Category: AYITC: Year 6

For the final post of the year I thought I would gather together some of the film and television novelisations and tie-in novels of some of the recurring reference points and inspirations for A Year In The Country, of which I have previously written:

“Often, when I was young, [novelisation and tie-in novels] were the only access I had to particular films and television shows, particularly in the days before home video releases of things became more ubiquitous, if the films etc were ‘too grown up’ for me to watch (!), I’d missed them at the cinema and so on. Viewed nowadays they can also have a particular period charm to them and can sometimes be almost like mini time capsules of particular eras.”

As I’ve also written about in an earlier post, I’m not sure that novelisations of films and television are quite as prevalent as they once were. Perhaps now that people have easier access to the actual films and television series  there isn’t such a demand for them.

Also possibly with more niche films the number of potential readers and related budget would be too small to make it practical. It’s a shame really. Possibly for similar reasons fotonovels / fumetti adapatations which use stills from their source films don’t seem to be around much any more either , which is also a shame as I’ve always had quite a soft spot for them and they’re a good way of seeing and collecting together images from a film.

Above is the French fumetti adaptation of The Curse of the Crimson Altar featuring Barbara Steele in her horned priestess outfit, which in terms of style is probably the definitive otherly pastoral image of a “baddie”.

The post has “cathode ray” in the title as I think the majority of the related films and series I first saw on television and also, as with say some vintage hardware synthesizers, there’s a certain nostalgic romance and hauntological-like character to cathode ray television images and associated interference, glitches, scan lines and so on.

Collecting the books together also lets me revisit some of those recurring reference points and return to some longstanding cultural “friends”, while also rounding the circle of the year.

As a side note, Fantom Publishing have been reissuing some of the novelisations of ’70s children’s television dramas which have become hauntological and otherly pastoral reference points, including the rural time rift tale Children of the Stones, Arthurian eco fantasy tale Raven and the also Arthurian mystical The Moon Stallion, along with releasing a new novelisation of “the boy who fell to Earth” eco science fiction series Sky. The editions are handsomely presented in a distinctive in-house style that feature silhouette based illustrations inspired by the stories.

Above is The Midwich Cuckoos “Filmed by M.G.M. as The Village of the Damned” tie-in edition book cover. This may well be the definitive novel and film of things going science fictionally awry in the bucolic setting of a British village. The “Midwich Cuckoo” on the left of the book’s cover looks curiously both angelic and threateningly terrifying.

The Owl Service’s tie-in edition book cover does not really reveal or all that much hint at the mystical rural nature of the series, although the press quote on the back cover remedies that somewhat:

“Youth and love and fear in a modern summer, a Welsh valley where an age-old legend still has to live itself out again, generation after generation.”

Time to go and revisit the rather fine opening sequence for the series, which I think is probably one of the definitive otherly pastoral-esque of such things.

And then there is the cover for Nigel Kneale’s novel of the final series of Quatermass which is something of a classic design in all its posterised glory. I suspect finding a copy of this in the bargain book stand of a local newsagent many years ago and the story’s themes of dystopia, mysterious alien contact and stone circles as gathering and possibly reaping places is one of the main wellsprings that eventually led to A Year In The Country.

“Huffity puffity ringstone round…”

Above is John Boorman and Bill Stair’s novel of Zardoz. Problems with immortality, invisible barriers, entropic advanced technological and medieval lifestyles, The Wizard of Oz, a giant flying head…

As I’ve said before, Zardoz is such an odd and peculiar “Quite how did they get away with making that?” film.

And then there’s the novel of the cultural behemoth and folk horror wellspring The Wicker Man. The original novel was published five years after the film was released and the cover in this post is one of the various reissues, which featured a foreword by Allan Brown who wrote Inside The Wicker Man.

The above right images are beind the scenes photographs of the construction of The Wicker Man structure but they could just as easily be images of an attempt to entrap this “creature”.

Above is the cover of Brian Freemantle’s rare and often hard to find novelisation of The Touchables film released in 1968. The film is something of a unique late ’60s psychedelic romp; where else will you find a story set in a huge see-through rurally based and real world life-sized inflatable bubble, complete with fairground attractions and a missing pop star?

And of course, creator of the series Peter J. Hammond’s Sapphire and Steel novel tie-in: “This is the trap. This is nowhere, and it’s forever.” Brrr.

Above is one of the novel tie-ins of The Prisoner. If you have ever visited the real world village resort of Portmeirion where much of the series was filmed you may well think of the series as a dream set within a dream…

And then there is Phase IV. The legendary and long thought lost original psychedelic ending finally had a home release as an extra included with the reissue of the film in 2020, the announcement of which was good to hear. Next step a release of the film with the original ending restored and in pace.

Above is the cover for one of the The Tomorrow People tie-in novels, the opening sequence for which I have previously written that it seems like a mixture of “The Owl Service [opening sequence], The Modern Poets book covers from back when, Mr Julian House’s work tumbling backwards and forwards through time and the audiologica of The Radiophonic Workshop… but all filtered somehow through an almost Woolworths-esque take on such things… Despite that Woolworths-esque filter and the inclusion of a somewhat incongruous sliced pepper in amongst the other more overtly unsettling imagery, I still find it unsettling now.”

In terms of hauntological and/or otherly pastoral reference points it can be filed alongside the likes of the introduction sequences for The Owl Service, Children of the Stones, Noah’s Castle and The Omega Factor.

Then finally there is the 1959 edition of Mary Webb’s Gone to Earth, which features cover art taken from promotional artwork for Powell and Pressburger’s film adaptation released in 1950. Below is text on the book quoted from A Year In The Country: Wandering Through Spectral Fields:

There is something notably “otherly” about a number of the title, credit and introduction sequences for the likes of 1970s and late 1960s television such as The Owl Service, Children of the Stones, The Tomorrow People and The Omega Factor; they are often like a distilled, concentrated version of the series’ at times more subtly off kilter, unsettling atmospheres.

The sense of their oddness can be heightened by the way that their recordings are often preceded by period TV station idents, which if you are of a certain age are very evocative of… distant hazy memories? A world that now seems very much apart from today?

Around the beginning of the 1980s whatever that otherlyness was in such sequences seemed to fade away and in a post in the first year of A Year In The Country I discussed how that may have been connected to wider changes in society.

The images in this post are from one of the introduction sequences for 1970s young adult anthology supernatural drama television series Shadows.

In it a silhouetted bird flies across a minimal green landscape and blue sky, which then fills with traditional terraced but mostly Brutalist architecture that begins to spin around and the colour fades to a murky blue grey.

A fierce looking girl then appears in front of the swirling buildings, staring unflinchingly at the viewer.

The buildings become ghostly spectres and fade away, leaving the girl stood alone in a once again minimal but this time all blue and grey landscape. As she stands stock still her shadow playfully skips with a skipping rope, a silhouetted bird flies behind her and then she fades into the background and the landscape turns darker and the sky becomes purple.

An empty rocking chair appears in front of her; it rocks and its shadow has somebody sitting in it. This then fades to any angry looking duotone sea with a murky narrow band of purple sky above it before the series’ name suddenly appears.

Its intertwining of these elements seems like a curiously prescient expression of the way that otherly pastoral / wyrd rural culture has come to intertwine with hauntological and urban wyrd orientated culture.

 

The original post published during the first year of A Year In The Country:

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

 

The images above and the first one below are some of the more traditional rural / folk ritual examples of folk art from the book and exhibition Folk Archive: Contemporary Popular Art from the UK, created and collected by Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane.

As I wrote in A Year In The Country: Wandering Through Spectral Fields:

“The phrase ‘folk art’ often conjures or represents a particular quite well-defined, often rural or cottage industry aesthetic and has been frequently used to refer more to work from previous eras but The Folk Archive does not make such distinctions… In the pages of the book you can find largely photographic images of tattoos/tattoo guns, artwork from prisons, burger van signs, illustrations painted onto the bonnets of cars and crash helmets, fairground paintings, sandcastles, cake decorations, Christmas decorations, protest banners, shop signs, decorative costume for a night out or a carnival, clairvoyant’s hand created signs, crop circles and the trappings of what could be considered traditional folkloric rituals.”

A distinctive example of fairground paintings as a form of vernacular or folk art are those on the closed fairground rides in a shot on location scene in the 1976 television sitcom spinoff film The Likely Lads. The artwork has in part an almost outsider art-like character to it and the style of it is notably different to “the glossy hyper realist artwork which often features at fairgrounds today”.

The fairground’s artwork is very evocative of a past era, and it’s style and character makes it seem as though it could be from a much earlier part of the twentieth century rather than just a few decades ago. This is not dissimilar to the way that some of Barbara Jones’ illustrations in her book Unsophisticated Arts of the everyday vernacular or folk art of 1940s fairgrounds, tattoo parlours, houseboats, seaside piers, amusement arcades etc at times captures and depicts atmospheres and aesthetics which seem both as though they could have been from a time long before that decade and also to belong to a time all of their own.

The original post published during the first year of A Year In The Country:

• Day #148/365: Folk Archive

 

A while ago in a second-hand bookshop I came across a slightly battered and faded copy of display copy only,: a book of Intro work. Published in 2001 it is a collection of design work done by Intro, the design company which Julian House of Ghost Box Records is a partner and creative director of.

The book features some of his early design work for Broadcast and the band are discussed in John O’Reilly’s introduction, where he talks about how some of the record sleeves for Barry Adamson, Luke Slater and Broadcast  “take on the collective mythology of cinema”.

Below is the text in his introduction where O’Reilly writes about Broadcast, which stuck in my head somewhat, in particular the part about their music being “a jagged angular take on rollneck-sweater 1960s pop”, which seemed like a very evocative and concise summing up of early(ish) Broadcast’s Alphaville-esque pop world:

“The most striking allusion to the cinematic medium is Broadcast’s The Noise Made by People. The sleeve becomes the title sequence of a movie as the chunky, brutalist Saul Bass-like typography solidifies the sleeve image. Members of the band are pictured inside the letters – characters of the Broadcast ‘film’. The Noise Made by People is a jagged angular take on rollneck-sweater 1960s pop. When you open the CD, the cracked concrete effect of the cover materializes as the sleeve and cover separate. The lyrics and images for the 12 tracks are on three separate cards, each resembling a detail from a film poster… The disconnectedness of the inner sleeve, its incompleteness, the fact it’s not quite whole, isn’t a designer’s whim. It is directly linked to the dynamic of melancholy that is at the heart of Broadcast’s music. Musically, Broadcast’s sad tone inhabits the flat vocals of Trish Keenan, the minor key in which the songs are composed and the restless sonic detours, which promise to take you somewhere before drifting away. This melancholy is pictured on the sleeve itself, in the images of the band in the lettering, where each cropped facial shot captures them in a private moment of reflection or gazing into the distance, looking for some promise of completion that will never arrive.”

The artwork from The Noise Made by People is later reproduced in the book across six pages. display copy only is now long out of print but can still be found used online at prices that seem to vary from decidedly pocket-money friendly to not expensive but not cheap either.

As I’ve discussed before one of Broadcast’s final releases, the rare and hard to find EP / mini-album Mother is the Milky Way, pointed to a fascinating future for them in the way it melded and interwove the personal, avant-garde and exploratory tendencies, pastoralism and pop sensibilities in a hypnagoic dream of “milling around the village”.

Broadcast were a fine example of pop’s tendency to find inspiration and reference points via all kinds of cultural avenues and particularly in their interviews they often laid a trail of cultural breadcrumbs that could lead to all kinds of fascinating finds:

Without realising, in recent years I seem to have amassed quite a few books published between 2008-2011 that collect record cover art and packaging. They tend to collect work from independent and niche releases and almost solely concentrate on CDs, and some of the packaging designs are intriguingly complex and lavish. In a more recently published book on record sleeve art that I looked at a lot of the releases were on vinyl and, while the design work was interesting, the packaging was fairly uniform. This was presumedly in part because the larger size of vinyl sleeves and overall falling sales of music on physical media means that producing custom vinyl sleeves is prohibitively costly.

Viewed now the books seem like something of a time capsule snapshot of a fading era in the 2000s when, although CD sales had fallen by 60% or more since their peak in 2000 they were still quite high, and I assume therefore they were still able to more easily support bespoke packaging design. Also the books are a snapshot of the period before the current upsurge in vinyl sales and an accompanying move of much of niche music back onto vinyl only releases.

Anyways, back to Broadcast. It’s always a treat to come across some of their cover art in one of these books. Above are the covers to Ha Ha Sound and Pendulum in 1,000 Supreme CD Designs.

In fact it’s a treat to come across Broadcast in unexpected places anywhere really. Above is a copy of their early(ish) single Come On Let’s Go that I found recently(ish) in a charity shop.

It seems quite rare nowadays that I come across CDs that catch my eye in charity shops, and it’s almost as if CD production stopped around 2003 as most of the CDs I do find tend to be dated no later than that. Perhaps a lot of the more niche CDs are now sold online either via individuals and small businesses on Discogs and/or the large-scale mega listers of used CDs, books and DVDs elsewhere online.

Below is a gathering and revisiting of some other Broadcast book, magazine etc appearances that I’ve written about before at A Year In The Country:

Broadcast in the somewhat hauntological issue 32 of Shindig! magazine, which also featured articles on Berberian Sound Studio, giallo cinema, synth duo Emerald Web, the Children’s Film Foundation and Ghost Box Records. The original printing is sold out but it is now available to buy again in a bespoke printed format at the Shindig! website

The aforementioned interview with Broadcast by Joseph’s Stannard in issue 308 of Wire magazine and its unedited transcript on the magazine’s website have been something of a recurring reference point for A Year In The Country in its interweaving of otherly pastoral and hauntological-esque reference points and a sense of creating or stepping into alternate or parallel personal and cultural worlds and reality:

“I like those moments in British films like The Wicker Man and The Witches, when you’re not quite sure if the people of the village know all about the odd occurrences or not but an accidental citing or overheard conversation reveals that they are as much apart of the bizarre set up as the suspicious and aloof owner of the stately home… 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. Bands like The United States Of America, White Noise, A To Austr and a recently discovered album for me, The Mesmerizing Eye, all use audio collage, clashes of sound that work more in the way the mind works, the way life works, extreme juxtapositions of memories and heavy traffic noise say, or reading emails and wasps coming through the window. But as well, I feel that in my own small way I am part of that psych band continuum, but in a make-believe reality stemmed off to exist outside of the canon.” (Trish Keenan quoted from the unedited transcript.)

The Music Made by People was also featured in the 2002 book Sampler 2: Art, Pop and Contemporary Music Graphics, which was written and designed by Intro:

“The work contained [in the book] tends to veer towards designs to accompany abstract(ish) electronica and is often kind of lovely, slightly arch, slightly distant, deeply philosophic” (Quoted from an earlier post at A Year In The Country.)

Above are examples of Broadcast wandering overseas and on the covers of Mucchio and Rockerilla magazines and these were published at a time when Broadcast were still being connected with and promoted by indie music orientated press.

Particularly in the image of Broadcast on the cover of Rockerilla there is a sense of channeling some slightly undefined past decade’s vision of the future…

… talking of which and the above mentioned “rollneck-sweater 1960s pop” and Alphaville-esque – above is a promotional photograph for the band.

 

Links:

• Broadcast’s page at Warp Record’s site
• James Cargill of Broadcast’s Soundcloud page
• A collection of Julian House’s artwork at Flickr
• The Broadcast cover feature edition of Shindig! magazine
• The unedited transcript of Joseph Stannard’s interview with Broadcast at Wire magazine

 

Elsewhere at A Year In The Country: 

• 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
• Broadcast and The Focus Group’s #1: Witch Cults and #2: I See, So I See So
• Broadcast – Recalibration, Constellation and Exploratory Pop
• Broadcast; Constellators and Artifacts
• Broadcast; Constellators and Artifacts (Revisiting)
• The Viewing Portals of Children Of Alice
• Broadcast and The Focus Group – #2: I See, So I See So: Audio Visual Transmission Guide #11/52a
• Broadcast and The Focus Group – #1: Witch Cults: Audio Visual Transmission Guide #3/52a
• Broadcast – Mother is the Milky Way and Gently Milling Around Avant-Garde, Non-Populist Pop
• Broadcast and the Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age and the Recalibrations of Past Cathode Ray Stories

 

In the first year of A Year In The Country I wrote the following about The Garden of Earthly Delights by United States of America, whose work I discovered via interviews with Broadcast, who have talked about how the band were a particular inspiration and influence for them:

“[It] is a fine example of pop meeting the avant-garde; it’s a quite simply fantastic, driving, catchy ‘tune’ but at the same time the lyrics seem as though they should be sat in amongst the darkest reaches and etchings of some long-lost particularly dark psych / acid folk record – maybe something that would sit alongside / amongst the work of Comus or some of the songs of Forest… this is a tale of Eden gone particularly rotten, more Venus Fly Traps double plus than English rose arcadia and looking at the lyrics written down, they’re genuinely unsettling, a dream that you would be particularly glad to no longer be amongst but also not so happy to have woken from and left with the residues.”

The Garden of Earthly Delights is the second track on the album and is preceded by Cloud Song. This is a gentle pastoral dream of a song which somewhat lulls the listener almost into a sleep-like state of calm before the appearance of The Garden of Earthly Delights’ more rambunctious pop and their placing on the album next to one another becomes almost a mirror image yin yang double B-side single that never was.

United States of America only released one album and one single before splitting up in the late ’60s but as referred to above the work they created in the brief time they were together contained an intriguing mixture of the avant-garde and exploratory tendencies intertwined with a pop sensibility – the influence and lineage of which can also be found in Broadcast’s work, particularly on their later releases such as Mother is the Milky Way.

 

The original post published during the first year of A Year In The Country:

• Day #342/365: A garden of (un)earthly delights and a wardrobe of fineries…

 

In A Year In The Country: Wandering Through Spectral Fields I wrote about a number of books and photography projects which “could be seen to document a form of former Soviet Union hauntology [and which often] focuses on monuments and remnants of Cold War era striving, dreams and far-reaching projects.”

The chapter was titled A Bear’s Ghosts: Soviet Dreams and Lost Futures and I also write in the book that:

Released today 17th November 2020.
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.

Features music and accompanying text on the tracks by: Grey Frequency, Field Lines Cartographer, Keith Seatman, Pulselovers, Sproatly Smith, The Howling (Robin The Fog of Howlround and Ken Hollings), Folclore Impressionista, Listening Center, The Séance, Widow’s Weeds, Handspan, The Heartwood Institute, A Year In The Country and Vic Mars.

The Quietened Dream Palace is an exploration of closed down cinemas, including those which have been abandoned, become derelict, reopened as something new or demolished and there is little or no trace of any more.

In part it explores the way that peoples’ experiences and memories of such cinemas, the stories told in them and the buildings themselves have now become merely the ghostly spectres of history and memory. Alongside this the album reflects on the opulent historic design lineage of cinemas and the way that closed, abandoned etc cinemas and recollections of them can become faded snapshots of previous eras’ and places’ design and character.

It is also an interconnected exploration of how closed down cinemas once summoned the stories of their phantom dream worlds via the conjuring/seancing of celluloid film and its flickering light projections, and how this medium and related analogue projection equipment is largely no longer used, with both them and the accompanying skills of analogue projectionists, along with an associated way of life, increasingly becoming lost to time.

The music and accompanying text draws from and intertwines personal and wider cultural and historic memories as it wanders amongst “quietened dream palaces” and the times when they still cast their spell over audiences.

 

The Quietened Dream Palace was planned and a considerable proportion of the related artwork, text and music was created prior to the global events of 2020.

Its central themes relating to abandoned etc cinemas were never intended to refer to or interconnect with the need for cinemas to stay closed during 2020 but we understand that the album will potentially, in part, have a different resonance in the new and changed landscape.

We wish the UK and overseas cinemas all the best in these challenging times. Here’s to many more years of them transporting audiences via the stories projected and told in them.

 

Dawn Light Edition. Limited to 208 copies.
White/black CD album in textured recycled fold-out sleeve with fold-out insert and badge.

Further packaging details:
1) Hand-finished and custom printed by A Year In The Country using archival giclée pigment ink.
2) Includes metal badge, secured with removable glue on string bound tag.
3) 1 x folded sheet of accompanying notes, printed on textured laid paper, hand numbered on back.

 

Tracklisting:
1. Grey Frequency – ABC 123
2. Field Lines Cartographer – Faded Flicker
3. Keith Seatman – Saturday Matinee
4. Pulselovers – The Gaumont Frieze
5. Sproatly Smith – 1 And 3 On The Front
6. The Howling – Scala KX 82
7. Folclore Impressionista – Three Steps In The Dark
8. Listening Center – Meet You Outside The New Metropole
9. The Séance – Minors Club
10. Widow’s Weeds – Celluloid Ghosts
11. Handspan – A World In My Pocket
12. The Heartwood Institute – Carbon Arc
13. A Year In The Country – Memoirs Of A Magic Lantern
14. Vic Mars – Only The Clock Remains

“A set of tracks rooted in real world experience, but which still manage to reach out and touch the unreal and the ethereal…” Stuart Douglas, We Are Cult

 

The Wyrd Britannia festival took place in January 2014, and viewed now it seems like both something of a harbinger of the flowering of interest in “wyrd” folk and rural culture and an early gathering or focal point for such things. It was also possibly an early-ish use of the word wyrd in relation to the rise of interest in such culture.

Wyrd Britannia was described as “A festival of special events in Calderdale libraries throughout 1 week in January, exploring ideas of landscape, folklore, ritual and psychedelia”. It was held to mark the relaunch of Calderdale library’s Wyrd Britannia collection of films, books, music etc, which was said to “reflect the dark and complex underbelly of English rural tradition and beliefs”.

It included free screenings of films which have become part of an almost canonic core of of wyrd film and television, that included The Wicker Man, Robin Redbreast and Penda’s Fen, the latter of which was at the time still quite rare, as it had not yet been restored and had a home release by the BFI.

Alongside those it included readings by Andy Roberts, author of Albion Dreaming: A Popular History of LSD in Britain and Chris Lambert who wrote Tales from the Black Meadow, which is part of a project that explores the myths which surround a moorland area known as Black Meadow, where Professor R. Mullins, who was researching local folklore, is said to have gone missing in 1972.

There was also a performance by Magpahi and Folklore Tapes’ Echo of Light, which was a visual and music collaboration / performance / installation by Alison Cooper (aka Magpahi), Sam McLoughlin (Samandtheplants) and David Chatton-Barker (Folklore Tapes).

I only made it to one of the events, which was something of a magical evening…

 

The original post published during the first year of A Year In The Country:

• Day #9/365: Wyrd Britannia Festival

 

Another slowly growing mini-collection on the shelves of A Year In The Country – this time it’s focused on and around that much-loved saggy old cloth cat Bagpuss.

In this mini-collection there’s the 2005 DVD release of the series (surely it’s time for a Blu-ray upgrade?), a slightly battered copy of Oliver Postgate’s Seeing Things memoir, the 2018 Earth Records release of The Music From Bagpuss and Jonny Trunk and Richard Embray’s The Art of Small Films book.

If you’re reading this I expect you already know about Bagpuss but just in case below is a brief overview of the series:

Bagpuss is a children’s television animated series made by Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin’s Smallfilms and was first broadcast on British television in 1974. Set in some unnamed past era, probably early twentieth century, it is based around a shop owned by a young girl called Emily, in which nothing was sold but rather she displayed lost and broken things in order that their owners would hopefully discover and collect them.

Each episode would begin with a sepia tinted sequence that explained about Emily, the shop and the things in it and then Emily says a magical evocation to wake up her much-loved cloth cat Bagpuss who lives in the shop and she leaves.

Bagpuss and his other toy animal friends would then wake up and come to life and the world would change from sepia to colour and they would discuss what the new object was; someone would then tell a story related to the object, often accompanied by a song which would generally draw from British traditional and folk music. After this the mice in the shop would mend the object while in squeaky voices they would sing to the tune of traditional song Sumer is Icumen In. There would be much banter and bickering between the characters (with pompous academic and wooden woodpecker Professor Yaffle notably often finding fault with the playful mice of shop), but by the end of each episode peace would be restored and the newly mended object would be placed in the shop window, hopefully to be seen and claimed by its owner. Bagpuss would then yawn and fall asleep, with both him and his friends becoming toys again and their world fading once more to sepia.

Writing and re-reading that now, it makes me realise just how odd and fantastical the world and premise of Bagpuss was. A shop that doesn’t sell anything? Whoever heard of such a thing? It almost seems like an accidental comment and rebuttal of the more rapacious aspects of commerce. Also curiously nobody outside of Emily ever seems to see or discover the shop when the toys have sprung to life and their world has become subtly and unreally full of vivid colour. And how did Emily know that they could be brought to life? Where did she discover the magical evocation that brings them to life? And was the “real” world actually sepia coloured, only turning into colour when Bagpuss woke up?

All I can say is that in the world that Bagpuss creates it all makes seamless sense and rational questions do not intrude.

Bagpuss is possibly the most fondly remembered and iconic example of Peter Firmin and Oliver Postgate’s Smallfilms work. As I wrote in A Year In The Country: Wandering Through Spectral Fields “it contains a sweetness, a uniqueness and gentle melancholia that arguably has never been repeated or equalled” and conjures up a sense of a warmly enchanting never-never land.

I first became aware of The Music of Bagpuss album via a review in Actual Size magazine (which was founded by one of the proprietors of Bopcap Books):

“Some 44 years ago, an audience of young children was introduced to and fell under the spell of the titular saggy old cloth cat in a charming, gentle, handmade stop-motion animation. If you need any kind of confirmation of the magic of this show, you only need to listen to the plucked strings of first track ‘Opening’ on this newly-remastered soundtrack album and you’ll be whisked back to that comfy, sepia-tinted world… That’s not to say only fans of the show can enjoy this album; the music here is a beautiful patchwork of British folk which stands up on its own as a really rewarding listen, much like The Wicker Man soundtrack before it… The 32 tracks which make up the main body of the album are – like all good folk music – a patchwork of traditional pieces, half-remembered tunes and pure improvisation.” (Quoted from Helen Skinner’s review of the album in Actual Size.)

Earth Record’s release of The Music From Bagpuss is available in four different editions, including a CD in one of the hardback book style sleeves with inner pages which are being used more frequently of late, including Earth Records reissue of Anne Briggs’ 1971 album The Time Has Come, various of their Bert Jansch releases and their release of the DVD and soundtrack CD of The Ballad of Shirley Collins documentary. These “bookbacks” are a rather handsome way of presenting CDs and DVDs and I wish more people used them, as there’s something about them that makes releases feel more precious or thought about in some way, particularly in contrast to say a standard plastic DVD case without even a booklet, as is often the case with releases.

There are 49 tracks in total on The Music From Bagpuss, including a number of outtakes and alternate versions, and there are also accompanying sleeve notes/essays etc on Bagpuss from Oliver Postgate’s son and illustrator Daniel Postgate, writer and comedian Stewart Lee, singer and songwriter Frances McKee who performed with The Vaselines, Sarah Martin of Belle & Sebastian and Andy Votel of archival record label Finders Keepers Records.

It’s always something of a treat to be able to revisit the folk and traditional music orientated soundtrack for Bagpuss, which was recorded by Sandra Kerr and John Faulkner, and to have it so well presented, restored and comprehensively collected as in this release is icing on the cake. Just writing about it now makes me want to go and relisten to The Miller’s Song and maybe rewatch the accompanying sequence, of which I have previously written that it is a:

“a lilting, life affirming and yet also curiously quietly melancholic song about the cyclical nature of farming and rural life, the growing of crops and the passage of those crops to the mill and eventually via the baker to become loaves of bread… The sequence goes on to include what seems like a curiously out-of-place and anachronistic modern combine harvester alongside a combustion engine tractor and delivery truck, while also showing more traditional milling methods.” (Quoted from A Year In The Country: Wandering Through Spectral Fields.)

The style of the series suggested the early twentieth century Edwardian Era but although it had a notable vintage quality as mentioned previously it more seemed to exist in a sepia-toned time all of its own. The sense of a time unto itself is also present in the artwork for the Music From Bagpuss album, for which the characters from Bagpuss have been reinterpreted by Hannah Alice in a contemporary illustration / graphic design manner. These bring to mind a retro styled but contemporarily produced children’s book illustration, with the uncluttered minimal vintage tinged illustrations adding to the atemporal nature of the world of Bagpuss.

Watching Bagpuss back when felt like being offered a brief view or portal into another magical otherly world, and I’ve written elsewhere about how it may have been a very early childhood influence and discovery of more left-of-centre or even subtly experimental forms of pastoralism which would quietly sow the seeds for A Year In The Country.

Similar themes are discussed in Andy Votel’s sleeve notes for The Music From Bagpuss, where he writes that “those fifteen minutes that followed shortly after lunchtime your TV set became a secret shop window”. He also writes of how he has wondered if his childhood watching and being entranced by Bagpuss and Emily’s shop of lost curiosities may have been one of the things that fuelled his future fascination with visiting dusty second-hand shops and hoping to find and then release “lost” music and objects. He also goes on to talk of how the music in Bagpuss, and in particular the dulcimer twangs that accompany Bagpuss coming to life and the mice’s squeaky re-worded version of Sumer is Icumen In, may well have subliminally stoked his obsession with The Wicker Man.

(Related to which Finders Keepers Records which he co-founded would go on to release the compilation album Willow’s Songs, which collected traditional British folk songs that inspired The Wicker Man soundtrack and also reissue David Pinner’s novel Ritual, which was one of the inspirations for The Wicker Man, both of which I have written about before at A Year In The Country.)

And talking of magical worlds… Both Sarah Martin and Frances McKee talk about how The Mouse Mill episode is their favourite, something which they seem to share with a number of people. If you don’t know it, in that episode the mice in Emily’s shop appear to be able to make an endless supply of chocolate biscuits using breadcrumbs and butter beans, which to young viewers with a sweet tooth and limited access to money may well seem like a magical nirvana like ability (!)  Sadly, it’s all just a ruse and sleight of hand as the mice are merely rotating the same one biscuit over and over again… ah, if only (! again).

Perhaps the lack of money being necessary at the shop is part of the magic of Bagpuss that has made it so enduringly entrancing for younger viewers with only pocket-money to spend and/or who relied on grown ups generosity and money in order to buy toys, sweets and so on; as Andy Votel says in his sleeve notes for The Music of Bagpuss, the shop was a place where “the toys themselves were the shopkeepers and mum’s purse wasn’t needed.”

Jonny Trunk and Richard Embray’s The Art of Small Films book released by Four Corners Books collects objects, artwork, stills and so on from the Smallfilms archive. As is written on the cover “It’s a book full of pipe cleaners, cotton wool, wire and ping-pong balls” and it provides a behind the scenes or glimpse behind the curtain view of Bagpuss, The Clangers, Ivor the Engine, Noggin The Nog and so on.

Interestingly it doesn’t break the spell of Smallfilms work and the worlds it created, which may in part be due to for example the adjustable skeletons of the figures in the series often having an intriguing folk art-esque quality and their own particular charm to them, which merely adds to the spell and worlds they create rather than puncturing them.

(Above: not a model for the long-lost Smallfilms’ folk art take on The Transformers but rather one of the skeletons for the Clangers.)

In the introduction to The Art of Small Films comic and writer Stewart Lee talks of how the book presents the archive of Smallfilms “as one would a collection of artefacts in an exhibition detailing some much-admired 20th century art movement, like Fluxus or Dada.”

It does indeed present objects from the archive in a museum-like and at times almost forensic manner but as well it brings to mind a rather poshly produced scrapbook.

That sense of scrapbooking, of the importance and sheer enjoyment in childhood that tracking down and collecting things could bring is something that may be considered to be present in a number of the archival books which Jonny Trunk’s has worked on (and also the archival releases of the earlier mentioned Finders Keepers Records). The books often focus on what was originally considered ephemeral or purely utilitarian, whether the archiving of one man’s collection of old sweet wrappers, tickets, badges etc in Wrappers Delight, library music cover art in The Music Library, flexi disc art in Wobbly Sounds or the 1960s and 1970s packaging design work of a supermarket’s design studio in Own Label.

The books can be seen as a form of elevating and focusing on such work in a way that, consciously or not, acknowledges that for much of the population the culture which people connected with and/or came into contact with on a regular basis, was more likely to arrive via television sets, record players or the aisles of Woolworths than art galleries and museums. They’re not in conflict with more fine art gallery and museum based archiving and exhibiting, but rather make the case for also valuing, archiving and studying creative work from other sometimes more overlooked, populist and/or utilitarian areas of previous decades’ culture.

Links:

• The Music from Bagpuss at Earth Records’ site
• Bagpuss at Bandcamp ! (Yep, I kid you not, he has his own Bandcamp page!)
• The Smallfilms Treasury
• The Art of Smallfilms book at Four Corners Books’ site
• Actual Size magazine (where I discovered about The Music From Bagpuss album)
• Bopcap Books (which is co-run by the founder of Actual Size magazine)
• The Ballad of Shirley Collins
• Jonny Trunk’s Wrapper’s Delight
• Wobbly Sounds – A Collection of British Flexi Discs
• Jonny Trunk’s Trunk Records
• Willow’s Songs at Finders Keepers Records’ site
• David Pinner’s Ritual at Finder Keepers Records’ site

 

Elsewhere at A Year In The Country:

• Detectorists, Bagpuss, The Wombles and The Good Life – Views from a Gentler Landscape
• Journeying Through The Seasons with David Cain (or maybe just July and October)
• Rounding the Circle with a Magical Saggy Old Cloth Cat
• The Ballad of Shirley Collins and Pastoral Noir – Tales and Intertwinings from Hidden Furrows
• The Ballad of Shirley Collins Trailer and Wandering Amongst Shadowed Furrows / The Hidden Reverse
• The Return of Old Souls; Fleeting Glances of Anne Briggs
• The Seasons, Jonny Trunk, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and Howlround – A Yearning for Library Music, Experiments in Educational Music and Tape Loop Tributes
• The Telegraph Pole Appreciation Society and Accidental Art
• Further Appreciations of Accidental Art – Poles and Pylons
• Further Accidental Folk-Art
• “Here Be Monsters”: A Note on Ritual – introductions to and discoveries of Summer Isles predecessors via Ritual, Old Crow and the work of an archivist, literary sometimes pop-star
• Willow’s Songs

 

Preorder available now. Released 17th November 2020.
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.

Features music and accompanying text on the tracks by: Grey Frequency, Field Lines Cartographer, Keith Seatman, Pulselovers, Sproatly Smith, The Howling (Robin The Fog of Howlround and Ken Hollings), Folclore Impressionista, Listening Center, The Séance, Widow’s Weeds, Handspan, The Heartwood Institute, A Year In The Country and Vic Mars.

The Quietened Dream Palace is an exploration of closed down cinemas, including those which have been abandoned, become derelict, reopened as something new or demolished and there is little or no trace of any more.

In part it explores the way that peoples’ experiences and memories of such cinemas, the stories told in them and the buildings themselves have now become merely the ghostly spectres of history and memory. Alongside this the album reflects on the opulent historic design lineage of cinemas and the way that closed, abandoned etc cinemas and recollections of them can become faded snapshots of previous eras’ and places’ design and character.

It is also an interconnected exploration of how closed down cinemas once summoned the stories of their phantom dream worlds via the conjuring/seancing of celluloid film and its flickering light projections, and how this medium and related analogue projection equipment is largely no longer used, with both them and the accompanying skills of analogue projectionists, along with an associated way of life, increasingly becoming lost to time.

The music and accompanying text draws from and intertwines personal and wider cultural and historic memories as it wanders amongst “quietened dream palaces” and the times when they still cast their spell over audiences.

 

The Quietened Dream Palace was planned and a considerable proportion of the related artwork, text and music was created prior to the global events of 2020.

Its central themes relating to abandoned etc cinemas were never intended to refer to or interconnect with the need for cinemas to stay closed during 2020 but we understand that the album will potentially, in part, have a different resonance in the new and changed landscape.

We wish the UK and overseas cinemas all the best in these challenging times. Here’s to many more years of them transporting audiences via the stories projected and told in them.

 

Dawn Light Edition. Limited to 208 copies.
White/black CD album in textured recycled fold-out sleeve with fold-out insert and badge.

Further packaging details:
1) Hand-finished and custom printed by A Year In The Country using archival giclée pigment ink.
2) Includes metal badge, secured with removable glue on string bound tag.
3) 1 x folded sheet of accompanying notes, printed on textured laid paper, hand numbered on back.

 

Tracklisting:
1. Grey Frequency – ABC 123
2. Field Lines Cartographer – Faded Flicker
3. Keith Seatman – Saturday Matinee
4. Pulselovers – The Gaumont Frieze
5. Sproatly Smith – 1 And 3 On The Front
6. The Howling – Scala KX 82
7. Folclore Impressionista – Three Steps In The Dark
8. Listening Center – Meet You Outside The New Metropole
9. The Séance – Minors Club
10. Widow’s Weeds – Celluloid Ghosts
11. Handspan – A World In My Pocket
12. The Heartwood Institute – Carbon Arc
13. A Year In The Country – Memoirs Of A Magic Lantern
14. Vic Mars – Only The Clock Remains

 

Scherenschnitte means “scissor cuts”in German and is a name given to the art of paper cutting.

In the first year of A Year In The Country I wrote about the paper cutting / scherenschnitte artwork of Elsa Mora, which is beautiful, intricate and sometimes unsettling work. The sense of dreamlike folkloric fantasias that it conjures at times brings to mind elements of the worlds unto themselves of some Czech New Wave cinema…

The original post published during the first year of A Year In The Country:

• Day #234/365: Scherenschnitte: nocturnal strigiformes, fields in England & otherly folkloric tales and signifiers via patience and a neatness of hand…

 

Every now and again I check my shelves and I start to realise that something that started out as, say, just one DVD, has started to become a mini-collection.

Along which lines Edge of Darkness, which I now appear to have on DVD and Blu-ray, alongside a copy of the Radio Times from November 1985 with the series on the cover, John Caughie’s BFI released TV Classics book on the series, with an afterword by its writer Troy Kennedy Martin and the book of his script for the series, which amongst other extras includes a background to the events that preceded the series (I think I used to own the series on VHS as well but I’m not sure).

I seem to find myself collecting/seeking/gathering these kind of things in the way I once did different twelve inch releases and remixes of single once upon a time.

I’ve written about the series elsewhere at A Year In The Country and also in the Straying from the Pathways book but with recently rewatching it on Blu-ray I thought I would revisit it.

If you don’t know the series, it was written by Troy Kennedy Martin and originally broadcast on the BBC in 1985 and is a mixture of crime drama and eco/political thriller, in which a policeman called Ronald Craven attempts to unravel the truth behind the murder of his daughter. His investigations lead him into a murky world of government and corporate cover-ups, and as they proceed his sanity appears to crumble, while it is also slowly revealed that he may well have known his daughter was involved as an activist in that murky world and that he did not stop her. Heavily influenced by the political climate of the time, it notably explores the aura of secrecy surrounding the nuclear industry and the implications of the Gaia hypothesis of environmentalist and former NASA scientist James Lovelock, which posits that living organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings on Earth to form a synergistic and self-regulating, complex system that helps to maintain and perpetuate the conditions for life on the planet.

It is intelligent but also highly entertaining television, where real world, mythical and mystical elements intermingle and brings to mind some form of Arthurian Knight’s quest as Craven attempts to defeat those who possibly threaten the existence of all human life. There is a sense of dark forces being at play, which, as I say in Straying from the Pathways, are not supernatural but may be in part preternatural or beyond the realms of the day-to-day world.

To a certain extent the first four episodes are more conventional but during the 5th, and to a degree the 6th, episode the gloves come off and it becomes quite unhinged, almost hallucinatory in parts, possibly reflecting Craven’s descent into obsession, madness, in part due to his unresolved grief.

It went on to win multiple awards and due to it’s popularity was re-broadcast only around 6 weeks after it’s original showing, which was the fastest time between original broadcast and repeat in the BBC’s history. Back then that really was quite the thing and it’s hard to imagine just how significant and unusual that was in these days of constant broadcast and online repeats of programmes – or to give them their new name, catchup and TV on demand (!) (Thanks to Mat Handley of Pulselovers for pointing out the similarity of those.)

Even though much of the series is set in urban areas, I tend to think of it as being about the landscape, perhaps in part because of the way that the land is shown as containing layered, hidden subterfuges in a system of former mining tunnels below a rural area, where there are some decidedly shady and undeclared experiments taking place.

These sections are set in Yorkshire and because of that and their subterranean nature, both literal and figurative they bring to mind the hidden histories and settings of David Peace’s Yorkshire noir Red Riding crime novels, and also his occult (as in hidden) history of the 1984-1985 UK miners’ strike GB84, alongside the intriguing and oddly out of place rant about secret underground bases in Alan Clarke and David Rudkin’s visionary rural drama Penda’s Fen.

The way in which the series explores some similar territory as Penda’s Fen, and also its possible forebears in film and television, was discussed in an article written by Robert Hanks for the January 2020 issue of the BFI’s Sight & Sound magazine, that was included as an accompaniment to the series’ Blu-ray release:

“In its paranoia, its gleeful attitude to the apparatus of espionage, it’s bureaucracy and jargon… Edge of Darkness clearly owes a debt to John Le Carré, and no doubt memories of the success of the BBC’s 1979 Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy helped get it made. But inits emphasis on the environment, on soil and growth, in its invocation, via James Lovelock’s theories, of the earth godess Gaia, and in its questioning attitude to Britishness – to the relationship between the nation, the land it loves on and the state that controls it – it is much closer to the brilliant David Rudkin / Alan Clarke drama Penda’s Fen.”

As in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, particularly in the novel, that “gleeful attitude” to espionage in Edge of Darkness at points comes across as being nearer to those who have received an elite, probably private, education playing schoolboy-like games, although the reality of the situations and their possible outcomes have high stake and often deadly outcomes. This is particularly notable in relation to the character’s Pendleton and Harcourt that Craven becomes involved with, who act very much as freewheeling agents operating in a grey area of intelligence that is only nominally under the auspices and control of the state; they often seem to have and take a jokey, game playing attitude in regards to very serious matters which, at times, borders on the flippant approach of duo Mr Steed and Mrs Peel in the cartoonish espionage japes of the 1960s television series The Avengers.

Although, as I say in the Straying from the Pathways, the series “was produced and broadcast during, or just after, some of the turbulent events of the 1980s, it was not so much an exploration of hidden history but rather an attempt to explore, reveal or counterbalance hidden current events as well as the machinations of the hidden state and the actions of those in positions of power”. I think in some ways, in relation to this sense of hidden tales and history in the landscape, it is quite possibly one of the roots or inspirations for what has become A Year In The Country.

It must be said though that the depictions of the landscape/rural areas in the series rarely feel wide open and expansive. As with much of the series there is often a sense of both intimacy and claustrophobia.

The Blu-ray has only fairly recently been released and I think I managed to wait a whole week before giving in and buying it. I was slightly concerned about watching it as quite a few HD Blu-ray transfers of older films and television are often not done all that sympathetically. (And pardon me as I am now about to mildly geek out about Blu-ray transfers!)

In those releases where you get both the DVD and the Blu-ray I’ve at times found myself turning off the Blu-ray and putting on the DVD as the HD transfer can sometimes be just too harsh and unforgiving, the detail looks over harsh or too much. Which I never really understand in terms of HD transfers seeming overly detailed as, although traditional film and pixel counts aren’t directly comparable, if something was originally recorded onto film then effectively it has more detail in it than the 1080p in a Blu-ray.

On some transfers people’s skin looks waxy due to too much digital noise reduction (DNR) and, probably my least favourite, skin tones can be too pink/red – or even, as in a recent new 4K transfer I watched, their skin tones can keep varying throughout the transfer. I generally think a good transfer should be largely invisible; you shouldn’t even notice it all that much but just be able to sit back, appreciate and lose yourself in it.

(Something of a time capsule view of the high street in Edge of Darkness.)

Anyways, fortunately the Edge of Darkness is a fine transfer and well worth a watch.

The Radio Times in my mini-Edge of Darkness collection is from November 1985 and took a fair bit of hunting down. There are a fair few copies of old Radio Times available online but there are a few that seem particularly rare, with this being one of them. The issue has a three page article on the series including quotes/an interview from it’s writer, in which he somewhat evocatively and succinctly describes the sense of subterfuges in the series by saying that Craven’s quest reveals the “silhouette” of modern British politics.

The cover image is something of a curio. It’s not taken from the series and makes it look as though it may well be a quite conventional detective or noir series. Which it really isn’t, although it does have noirish elements in the Chandler-esque sense of Craven being a lone untarnished knight attempting to right wrongs and defeat those with much more power and resources. Or if you take noir as being about desperate people doing desperate things and who will ultimately come undone, well, all that’s there to, along with noirish pouring rain and Craven in a noir-ish private eye-esque raincoat with the collar turned up. By the end of the series, as in some of Chandler’s Philip Marlowe stories, there is a sense that Craven has put himself through all kinds of hell and hardship and although he may have briefly cleaned up one small corner of corruption, and achieved some kind of minor victory, possibly merely for his own respect and dignity, while also making things a bit awkward for those higher-up in society’s hierarchy, ultimately things will continue how they always have.

Connected to which, in a manner that reminded me of some of John Le Carré’s espionage fiction writing, there is also a sense of a small group of powerful, possibly high-end public school/Oxbridge etc educated men playing at spy games. But these are games with deadly consequences.

Despite it’s sometimes heavy, dark themes as I mentioned previously, this is also highly entertaining television. It remembers to entertain in amongst it’s potentially heavy, dark themes. It’s tender at points and even quite humorous. This is notably so in some of the sections featuring Jedburgh, an American far-from secret agent who, despite his sometimes questionable morals and methods, is a big-hearted bluff man. He conspicuously wears a stetson in London and drives a white Rolls Royce (just to make sure he’s not undercover at all but hidden in plain sight), loves watching the British ballroom competition Come Dancing on television and one of his main aims in amongst the Cold War, and proxy shennanigans that he is involved in, appears to be to defend Britain’s golf courses no matter what (he also loves playing golf).

(I say about Edge of Darkness remembering to entertain with a pointed look at a lot of contemporary television drama, which curiously seems to equate heavy, unrelenting and dark atmospheres with entertainment, albeit without the more layered and nuanced political and other aspects that can be found in Edge of Darkness.)

In the Radio Times Troy Kennedy Martin discusses how he was sensitive to “the risk of overwhelming people with gloom:

“One of the problems is that, to a certain extent, everyone who’s writing about Thatcher’s Britain, particularly if they’re over a certain age, is unbelievably depressed about it. So they’re writing really heavy stuff… [Thanks to characters like Jedburgh the series] has humour to take the curse off it.”

There’s a website I’ve mentioned before dedicated to Edge of Darkness which, in a somewhat charming and time capsule way, has a “how the internet used to look” design. Even the website’s URL (http://fabulousbakers.tripod.com/edge/main.html) is now reminiscent of another age.

Anyways, the front page image on that website, pictured above, has a pulp thriller/science fiction-esque look to it, which seems almost wonderfully inappropriate for Edge of Darkness. I’d found it intriguing because of its disjunction with the actual series and also because it looks like a professional illustration and also unlike anything else on the website. I’d assumed that the website’s creator had drawn or commissioned it, which seemed odd as the rest of the site doesn’t appear to consider Edge of Darkness in a similar pulp fiction-like manner.

However, recently, I found out that it is actually the cover to the German home video release version of the series, and is a prime example of the times when film and video etc manufacturers give something a more mainstream cover design in order to, I assume, draw in a wider audience. It’s a curious thing do really, almost false advertising and I’m not really sure that it works as they probably alienate some of the audience who know and understand that the series, film etc is more left-of-centre and also must leave some viewers who buy them scratching their heads after watching them if they expected something more conventional.

 

Links:

• That “vintage” Edge of Darkness website
• The Edge of Darkness Blu-ray

 

Elsewhere at A Year In The Country:

• The Wicker Man, Edge of Darkness and Village of the Damned – The “Tricky” Cult Remake
• In The Morning I’ll Be Gone, Orkney Twilight, GB84 and Edge of Darkness – Hinterland Tales Of Myths, Dark Forces and Hidden Histories – Part 1
• In The Morning I’ll Be Gone, Orkney Twilight, GB84 and Edge of Darkness – Hinterland Tales Of Myths, Dark Forces and Hidden Histories Part 2
•  Edge Of Darkness, stepping into the vortex, reshuffling and sweeping the board…

 

Preorder 3rd November 2020. Released 17th November 2020.
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.

The Quietened Dream Palace is an exploration of closed down cinemas, including those which have been abandoned, become derelict, reopened as something new or demolished and there is little or no trace of any more.

In part it explores the way that peoples’ experiences and memories of such cinemas, the stories told in them and the buildings themselves have now become merely the ghostly spectres of history and memory. Alongside this the album reflects on the opulent historic design lineage of cinemas and the way that closed, abandoned etc cinemas and recollections of them can become faded snapshots of previous eras’ and places’ design and character.

It is also an interconnected exploration of how closed down cinemas once summoned the stories of their phantom dream worlds via the conjuring/seancing of celluloid film and its flickering light projections, and how this medium and related analogue projection equipment is largely no longer used, with both them and the accompanying skills of analogue projectionists, along with an associated way of life, increasingly becoming lost to time.

The music and accompanying text draws from and intertwines personal and wider cultural and historic memories as it wanders amongst “quietened dream palaces” and the times when they still cast their spell over audiences.

 

Features music and accompanying text on the tracks by:
Grey Frequency
Field Lines Cartographer
Keith Seatman
Pulselovers
Sproatly Smith
The Howling (Robin The Fog of Howlround and Ken Hollings)
Folclore Impressionista
Listening Center
The Séance
Widow’s Weeds
Handspan
The Heartwood Institute
A Year In The Country
Vic Mars

 

The Quietened Dream Palace was planned and a considerable proportion of the related artwork, text and music was created prior to the global events of 2020.

Its central themes relating to abandoned etc cinemas were never intended to refer to or interconnect with the need for cinemas to stay closed during 2020 but we understand that the album will potentially, in part, have a different resonance in the new and changed landscape.

We wish the UK and overseas cinemas all the best in these challenging times. Here’s to many more years of them transporting audiences via the stories projected and told in them.

 

Cor, that was something of a treat to revisit  #1: Witch Cults and #2: I See, So I See So, the two videos Broadcast made in collaboration with Julian House (of Ghost Box Records, The Focus Group and Intro design agency) to accompany their, also collaborative with him, album Broadcast and The Focus Group Investigate Witchcults of the Radio Age.

The videos and their accompanying songs bring together, distill and refract so much that is good and fine about Broadcast and Ghost Box Records, so many of their influences and reference points. Watching them is not unlike being given a brief view of a parallel world via a soon to close portal.

#1: Witch Cults has a distinctly occult (as in hidden) seeming take on the landscape, and the silhouette of what may well just be a telegraph pole hints at having a much more sinister purpose. This is distinctly hauntological work, flickeringly stuffed full of spectres, but in a way that you’re not quite sure what of. It recalls phantasms on the edge of consciousness, memory, culture and history, all overseen by Trish Keenan as… Mystic? High Priestess?

#2: I See, So I See So is like watching and listening to fragments of some far off, both never was and long forgotten children’s television series, something that has tumbled forwards and backwards from a decade you can’t quite place, but which is also decidedly the 1960s and 1970s. It made me think of an imagined form of curiously government sponsored British experimentalism that snuck into British mainstream television back when, and also subtly the fantasias of parts of Czech New Wave cinema, some of which Broadcast talked about appreciating and taking inspiration from.

Shouldn’t there be a TV channel dedicated to this kind of thing? Shouldn’t they be available on DVD and Blu-ray?

These videos and Broadcast’s mini-album Mother is the Milky Way’s exploration of a spectral, otherly form of pastoralism pointed to a fascinating future direction. One which was tragically cut short.

Anyways, if you have a spare moment to peer into the portal (!), I would highly recommend a viewing or two or more of #1: Witch Cults and #2: I See, So I See So.

 

The original post published during the first year of A Year In The Country:

• Day #33/365: Broadcast and the Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age and the recalibrations of past cathode ray stories…

 

The Top of the Tower restaurant was a rotating restaurant on top of the BT Tower communications tower in central London. Formerly known as the GPO Tower, the Post Office Tower and the Telecom Tower the restaurant was open from 1966 to 1980 and was designed to fully rotate once every 23 minutes.

Viewed today it seems like part of an optimistic boundary pushing futurism that also created the supersonic passenger airliner Concorde which was operational from 1969 to 2003 – a sort of terrestrial orientated reaching for the stars.

The restaurant also had a decided “Dinner with the ambassador” sense of swank or even fantasy to it (something which Peter Strickland explores in relation to British department stores in previous decades in his film In Fabric) and photographs of it when it was open and related brochures are very much a snapshot of a particular era’s high life.

The following is a quote from a wonderfully evocative short British Pathé film on the Top of the Tower, which provides an excellent time capsule snapshot of the restaurant, its atmosphere and aesthetic:

“Offering you a visual menu that takes your breath – but not your appetite – away… this is a really exciting kind of epicurean thrill. When you eat here they give you a certificate of orbit to say you’ve been above and around the houses two and a half times in every hour… it’s high life par excellence. You’ve really come up in the world here, where you’re always moving with the times and the whole of London is yours on a plate.”

Curiously and as something of a contrast to the restaurant’s creation of an air of sophistication it was run by Butlins, a company which at the time were better known for budget friendly seaside holiday camps.

In this post are a selection of images from the restaurant, an advert, pages from some of the menus and brochures and so on… here’s to luncheon, dinner and supper amongst previous decade’s reaching for the stars (!)

Links:

• Top of the Tower aka GPO Tower British Pathé 1967 film footage

 

Viewed now the Savage Party trailer broadcast in 2012 for youth orientated British soap opera Hollyoaks seems notably prescient of mainstream interest in and acceptance of folk horror and otherly pastoral themes and tropes, which only seems to have more widely happened over the last year or two.

In the trailer, to a soundtrack of Stealing Sheep’s psych pop, people wearing horned head dresses, garlands of flowers and Wicker Man-esque animal masks enter a woodland party through iron gates in the middle of nowhere. They frolic, cavort, play and ride traditional fairground attractions, bid others to keep secrets, sit masked amongst an old-fashioned sitting room with no walls, are drenched by preternatural rainfall as nearby others walk in the sun and look terrified as they watch vintage disaster footage via a hand cranked projector.

The trailer is a joyful depiction of a temporary autonomous zone fantasia, shot through with moments of dread and a subtle sense of foreboding. It’s resolutely mainstream in its aesthetic and also seems to connect with ancient ways and “the patterns beneath the plough”.

The original post published during the first year of A Year In The Country:

• Day #146/365: Glimpses of Albion in the overgrowth

 

Released in 2018 Simon Stålenhag’s The Electric State is an illustrated novel set in an alternative 1997; in it a young woman and her robot travel through an American landscape which is littered with unsettlingly both friendly looking and creepily anthropomorphic battle drones and giant consumerist and advertising debris, and the images in Electric State depict society and the landscape as being some kind of physical and psychic edgeland and waste ground.

In contrast to much of science fiction, the majority of the images in Electric State are set rurally and the active and discarded or damaged technology is set against and amongst a background of natural beauty. Also although they are of terrestrial origin there is often something biomechanically extraterrestrial about the drones and it seems almost as though they and related machinery and vehicles have crash landed on the Earth and could be debris from a war between alien civilisations that have battled above the planet.

(The way in which they invoke discarded alien debris is vaguely reminiscent of science fiction novel Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, which was loosely adapted for the cinema by Andrei Tarkovsky, and in which mysterious zones that exhibit strange and dangerous phenomena contain artifacts with inexplicable and sometimes seemingly supernatural properties which were left behind by unseen extraterrestrial visitors.)

In a manner which could be considered both analogous and a comment on contemporary digital technology Electric State’s alternative world features a new form of virtual reality called Mode 6 which is used to control the drones and also as a form of escape by the general public, and is so addictive that people literally pass away through neglect when attached to it. The Mode 6 headsets are large beak-like devices which are vaguely reminiscent of real world virtual reality headsets from the early nineties which were large in size as effectively they involved users strapping small cathode ray screens to their heads.

Stålenhag’s painted work connects with a lineage of science fiction art produced in previous decades such as that by Chris Foss and John Harris. However, whereas their artwork was often vividly hyperreal and had a grand space opera-esque character and depicted vast galaxies, large-scale space vehicles and exploration etc, Stålenhag’s work in Electric State is Earthbound, dystopic, more subdued and melancholic. Accompanying which even though it depicts travelling through the open landscape, there is at times something quite intimate and narrowly focused about it.

Links:

• Simon Stålenhag’s site
• Simon Stålenhag’s The Electric State book
• Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic
• Chris Foss’ site
• John Harris’ site

 

Released today 22nd September 2020.
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.

Features music and accompanying text on the tracks by: Circle/Temple, The Heartwood Institute, Sproatly Smith, A Year In The Country, Field Lines Cartographer, Howlround, Folclore Impressionista, Handspan, Widow’s Weeds, Listening Center, Vic Mars, Pulselovers and Grey Frequency.

The album explores the way that places are literally layered with history, and is an audio slicing through the layers of time. It journeys amongst the stories and characters of these layers, including, amongst other aspects, the structures built, events which took place and different era’s technologies and belief systems.

Such layering can go far back into pre-recorded history. Much of the earth is thought to have once been underwater, and it is likely that the majority of cities, towns and villages are built in fomer ocean areas. Current land masses have come to be formed, in part, through a layering of past marine, other life and plants, which in turn are then quarried or mined, subsequently being used to create the infrastructure of contemporary civilisation, and creating something of a cyclical, time-out-of-joint nature to the layers of time.

The layering of time can also take many other forms: modern homes and buildings are often built on top of the remains of previous settlements, which at times are discovered when new building work is carried out; contemporary roads and pathways follow the same routes as ancient roads and trails, which have been travelled down for millennia; often forgotten or abandoned tunnel networks, bunkers, railway lines, telephone exchanges etc lie under cities and towns; active and former mines thread underneath rural areas; churches are built on ancient places of worship, and then in turn are sometimes abandoned themselves, and become the sites for modern day revelries such as gigs, dance music events and so on.

The Layering is a reflection on how these, and other varied strata, are layered on top of one another, and/or sit side-by-side, with some being recorded, while others are forgotten or unknown, becoming part of a hidden or semi-hidden history.

 

Dawn Light Edition. Limited to 208 copies.
White/black CD album in textured recycled fold out sleeve with fold-out insert and badge.

Further packaging details:
1) Hand finished and custom printed using archival giclée pigment ink by A Year In The Country.
2) Includes metal badge, secured with removable glue on string bound tag.
3) 1 x folded sheet of accompanying notes, printed on textured laid paper, hand numbered on back.

 

Tracklisting:
1: A Year In The Country – Cross Sections Of Time
2: Circle/Temple – The Hollow Stream Buried
3: The Heartwood Institute – Beneath The City Streets
4: Sproatly Smith – Chapel Still Stands
5: Field Lines Cartographer – Layers Of Belief
6: Howlround – A Heart Shaped Forest
7: Folclore Impressionista – The Problem Of Symmetry
8: Handspan – At The End Of The Aerial Flight
9: Widow’s Weeds – Gilmerton Cove
10: Listening Center – Wattle And Daub Office Blocks
11: Vic Mars – Once There Were Houses
12: Pulselovers – Brodsworth
13: Grey Frequency – Tigguo Cobauc

“…speaks of interwoven geographies and technologies… a magnificent soundscape of noise… One of the most astonishing works 2020 has offered us.” Eoghan Lyng, We Are Cult

 

As with many of these “revisiting” posts it’s something of a treat to revisit Virginia Astley’s From Gardens Where We Feel Secure.

It conjures a sense of an Arcadian idyll, of never-ending sunny afternoons in a secluded garden in some indefinable past time where the birds sing, the flowers bloom and the inhabitants can laze on striped deckchairs from now to eternity…

…but, and here’s the rub, there’s a flipside or undertow to that idyll; as Summer of Their Dreams segues into When the Fields Were on Fire subtly dissonant reversed glitchy sounds now accompany the piano and seem to almost submerge the sounds of the church bells and bird song and there is a sense of something foreboding off on the horizon.

The sense of calm returns with the final track It’s Too Hot to Sleep as an owl hoots repeatedly in the distance, and as I said in the post about the album from the first year of A Year In The Country “it’s like saying hello once more to a very welcome old friend”.

 

The original post published during the first year of A Year In The Country:

• Day #118/365: Virginia Astley’s From Gardens Where We Feel Secure

 

Hilla and Bernd Becher were a husband and wife photography duo who for forty years photographed and classified disappearing industrial architecture in Europe and America.

The resulting images work both as near forensic documenting of such architecture and also a form of art project, one which could be considered to utilise these structures as found objects.

Often they grouped similar structures together, sometimes presenting a number of them in a grid. At such times the similar but different design of the structures brings to mind both British radio DJ John Peel’s comments about the band The Fall when he said “They are always the same; they are always different” and my comments in A Year In The Country: Straying From The Pathways about the photographs in Langdon Clay’s book Cars: New York City 1974-1976, which focused on cars parked in the city at night:

 

Elsewhere at A Year In The Country:

• Paul Virilio’s Bunker Archaeology and Accidental Utilitarian Art
• Reflections on Brutalism – A Return to the Experimentations and Aesthetics of This Brutal World and Paul Virilio’s Bunker Archaeology
• Bunker Archaeology, The Quietened Bunker, Waiting for the End of the World, Subterranea Britannica, and The Delaware Road – Ghosts, Havens and Curious Repurposings Beneath our Feet
• Poles and Pylons and The Telegraph Pole Appreciation Society – A Continuum of Accidental Art
• Further Appreciations of Accidental art – Poles and Pylons
• Langdon Clay’s Cars – New York City, 1974-1976 – Part 1 – Post-Populuxe Ghosts That Brood While the City Sleeps
• Langdon Clay’s Cars – New York City, 1974-1976 – Part 2 – Totemic Spectres and Signifiers