Category: AYITC-Year 3 Wanderings / Ether Signposts

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.

 

Well, in a further wanderings and searching for a particular atmosphere manner…

Castles and Strongholds of Pembrokeshire by Emily Hewlett Edwards.

I suppose in a way this book, with its photographs and studying of crumbling defence installations reclaimed by nature, could be seen as a forerunner of Paul Virillio’s Bunker Archaeology…

In fact, it could be seen as part of lineage of such things, wherein such buildings and structures seem to have gathered some kind of quiet grace, surrender, maybe even a touch of stalwart melancholia here and there over the years.

It feels like a privately published labour of love – there doesn’t seem to be any publisher listed and the textured, laid paper and cover implies a possibly more non-standard publishing route.

(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…

Week #33/52: Bunker Archives #4; Paul Virilio’s Bunker Archaeology and accidental utilitarian art

Wanderings #11/52a: Ancient Lands And A Very Particular Atmosphere From Back When

Elsewhere in the ether:
Peruse the book here.

 

I can’t remember how I came acroos Thistletown but it’s been an interesting find.

Released by Will Hodgkinson on his record label Big Bertha, which seemed to be created as much as an art project/experiment in how such things worked as being a traditional record label.

I know little about the band, though that’s okay, it means I can just appreciate the music.

The little I know includes that the album was produced by Michael Tyack from Circulus and recording was held up at one point I think because they didn’t want to disturb a nesting duck…

If you should appreciate semi-lost privately pressed acid/psych/underground folk from the late 1960s and 1970s along the lines of Midwinter and Caedmon, the crystalline folk expressions of Lutine  and the folk-esque retravellings of Espers, you may well find much to like here.

In fact in parts, the music contained within the album could well be from a “semi-lost privately pressed acid/psych/underground folk from the late 1960s and 1970s”… not in a purely retro, retreading manner but more in that seems to capture the spirit of or be in part from some flipside of the history and culture of Britain, to live in some other bucolic parallel, a separate time both enchanted and enchanting.

As far as I know Rosemarie is out of print but it can often be found for but a few pence or pounds.

A curiousity and well worth a wander towards.

 

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

Intertwined wanderings around these parts:
Day #3/365: Gather In The Mushrooms: something of a starting point via an accidental stumbling into the British acid folk undeground

Day #50/365: Lutine – music for the mind to wander with…

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

Day #107/365: Archie Fisher & Acid Tracks – An Introduction to the roots of psych-folk: subculture not from beneath the paving stones but from under the plough

Day #132/365: Espers, coruscation and the demise of monarchs…

Day #257/365: Further coruscations; Lutine, White Flowers and textural voyages…

Elsewhere in the ether:
Peruse the album here. Thistletown at Big Bertha here and traces in the ether here.

 

And in a further consideration of natural forms of calligraphy, patterns and marks upon the land…

I think one of the things that draws me to images/books like this, is that sometimes the patterns they create seem nearer to something genuinely abstract than a document of real/natural life and the land…

 

(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

Elsewhere in the ether:
The images here are from the 1989 book Shadow Of Heaven by Patricia Macdonald, published by Aurum. Peruse it here.

 

I suppose if you take the phrase edgelands as in part referring to transitional areas, often where industry/man made areas meet the countryside, then the book Grenzfalle / Falling Barriers could be seen as a document of a type of edgelands…

…but, well this is an edgelands with a particular brutal, brutalist architecture.

The book was published in 2009 and is a collection of photographs taken by six different photographers of the barriers that divided East and West Germany, just as the country began to be reunited.

(The photographers in question are Gerhard Zwickert, Eberhard Kloppel, Peter Leske, Heinz Dargelis, Werner Schulze, Bernd-Horst Sefzik.)

While a lot of imagery of such things has focused on the Berlin wall, this is more a document of the barriers in the landscape, next to frontier villages and so on.

There’s a curious harshness or possibly even (static) violence to these structures, their purpose and the philosophy that underlined them.

It is a fascinating, enthralling, moving book and I’m rather glad I found it.

Although the images were taken in 1990, they seem to harken back to an earlier, nearer mid century time somehow and reminded me of Paul Virilio’s Bunker Archaeology photographs…

I could easily be posting most of the images within it from now to whenever but I thought the best way to go about it was possibly to select just one book spread by each of the six photographers (not an easy task)… so here goes…

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

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

Day #229/365: A Bear’s Ghosts…

Week #33/52: Bunker Archives #4; Paul Virilio’s Bunker Archaeology and accidental utilitarian art

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

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:
Peruse the book here and at the publishers Kerber Verlag.

 

A smattering of Broadcast related items/avant-pop artifacts and cultural constellations…

1) The booklet included with the 2015 represses of Broadcast’s albums.

Along with Mother Is The Milky Way, this seems to be one of the very rarest of Broadcast artifacts.

I know that it was included with initial copies of the represses but I don’t know how many copies were printed/included and apart from the initial press mentioning about the booklet, I’ve never seen another copy, photographs of it or a mention of it being included with an album that is for sale/resale since the initial period of the re-releases.

It’s a lovely thing which feels very precious; only 8 pages long, approximately 10 inches in dimensions but feels encyclopedic, gathering together 6 different covers designed by Julian House over the years for Broadcast’s albums and two cover images of Trish Keenan in avant-pop high priestess garb.

Seek and you may find (or not)…

2) Transmission: Possible; interview in NME, 3rd June 2000.

It’s been a fair old while since I’ve picked up an old copy of the weekly music press such as the NME and it was a genuinely odd experience, it feels like such a time capsule from another era.

I guess this issue from just after the millenium was published just before the internet really started to kick in, just before the magazines power, reach and influence started to wane.

One of the things that struck me on reading the magazine was just how important it was once upon a time with regards to “making or breaking” bands etc, in the sense that there weren’t all that many outlets back then for indie/independent/leftfield/younger persons/student-esque music.

And there, in the middle of it all, something of a cuckoo in the nest, are Broadcast.

With hindsight they seem somewhat out of place but I guess for a brief(ish) moment they were marketed in a similar way to other young people/student-esque etc bands.

3) Trish Keenan’s sleeve notes for the Finders Keepers/B-Music release of the soundtrack to Valerie And Her Week Of Wonders.

This seems to be a pretty rare item nowadays, which is a shame as it’s a fine gathering of work and the sleeve notes are well worth a read and peruse.

They include a consideration of the cinematic background of the film by Peter Hames, author of the book The Czechoslovak New Wave and Andy Votel’s (who is one of the people behind Finders Keepers) notes which are a personal history snapshot of cultural discovery and subsequent cultural explorations and searching.

Trish Keenan’s notes are relatively brief but they are very evocative, particularly in capturing a sense of the point when a piece of work does seem to literally open up new pathways within your mind and very firmly take root within them.

In a way, it is a reflection of a form of (non-lysergic) psychedelic awakenings.

 

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

Intertwined wanderings around these parts:
Day #33/365: Broadcast and the Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age and the recalibrations of past cathode ray stories…

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 #251/365: Broadcast; constellators and artifacts

Week #43/52: Broadcast – Mother Is The Milky Way and gently milling around avant-garde, non-populist pop

Audio Visual Transmission Guide #28/52a: Valerie And Her Week Of Wonders – Unreleased Variations Away From Bricks And Mortar

 

There are a fair few book, website etc appreciations of brutalist / modernist architecture out and about in the world but I thought that The Modernist / The Modernist Society was a nice take on such things.

It has a certain classy stylishness to it that appeals.

The printing is all subtle, soft halftone printing rather than high resolution photographic reproduction, which I have wandered when reading it whether that was a deliberate choice rather than something decided by financial restrictions, as it seems to be in line with some kind of spirit of say information booklets from back in the day.

I particularly like the packaging of their publication Sacred Suburbs, which is described as:

“A celebration of postwar places of worship built around Greater Manchester between 1945 and 1975.”

The cover design brings to mind some kind of sense of occult (used in the referring to hidden knowledge manner), almost England’s Hidden Reverse-esque symbolism.

Issue 19, which is themed Faith is something of a companion piece to Sacred Suburbs and together they provide an interesting viewpoint on brutalist/modernist architecture which is more often associated with utilitarian corporate/municipal buildings or vast swathe like housing blocks than something as abstract as matters of the soul and belief.

 

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

Intertwined wanderings around these parts:
Week #33/52: Bunker Archives #4; Paul Virilio’s Bunker Archaeology and accidental utilitarian art

Week #49/52: The Wanderings Of Veloelectroindustrial

Wanderings #7/365a: Brutalist Breakfasts

Elsewhere in the ether:
The Modernist.

I recently(ish) came across this article by Philip Kemp in the January 2001 issue of Sight and Sound magazine which takes as its starting point the work of John Boorman and in particular his 1989 Arthurian film epic Excalibur.

Pre the more recent overt interest in such things, it is in part an exploration of myth, fable, folklore and the hidden tales of the land in British cinema (and a touch or two of television)…

It is a highlighting of the tendency within British cinema to shy away from and almost be embarassed by the possibility embracing the grander or more esoteric aspects of myth and mythology.

Here are a few excerpts that caught my eye:

“Listen carefull to the echoes of myth. It has much more to tell us then the petty lies and insignificant truths of recorded history (John Boorman).”

“While writers from the Romantic period onward have oten turned to earlier mythic narratives for inspiration, British film-makers have rarely felt comfortable about drawing their stories from the national myth pool. The legends of native folk culture tend to admit an unworldly, if not a spiritual dimension that sits uneasily with the buttoned-up realism of British cinema…”

“Blake, Fueseli, Palmer and Turner, to name but a few, all explore visually intense recreations of mythic landscapes that are entirely their own yet as British as Bramley apple pie…”

“It’s this tradition that bursts through in the work of Powell and Pressburger. In the 40s and 50s the lush romanticism of such films as A Canterbury Tale and Gone To Earth, rooted in loving depictions of rural landscapes and a deeply felt, quasi-pagan notion of Englishness, was even then seen as eccentric and faintly embarassing, out of tune with the prevailing mode of monochrome documentary.”

“Hammer and its competitors reclaimed the tradition of supernatural horror from Universal studios and replanted it in indigenous soil. Nigel Kneale explored the interface between folk-myth and science fiction in his Quatermass cycle, as did (mainly for television) the playwright David Rudkin, whose Penda’s Fen… combines visions of such legendary figures as King Penda, the last pagan ruler of England, with a quasi-mystical view of the English landscape.”

Avoiding such things may in part be due to budgetary restrictions but I suppose interestingly, if you look at films such as Puffball, In The Dark Side and Kill List, you can see some kind of interweaving between the more realist or almost documentary like side of British film making with elements of folklore and myth, without the need for huge, more expensive spectacles.

And finally, the image below… Shades of Zardoz perchance?…

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

Intertwined wanderings around these parts:
Day #21/365: In The Dark Half

Day #135/365: Kill List

Day #197/365: Huff-ity puff-ity ringstone round; Quatermass and the finalities of lovely lightning

Day #191/365: Penda’s Fen; “Cherish our flame, our dawn will come.”

Day #313/365: The curiousities of Puffball… “Everything has changed, we don’t belong here…”

Day #326/365: Harp In Heaven, curious exoticisms, pathways and flickerings back through the days and years…

 

Week #36/52: Gone To Earth – “What A Queen Of Fools You Be”, Something Of A Return Wandering And A Landscape Set Free

Week #45/52: Quatermass finds and ephemera from back when

Wanderings #24/52a: Zardoz Ephemera / A Revisiting Of Fading Vessellings

Elsewhere in the ether:
The issue in question of Sight And Sound

 

Nowadays appreciations of older fantastic and science fiction television that is part of the hauntological canon of such things are… well, if not two a penny at least reasonably commonplace in certain cultural niches and corners and sometimes in a more mainstream sense.

However, back in 1986 that wasn’t the case anywhere near as much.

And even if it was, it was considerably harder to see such things than in these reissue and digital ease of access times.

So, when I saw this 1986 brochure for the National Film Theatre festival in London it caught my eye due to the strand of showings called Fantastic Television.

As part of that they showed episodes of Dr Who, various Quatermasses, Timeslip, Blake’s Seven, Survivors, Out Of The Unknown, The Andromeda Breakthrough, The Stone Tape, Ace Of Wands, Sapphire and Steel, Doomwatch, Casting The Runes, The Avengers, The Prisoner and various Gerry Anderson programs.

I don’t know the ins and out of video tape issues of these various programmes and series but I expect for some of them this was a particularly rare outing in any form and possibly fairly unusual to present a whole season of them as part of a major, critically lauded and non cult/niche culture orientated film festival.

I particularly like the description that accompanies The Stone Tape:

“How do you capture a Ghost? In the old days people would try with a bell, book and candle, but with today’s technology the obvious answer is a computer. The new inhabitants of a country house discover it to be haunted and decide to programme a sophisticated computer to lay the ghost.”

And also the subtitle for the season “Past Visions Of The Future”, which seems like a hauntological statement of intent before the phrase or philosophical/cultural idea had come into being.

 

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

Intertwined wanderings around these parts:
Well, that would be a fair few I expect but below is a selection or two;
Day #23/365: Nigel Kneale’s The Stone Tape – a study of future haunted media

Day #48/365: Sky: a selection of artifacts from a library of a boy who fell to earth…

Day #183/365: Steam engine time and remnants of transmissions before the flood

Day #202/365: Filming The Owl Service; Tomato Soap and Lonely Stones

Day #236/365: The Owl Service: fashion plates and (another) peek behind the curtain

Day #284/365: Sapphire and Steel; a haunting by the haunting and a denial of tales of stopping the waves of history…

Week #2/52: The Tomorrow People in The Visitor, a Woolworths-esque filter and travels taken…

 

A while ago I wrote If “Sometimes Slightly Dour 1970s Books On Windmills That Have Subtley Gained A Layer Or Two Of Extra Resonance With The Passing Of Time” Was A Quite Long Book Genre…

Well, near to that section in an imagined bookshop/library may well be the “Sometimes Slightly Dour 1970s Books On Stone Circles That Have Subtley Gained A Layer Or Two Of Extra Resonance With The Passing Of Time” section.

There are a lot of books that have been published on stone circles; tourist orientated ones, academic, photographic, photographic/text intertwined, populist etc and a quick glance at say one of the more well known online retailers will bring up a fair few recently published books along those lines.

Which is all good and fine but I tend to find that it’s the accidental older finds that I’m drawn to, books that, well have “gained a layer or two of extra resonance with the passing of time”.

Rings Of Stone by Aubrey Burl and Edward Piper, published in 1979, would be one of those.

I think it would be the above pages that first caught my eye… there’s something about them, particularly the one on the right that just seems a little too… angular? Geometric?

They put me in mind of the reflective sculptures/weapons around the dome in Phase IV.

While the above image just seems, well, wrong, while also being a good capturing of a particular atmosphere and spirit of time and place.

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

Intertwined wanderings around these parts:
Day #149/365: Phase IV – lost celluloid flickering (return to), through to Beyond The Black Rainbow and journeys Under The Skin

Week #5/52: The Right Side Of The Hedge – gardens where (should we?) feel secure and velocipede enhanced long arms…

Week #15/52: Phase IV / a revisiting / the arrival of artifacts lost and found and curious contrasts

Wanderings #9/52a: If “Sometimes Slightly Dour 1970s Books On Windmills That Have Subtley Gained A Layer Or Two Of Extra Resonance With The Passing Of Time” Was A Quite Long Book Genre

Wanderings #11/52a: Ancient Lands And A Very Particular Atmosphere From Back When

Elsewhere in the ether:
Peruse the book here.

 

A gathering of a few Zardoz related ephemera… the novelisation, the Arrow Bluray release and its earlier HD counterpart and one of the laserdiscs…

…because, well, there’s nothing quite like revisiting a relatively big budget, big name, genuine cinematic oddity that could be said to create its own particular take on psychedelia, back out to the country utopianism and heavy, heavy (man) post 1960s comedowns…

Or to quote myself:

“It feels like a genuinely psychedelic and dreamlike experience in many ways… a dissonant, challenging blockbuster/spectacle film in a way, full of “I can’t actually believe that this was allowed to come to the big screen” moments, questioning of societies actions, elements of 20th century fairy tales and philosophy amongst, well, the thigh length boots, nudity, guns and entertainment.”

Now, you could spend all day (well, a fair few hours) browsing the various Zardoz related memorabilia, although largely it would be variations on similar themes – a handful of period magazines, the varying video/DVD/Bluray/laserdisc releases and different countries posters and lobby cards.

One of the few actually different items that you may come across though are a handful of contact sheets.

Its hard to know if these are the original “tumbled out of the dark room from back when” sheets or reprints but I’m quite drawn to them.

Although I’m not somebody who has a didactic, either/or view on digital versus analogue technology and processes, I have found a certain magic to occur within dark rooms and contact sheets seem like very genuine, scarce and precious artifacts.

Laserdiscs meanwhile seem like such, to use that word again, oddities in the modern world. Or maybe that should be stranded artifacts.

They’re very solid, almost monumental seeming things, heavy, physically large and films sometimes came on more than one disc in gatefold sleeves and are an interesting way of seeing related artwork – collectible in themselves even without the ability to play them.

Despite the fact that this laserdisc copy of Zardoz is fading and corroding I know there may well be a frame or two of “He who fights too long against dragons, becomes a dragon himself” tales on there somewhere,

However, on this side of the pond and on this particular island laser disc players were such relative rarities and the technology required so specific that it is a genie (or should that be a reverse wizard of Oz?) caught in a relatively inoperable jar.

Even with something like say old 35mm trailer reels without a projector you can still hold them up to the light to see the individual frames and with cassette tape there are still plenty of cassette players knocking about the world and  tapes themselves are still being replicated.

…but laser discs.

Nope.

The last new disc was released in 2000 and although the players themselves were still sold in very limited and fairly pricey quantities until 2009, decent used working players in the UK are increasingly hard to find.

(I say decent as surprisingly, although they look like a forerunner to DVDs, as with vinyl, audio and video cassettes this was an analogue system and so the better players give a better picture and sound.)

 

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

Intertwined wanderings around these parts:
Day #177/365: Zardoz… in this secret room from the past, I seek the future…

Day #356/365: Audiological Reflections and Pathways #6; fading vessellings

Elsewhere in the ether:
Details of laserdisc players here (or electro-mechanical helium-neon laser players and Discovision).

 

I’ve been rather taken by the Malcolm Pointon album Electromuse that was released by Public Information.

Some electronic music from earlier eras I can sometimes find more interesting culturally than as work to actually sit down and listen to.

However the tracks presented here are a different deal altogether.

Particularly Symbiosis, especially once it really kicks in around 2:30 into it’s playing time.

This is threatening, engrossing music.

It sounds like all of the contemporary electronic takes on what has come to be known as hauntology synthesized (literally) and boiled down into one piece of work.

As I listen to it again, it puts me in mind of early Human League’s darker, instrumental, artsy but not self indulgent older brother – Being Boiled Plus Plus.

Good stuff.

And talking of hauntology – the cover art – just a stark presentation of one of the original tapes seems as though it could have tumbled from a spectral hauntology film project (the made-at-home, good old British pluck companion to The Berberian Sound Studio?).

Similar could be said of the accompanying studio-like tracklisting and tape speed.

And although of its time much of the work here sounds curiously contemporary. Possibly in part because some of the sounds, styles and atmospheres to be found on the album have been revisited by some of hauntology but I think it’s more than that…

…maybe it’s that there’s a certain, hmmm, not necessarily timelessness but maybe more a sense that this is in part unexplored, un-heavily harvested work.

Something interesting I read about Malcolm Pointon was that although the members of The Radiophonic Workshop often receive much of the attention and plaudits, here was a gent separate to all that and its associated state sponsorship – this was literally personal, private endeavour and that just mentioned good old British pluck.

 

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

Elsewhere in the ether:
The album was compiled by Ian Helliwell and Public Information. It can be perused further here.

 

I’m rather taken by George Shiras’ photography and the book collection of it In The Heart Of The Dark Night, published by Éditions Xavier Barral.

George Shiras was a pioneer of night time flash photography, particularly regarding nature photography.

His photographs show a world never seen and/or captured in this way before and they seem to have an almost otherworldy air to them.

The level of patience and hit-or-miss, sometimes literally dangerous techniques for creating flash that he used somewhat beggars belief in our more “I’ve got most of the techology I need for that sort of thing in my pocket, via a small computer/optical/communication device that’s quite a bit smaller than a paperback book” days.

In those days it was essentially about setting fire to and quick explosions of flammable powders and the like.

Alongside spending nights and nights or months and months waiting patiently for the right moment to light the taper as it were.

The book itself is a rather lovely artifact – one of those things that you want to hold delicately as it feels precious.

Nice cloth cover, tipped in cover image, embossed silver spine text and paper that is glossy but subtley textured and without the mainstream ubiquity feel that gloss can sometimes have.

A fine thing to be out in the world.

 

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

Intertwined wanderings around these parts:
Wanderings #21/52a: Vortex Views / The Extraordinary Beauty Of Birds

Elsewhere in the ether:
In The Heart Of The Dark Night at Éditions Xavier Barral.

 

And while we’re talking about nicely put together books of photography…

Deborah Samuel’s The Extraordinary Beauty Of Birds.

This is a book that focuses on, well, birds but not in a normal nature photography manner – the photographs here are nearer to a fine art project detailed study of, well, the details of birds.

The photographs often involve close ups of the design, pattern and colours of feathers and other features, eggs are seen in some kind of perfectly captured stillness that blends scientific photography documentation and something much more creative or expressive.

I was particularly drawn to the images of nests – the swirl, shape and seeming almost vortex of them. They veer ever so slightly towards the sinister in a way I can’t quite put my finger on.

Well worth a stop, look and see. Just for the sheer beauty of the photographs and also to take in an appreciate a somewhat unique perspective on nature photography.

 

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

Elsewhere in the ether:
The book at its publishing home in the ether. Deborah Samuel’s home for the work in the ether.

 

Now, I was somewhat wary of watching Watership Down – I remember seeing it when I was young and finding it in parts genuinely disturbing…

Anyways, I sat down with the Criterion Collection release to see what I thought a fair few years later on.

It’s a curious film. It had a U certificate, a number one hit song (penned by Mike “Wombles and Steeleye Span” Batt no less) and I think was marketed quite heavily to/aimed at children but it’s really not a children’s film.

Well, at least not in a conventional, purely escapist manner.

It sort of exists in a land of it’s own (grown-up children’s cinema?) and is quite dark, without being overly oppressive/somber and deals quite specifically with questions of mortality.

In parts it feels nearer to the fantasy like tales of European/Czech New Wave cinema than home grown, grounded film making – it is both realist and quite fantastical, strongly mixing myth amongst the British natural landscape.

I think one of the things that gave it a surreal edge for me was Richard Brier, sitcom stalwart and one of the stars of the gentle self-sufficiency comedy The Good Life, doing the main voice; the sound of him automatically makes me expect that nothing truly bad will happen but well that’s probably not quite the case here.

Although actually, the scene I was most dreading (I expect you’ll know the one I mean if you’ve seen the film), a dread carried over from younger years, while still quite brutal and disturbing is mercifully brief and not the endless, relentless non-escape that I seemed to remember it as.

As is often the way, the Criterion Collection release is a lovely thing and rather nicely designed.

It seems to reflect the more adult nature of the film’s themes, the sense of myth it explores and the way it wanders amongst a flipside of more bucolic representations of life in the country.

 

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

Elsewhere in the ether:
The Criterion Collection release and trailer.

 

When I was younger I used to thoroughly enjoy the likes of then very mainstream, often peak time TV viewing comedians such as Mike Harding, Jasper Carrott and Billy Connolly.

Back then I didn’t necessarily know or look into all that much the cultural origins or history of such entertainers – they just made me laugh and that was all good and fine.

Over the years I have accidentally come across things such as an old folk club flyer in an exhibition that features one of those comedians or the documentary Acoustic Routes on folk musician Bert Jansch, that was presented by Billy Connolly, in which he discusses his roots and connections with folk back when, which made me realise these comedians’ folk roots.

Which leads me back to Mike Harding.

A recent(ish) charity shop find was Mike Harding’s Walking The Peak And Pennines book.

It’s a nicely put together book that, well, does what it says on the can/cover – it’s an almost diary like document of Mike Harding walking that part of the country, with some good scenic photography taken by him.

It was the quote on the back cover that I was drawn to in particular:

“Wherever you walk on the hills, moors and in the valleys of the Peak and Pennines, you walk on the bones of those who have been there before you – from Roman legions to itinerant packmen, from monks to ranting Methodist parsons, from hand-loom weavers to mill poets – and if you listen carefully enough you can hear the echoes of their voices still singing in the wind.”

It put me in mind of the quietly left-of-centre-ness take on the layering of the land’s history and tales in Johnny Flynn’s title track for the TV series Detectorists (itself in part a quietly left-of-centre-ness take on the layering of the land’s history and tales):

“Will you search through the lonely earth for me
Climb through the biar and bramble
I’ll be your treasure…
I felt the touch of the kings and the breath of the wind, I knew the call of all the song birds…
I’m with the ghosts of the men who can never sing again…”

 

(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:
Later wanderings amongst the byways of folk by the gents who made me laugh:
Jasper Carrott looking back on his days at the Boggery Folk Club.
Billy Connolly presenting the Acoustic Routes documentary about sometime Pentangle-r Bert Jansch.
Mike Harding still listening and transmitting amongst the airwaves.
Further Midlands folk clubbery from back when.
Walking The Peak And Pennines For But A Few Pence can be found here.

 

And while we’re talking about worrisome fantastical creatures from back when and not-quite-so-mainstream pastoralism…

I find the the yetis/abominable snowmen from vintage Doctor Who rather reiminiscent of the folk costumes from over the seas in Charles Fréger’s Wilder Mann book.

In fact, many of the costumes in Wilder Mann could well be escapees (prototypes?) for the 1970s British BBC costume and creature effect department.

Some of my favourite photographs of the yetis are the behind the scenes ones.

They’re curiously disarming, especially considering how they once had a nation wanting to hide behind the sofa…

…particularly this image with the yeti being groomed while “going over lines” with that gent from Gallifrey…

 

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

Intertwined wanderings around these parts:
Day #69/365: Charles Fréger’s Wilder Mann and rituals away from the shores of albion

Other behind-the-scenes views of fantastical fictions from back when:
Day #202/365: Filming The Owl Service; Tomato Soap and Lonely Stones

Wanderings #17/52a: Not So Abounding Faceless Automatons And Not-Quite-So-Mainstream Crafting

Elsewhere in the ether:
Charles Fréger’s Wilder Mann in it’s natural habitat and at Dewi Lewis Publishing (often worth a look-see at what they’re sending out into the world I find).