Category: AYITC: Year 3

Now, I’m rather fond of Sapphire & Steel: I think it stands up well in being both thoroughly entertaining and also having various otherly, spectral, hauntological resonances and points of interest.

Often when I’m quite taken by a film or television I’ll find myself browsing related memorabilia, posters, lobby cards etc…

Which I have done with Sapphire & Steel, although there isn’t all that much available, possibly in part because it was made in a time before the thorough saturation of such things for the likes of cult, science fiction and fantasy television.

I actually think with Sapphire & Steel it exists perfectly well on its own without endless merchandise but longstanding habits can reappear as if by magic and a reasonable number of related things seemed to have “accidentally” arrived through my letterbox…

Here are a few of those and also a few I’ve resisted so far…

The Sapphire & Steel annual and novel tie-in…

The artwork in the annual is not dissimilar to that in the Look-Ins of the time, which was a television orientated weekly comic/magazine for younger folk which featured stories based on broadcast series and characters (Sapphire & Steel being one of those featured).

It is quite odd; there’s a sort of deliberate almost brutish / primitive / slightly off-kilter feel to it that puts me in mind of illustrations in the Doctor Who annuals from a similar time.

…and then on to later cult fan publications from 1989 and 2005…

I’m rather fond of this publicity still from the final (and very final) episode. It puts me in mind of an earlier era in the way it reflects 1960s kitchen sink post-war austerity and lack of showiness, filtered gently through a later period’s lens.

There have been a fair few British and elsewhere DVD releases of Sapphire & Steel… and (note to self), no it is not necessary to own them all just to peruse the packaging and the sometimes minute differences in how the episodes are presented.

And now… well, the grail of all things Sapphire & Steel:

The 1979 TV Times magazine which featured our heroes (is that the right word?) on the cover.

This was a weekly television listings magazine and I guess because of it only being needed for one week, very few have survived.

Over time, the very mainstream content of such magazines seems to have gained extra layers of resonance; possibly partly because of their nowadays scarcity and maybe also because they can capture or present a brief window into what seems like a very other time and place.

I have found a copy of the TV Times in question but I’m not quite sure yet if I can bring myself to tip a… well, not king’s ransom but maybe a small local lord’s ransom in its direction so that it can also “accidentally” arrive through my letterbox.

This magazine clipping/spread is heading in that general direction but well, it’s not that actual brief one-week-window-to-elsewhere of the TV Times.

Sapphire & Steel was intended / marketed / broadcast as mainstream entertainment but viewed now it is very much all of its own and maybe  what I’m looking for when I peruse related memorabilia is something which captures and represents the otherlyness of the series away from it’s mainstream presentation…

…but that otherly spirit is an elusive thing and possibly it being so phantasm like in nature, while being mixed in inseparably with that mainstream presentation is part of what makes the series so intriguing.

And so maybe (note so self) even that fairly elusive TV Times issue won’t put any kind of butterfly net around that particular spirit.

Hmmm.

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

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

Week #27/52: Sapphire & Steel, various ghosts in the machine and a revisiting of broken circuits…

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

I have something of a soft spot for Rif Mountain, which is a label / endeavour that has been a home for the likes of The Owl Service, Jason Steel, Robert Sunday, The A-Lords and sometimes A Year In The Country fellow travellers The Straw Bear Band.

For a while now it had been relatively quiet around those parts but recently there was something of a flurry of activity and these three fine beauties wandered through my letter box.

One of the things I appreciate with Rif Mountain releases is that they seem to contain a mixture of subtley left-of-centre-ness while also being particularly accessible.

Along which lines, back during the first spin-around-the-sun of A Year In The Country I said of The Owl Service’s Rif Mountain released The View From A Hill:

“The music? Well, I guess it could be categorised as folk but it has it’s own take or edge to it… many of these songs are folk music mainstays and both musically and visually it uses what could be considered standard tropes of folk music, folklore and culture…

…but this is anything but a mainstream folk album. Why? Well, I can’t quite put my finger on it but there are other layers and intelligence to it all, a pattern beneath the plough as it were. As an album it feels subtley experimental but still maintains it’s listenability.”

(In the case of these more recent releases, alongside the more overtly folk work of The Straw Bear Band, can be found the intimate, lone singers and tellers of tales Jason Steel and Robert Sunday.)

Part of what draws me to Rif Mountain is the packaging and design, which is often (generally?) done by Straw Bear Band-er and sometimes Owl Service-r Dom Cooper.

His work blends traditional folk tropes with a particularly classy and nicely done modern take on such things or to again quote myself, he may well use…

“…quite simple, modern and minimal design work in conjunction with matt card/printing to conjure up and reinterpret the imagery and spirit of folklore’s past.”

With his work the imagery is complimented by the physicality of the releases themselves, which combine to give them a very precious, tactile feeling that always makes me want to handle them carefully and gently.

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

Intertwined wanderings around these parts:
Day #30/365: The Owl Service – A View From A Hill

Day #170/365: Who’s afear’d: Dom Cooper & reinterpreting signs, signals and traditions…

Elswhere in the ether:
On this brace of releases you will find the earlier mentioned Jason Steel, The Straw Bear Band and Robert Sunday. They can be perused and purchased at Rif Mountain’s main home in the ether…

…and as is the modern way, they have a number of “outhouses” and the like: modern-day social gathering place, their visual library, gramophone room, other gramophone room, music filing / archiving, recordings from spinning the zeros and ones wheels of steel and picture box.

And something of a personal favourite at one of those gramophone rooms: the Vexed Soul EP, wherein traditional folk songs are revisited and reinterpreted, alongside more, shall we say “factory folk” music.

(If you should appreciate such revisitings and reinterpretings, I would also recommend a visit to 16 Horsepower’s channelling of related work here.)

Dom Cooper’s home in the ether can be found here.

It’s a curious thing with field recording and the way in which what could well have its roots in utilitarian, scientific recording of sound has gained in parts a sort of extra layer of creative resonance and wandered somewhere else.

Along which lines, the An Antidote To Indifference – Field Recording Special #2 publication.

This was released by Caught By The River and edited by Cheryl Tipp, who works in the Wildlife And Environmental Sounds archive of the British Library.

It is a beautifully put together… hmmm, I wouldn’t call it a magazine or fanzine, though it has elements of both – maybe I should just stick with publication as that seems suitable.

The design in part uses elements of what previously I have called “otherly geometry”, in a manner similar to say Folklore Tapes David Chatton-Barker or Ghost Box Records Julian House (in fact I was surprised to see that neither of them had worked on at least the cover) and the whole thing is clearly a labour of love.

I have described such work as often seeming “…to make use of geometric shapes and patterns to invoke a particular kind of otherlyness, to allow a momentary stepping elsewhere…”; in this particular instance that somewhere else may well be a sense of the spirit of that earlier mentioned extra layer resonance within some field recording work.

The contents take in literal out-in-the-fields field recording, the points at which field recordings meet imagined parallel versions of themselves, Howlround gent Robin The Fog rhapsodising about particular “sound arranged delightfully” creative techniques, Cheryl Tipp’s own Sound and Song in the Natural World piece, Recording the Sounds of the World’s First Computers…

I suppose a prime expample of the way in which field recording has moved from its more scientific routes to being nearer to a form of artistic expression could be found in the almost… no, actually singularly, fetishistic quality of the very precise listing of the details and recording equipment used for the moth sounds in the credits of Peter Strickland’s The Duke Of Burgundy film.

(And I suppose looking at the roots of the word fetish as charm, sorcery and made by art may be apt in this context).

In an interlinked manner, reading those credits, Cheryl Tipp may well have helped gather those sounds and details together as she is listed as having helped on that aspect of the film.

If you should be interested in wandering further than some possible pathways may well be the film Silence, which has been described as navigating the path between fiction and documentary, the field recording maestro work of former Cabaret Voltaire gent Chris Watson, who is also featured in the Field Recording publication (does he never get tired or stop and rest I often wander when I hear his work) and Cathy Lane & Angus Argyle’s In The Field: The Art Of Field Recording book.

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

Intertwined wanderings around these parts:
Day #142/365: Fog Signals/Ghost signals from lost transmission centres

Day #209/365: Signal and signposts from and via Mr Julian House (#2); the worlds created by an otherly geometry

Elswhere in the ether:
Peruse the Field Recording Special #2 at Caught By The River. Cheryl Tipps’s curating at the British Library here and a smattering of I think her own recordings here.