the television series is a sort of Sunday night, chocolate box, no alarms and no surprises take on such things – nothing wrong with that, a good break and escape is not a bad thing…

However, the books, although not necessarily dark or gritty, present a much more real, visceral life and practice.

Mortality and the very physical nature of the work of a country vet are told in a quite unflinching but not gratuitous manner – this is just how it is.

Curiously, they are still rather restful in nature, despite this realism – sort of chocolate box-ish without being over sweet.

I’ve been rather taken by the covers of the reissues by Tom Cole, which link together to form a set/one image and reflect the passing of time and life rather nicely – again in a sort of chocolate box-ish without being over sweet manner.

(File under: Trails and Influences / Year 3 Wanderings)

Intertwined wanderings around these parts:
Day #253/365: One For Sorrow; Helter skelter, hang sorrow, public minded urgings from times when the lights may well go out of an evening and heading towards Rocket Cottage-isms…

Elsewhere in the ether:
Peruse the book here.

350 miles – An Essex Journey…

Now this was something of a find.

It is a text and photographic exploration of the Essex shoreline by Jason Orton and Ken Worpole…

The photographs seem to be an almost unintended capturing or exploration of some semi-hidden other side of the land, of the forgotten or overlooked history, lives and tales of coastline edgelands.

There is a quiet grace and beauty to them, a gentle melancholia that I can’t quite always put my finger on…

“The authors have uncovered in words and images a haunted littoral of piers and power plants, mudflats and louring skies… Essex has never looked so mystical.” (Found here).

Lovely stuff.

(File under: Trails and Influences / Year 3 Wanderings)

Intertwined wanderings around these parts:
Day #160/365: Edgelands Report Documents; Cases #1a (return), #2a-5a.

Elsewhere in the ether:
Peruse the book here and at Ken Worpole’s home in the ether here.