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Artwork from The Shildam Hall Tapes: The Falling Reverse Album and The Shildam Hall Tapes Novella Added to the A Year In The Country: Year 7 Gallery


A selection of artwork from The Shildam Hall Tapes: The Falling Reverse album and The Shildam Hall Tapes novella has been added to the A Year In The Country: Year 7 Gallery

Written and recorded by Stephen Prince the novella and album are set among the cultural hinterlands of wyrd, otherly pastoral, folk, psychedelic and hauntological culture, and follow the journey of a song through time: one that appears to bring disarray to all who hear it. Is this coincidence or something more?

1799: A young woman who lives at the Shildam Hall country mansion writes a lament for a lover she can never be with, and locks it away forever.

1840: The song is discovered by one of her relatives and begins a journey through time. It entrances those who hear it, but does it also lead to their potential demise?

1969: A film set among the decadent milieu of late 1960s counterculture commences production at Shildam Hall, before collapsing amidst potential scandal after the song is rediscovered.

2004: A recording of the song is stumbled upon but all who listen to it seem to disappear…

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The Eccentronic Research Council’s “Another Witch Is Dead (Trad.)” from 1612 Underture: Songs for a Year In The Country 16/26

Non-populist pop from The Eccentronic Research Council’s “fakeloric sonic pilgrimage to the home of the Pendle witches” album 1612 Underture. And it is mostly definitely “pop” music… in some alternative parallel universe I can remember watching the band perform it on Top of the Pops.

 

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The Shildam Hall Tapes novella and The Shildam Hall Tapes: The Falling Reverse album – Released

Released today 28th July 2021.

The novella is also available at Amazon UK, Amazon US and their other worldwide sites and at Lulu.

The book may also available to order from other bookshops etc, please direct any queries regarding that directly to them.

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.

Written and recorded by Stephen Prince the novella and album are set among the cultural hinterlands of wyrd, otherly pastoral, folk, psychedelic and hauntological culture, and follow the journey of a song through time: one that appears to bring disarray to all who hear it. Is this coincidence or something more?

1799: A young woman who lives at the Shildam Hall country mansion writes a lament for a lover she can never be with, and locks it away forever.

1840: The song is discovered by one of her relatives and begins a journey through time. It entrances those who hear it, but does it also lead to their potential demise?

1969: A film set among the decadent milieu of late 1960s counterculture commences production at Shildam Hall, before collapsing amidst potential scandal after the song is rediscovered.

2004: A recording of the song is stumbled upon but all who listen to it seem to disappear…

The novella and album are further explorations of an imaginary abandoned film that first began on an album called The Shildam Hall Tapes released in 2018, which featured music by Gavino Morretti, Sproatly Smith, Field Lines Cartographer, Vic Mars, Circle/Temple, A Year In The Country, The Heartwood Instititute, David Colohan, Listening Center and Pulselovers.

The Shildam Hall Tapes: The Falling Reverse album is both a soundtrack to accompany the novella and also a standalone piece of work set amongst the fragmentary memories and dreamscapes of The Shildam Hall Tapes.

 

All of the above albums and novella can be listened to and read as standalone pieces of work. They also interconnect with the story and world of the near-mythical imaginary lost folkloric fever dream film The Corn Mother, which was explored in the 2020 novella The Corn Motherand album The Corn Mother: Night Wraiths, both of which were written and recorded by Stephen Prince; and also the 2018 album The Corn Mother, which again featured music by a variety of performers, including a number of those mentioned above, alongside Depatterning, United Bible Studies and Widow’s Weeds (see below for the full list of contributors).

As with the A Year In The Country project as a whole, which they are released as part of, the novellas’ and albums’ structures are inspired by the cycle of the year. Following the number of seasons, the novellas are each split into four sections; they have 52 chapters (which could also be considered scenes or episodes), the same number as there are weeks in the year; relating to the number of days in a non-leap year, each chapter’s text contains no more than 365 words; and as there are days in a week, the albums each have seven tracks.

The Shildam Hall Tapes: The Falling Reverse –  Dawn Light Edition. Limited to 208 copies.
Hand-finished white/black CD album in speckled recycled fold-out sleeve with fold-out insert, sticker and badge.

Further album packaging details:
1. Custom printed using archival giclée pigment ink.
2. Metal badge, secured with removable glue on string bound tag.
3. Sticker printed on vinyl style material.
4.  Folded sheet of accompanying notes, printed on textured laid paper, hand numbered and signed on back.

The Shildam Hall Tapes: The Falling Reverse tracklisting:
1. On The Moors (1799)
2. Day 12, Scene 2, Take 28 – Hoffman’s Fall (1970)
3. Blown Away Like Dust (1971)
4. An Ancient Find (1977)
5. Nobody Ever Really Knew What Happened (2004)
6. False Starts And Naysayers (2017)
7. Tumbling Through Time (1799-2020)

The titles of the album tracks contain a particular year or set of years, which refer to sections in both the novella and the timeline of The Shildam Hall Tapes’ world and story as a whole.

The Shildam Hall Tapes novella
78 pages. Softback.

The 2018 released The Shildam Hall Tapes album featured work by Gavino Morretti, Sproatly Smith, Field Lines Cartographer, Vic Mars, Circle/Temple, A Year In The Country (aka Stephen Prince), The Heartwood Institute, David Colohan, Listening Centre and Pulselovers.

Further details are at: www.ayearinthecountry.co.uk/the-shildam-hall-tapes-album-released

“The sounds venture into reinterpretation of folk culture and music, early electronic music experimentation, high fashion, psychedelia and the crossing over of the worlds of the aristocracy with pop/counter culture and elements of the underworld… Just as film is the visceral, visual experience needed to startle and stimulate the eyes, The Shildam Hall Tapes is the appropriate aural experience needed to caress and connect the ears to everything they are listening to.” Eoghan Lyng, We Are Cult

“An engaging collection of dark, ethereal and psychedelic experimental sounds.” Kim Harten, Bliss Aquamarine

“Every track unsettles and enthralls in equal measure.” Ben Graham, Shindig!

The Corn Mother novella and The Corn Mother: Night Wraiths album released in 2020 were both created by Stephen Prince.

“A ghostly record, where fact and fiction merge with unsettling noises, found sounds and atmospherics, all adding up to another immersive listen.” Terrascope

“Eerie, elegant and ever so evocative.” Thomas Patterson, Shindig!

“A fascinating and truly inventive novella… This is an original and significant piece of work, not only in its novel, singular and successful approach to folk horror and ‘imaginary’ films but in the creation of its own self referencing folklore.” Grey Malkin, Folk Horror Revival

Further details are at: www.ayearinthecountry.co.uk/the-corn-mother-novella-and-the-corn-mother-night-wraiths-album-released

The Corn Mother album released in 2018 includes music by Gavino Morretti, Pulselovers, The Heartwood Institute, United Bible Studies (David Colohan, Dominic Cooper of The Owl Service, Alison O’Donnell of Mellow Candle), A Year In The Country, Widow’s Weeds (featuring former members of/collaborators with The Hare And The Moon), Depatterning, Sproatly Smith and Field Lines Cartographer.

“You want to see the film as described in the liner notes, and as conjured in the songs on the album, and that’s an incredible trick to pull off… This is hauntology – the genre, rather than the philosophical dystopic – in its finest form, where buried memories of film, TV, music, and life come to the surface, often unverifiable because the hard copy has been lost or was never properly recorded in the first instance.” Alan Boon, Starburst

Further details are at: www.ayearinthecountry.co.uk/the-corn-mother-album-released

 

Thanks to everybody who contributed, wrote about etc the above albums and books, including Suzy Prince and Ian Lowey of Bop Cap Books for the editing and design work. A tip of the hat to you all!

 

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E4’s “Wicker Man” Ident and an Albion in the Overgrowth Portal View Into a World Unto Itself: Wanderings 16/26

Over the years in the A Year In The Country books and at the website I’ve discussed various television series and trailers which could be considered as offering glimpses of Albion in the overgrowth, i.e. mainstream television which to various degrees explores, utilises and expresses a “wyrd” or otherly pastoral sense of rural and folk culture, while also at times variously containing elements of and/or intertwining with folk horror.

Some previous examples I have written about include amongst others: the unsettling “pastoral spook” drama series Requiem (2018); the supernatural folk horror-ish drama series The Living and the Dead (2016); the gently melancholic comic drama series Detectorists (2014-2017) that centres around two rural treasure hunting metal detectorists; the reimagining of Roman history in the drama series Britannia (2018-); the folk horror related themes in some of the episodes of the 2000-2001 remake of the supernatural detective series Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) (1969-1970); and the “Savage Party” trailer released in 2012 for the Channel 4 soap opera Hollyoaks, which has a playful and almost dreamlike rural temporary autonomous zone aesthetic.

In terms of “Albion in the overgrowth”, the 2018 “Wicker Man” ident for the British television channel E4 could well be grouped amongst the above series and trailer, and in some ways is odder than all of them.

It is an animated short film used as a link between programmes, and seems to variously be channeling 1960s or 1970s British children’s television animated series, some lost Eastern European animation series from an indefinable earlier decade, bucolic calm, folk rituals, folk art and folk horror – in particular The Wicker Man (1973) – all in a brief 30 seconds or so. It’s the kind of thing that you could imagine being part of some semi-forgotten children’s television series originally broadcast back when that Finders Keepers Records would release the soundtrack to.

The animation and figures that appear in the ident are at a notable remove from polished contemporary CGI based work, appearing (I assume) to have been done my hand and have a pleasingly handcrafted folk art-ish feel, and seem to be made from materials such as fabric, wood etc. In terms of their aesthetic and animation style they recall the 1960s and 1970s Smallfilms work by Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin, such as Bagpuss (1974) and The Clangers (1969-1974), and like those series the ident also seems to offer a glimpse or portal viewing of a magical self-contained world unto itself.

The ident opens on a view over a neatly recently harvested looking field, taking a viewpoint from the uncultivated edges of the field which is where events take place, as though to show that they are at a remove from the norms and orderliness of civilisation. Initially a lone king-like figure walks onto the screen, wearing a cape and holding a flower by its stem as though it is a sceptre. He is vaguely human-like in shape but without facial features, has long thin bendy pipe cleaner-esque limbs and his body/fabric skin are green.

He is soon joined by other figures and creatures, who to varying degrees often have anthropomorphic human characteristics, and they begin folk ritual-esque revels and dancing. The other revellers include, amongst others, two frolicking corn dollies, a sheep that walks on its hind legs and is carrying a flag standard that bears the E4 logo, a strange folk ritual-like pyramidical stag headed creature, a cockerel that only seems to consist of a blue head and unnaturally long stilt-like orange legs, a staring eyed blue headed rabbit and a black and white creature, possibly a cow, made from layered wooden sections with a squared head. The soundtrack during this section mixes the stomp of the king walking, rural field recordings of birdsong etc and a free form seeming acoustic folk tune (loosely) played by the revellers.

A fox wearing human style clothing which also walks on its hind legs and some kind of clown, that is reminiscent of an unsettling skewed memory of a Victorian child’s toy, wheel on a cart that contains a folk art-esque wicker structure that forms the E4 logo. Once this is in place at the centre of the revellers the day darkens and the fox sets fire to the wicker logo, and it is at this point that the ident begins to take a darker turn, and marking this the soundtrack quickly and briefly changes to some form of choral drone.

NIght suddenly descends, the folk music resumes and the revels continue but now there is something, if not bacchanalian, then at least subtly frenzied about it as the participants dance around the burning wicker structure; the king sets light to one of the wicker dollies, which continues merrily dancing, and the clown also seems to be on fire but not making any attempt to halt this. The ident ends but there is a sense that the revels and their transgressions will continue.

What it brings to mind is Mackenzie Crook’s 2018 reimagining of the rural magic realism children’s television series Worzel Gummidge (1979-1989), which in the newer version features a living scarecrow who befriends two visiting children and via preternatural means and with the assistance of his fellow scarecrows helps to mend the seasons which have gone out of joint, and of which I have written:

“Worzel Gummidge is light-hearted, humorous and tender but also at times feels like a friendly nightmare, and it has an air of unsettling unpredictableness, which is heightened by the scarecrows often having a chaotic and unfettered by convention character, particularly when they are gathered together.”

E4’s Wicker Man ident has a not dissimilar sense of both playfulness and an unsettling  air, and as in the end of the 1973 The Wicker Man film, which it seems to fairly directly draw from and interconnect with, there is a sense of a folkloric ritual orientated rural community having come adrift.

What both Mackenzie Crook’s Worzel Gummidge and E4’s “Wicker Man” ident both also bring to mind is the (possibly) accidental at times surprisingly dark or unsettling atmospheres of some sections of late 1960s and 1970s British children and young adult orientated rurally set television drama series that have become hauntological and wyrd rural cultural mainstays – such as the drama series The Changes (1975), Children of the Stones (1976), The Owl Service (1969-1970) and also possibly some public information films from that time – with the “Wicker Man” ident sharing with them a sort of head shaking “What? What was that?” aspect.

 

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Boards of Canada’s “Gemini” from Tomorrow’s Harvest: Songs for A Year In The Country 15/26

There’s an ache and loss to “Gemini” and at times it makes me think of the soundtrack to a Bladerunner-esque slowly cancelled future, if it had been recorded in a dream and then the tapes left to quietly degrade for half a century or more as they slowly absorbed lost radio frequencies…

 

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The Quietened Dream Palace – Reviews, Broadcasts and Drifting Between the Real and Unreal…

A selection of reviews, broadcasts etc of The Quietened Dream Palace album…

“You’ve got to admire the thought that goes into these releases. Just the idea of old cinemas is evocative enough – all velvet seats, flickering light…  Evocative stuff.” Neil Milligan, Electronic Sound magazine issue 72

“With their latest instalment, multimedia hauntology project A Year In The Country has turned its attention to the world of abandoned cinemas… the album drifts between ethereal ambience and nostalgic electronica. Field Lines Cartographer and Grey Frequency capture the atmospheric, sci-fi flavours of Tangerine Dream and Vangelis, while The Séance’s ‘Minors Club’ would not be out of place in a John Carpenter film. ‘Memoirs Of A Magic Lantern’ and ‘Only The Clock Remains’ are more in time with the current crop of experimental ambient and there’s some lovely reminisces of youthful trips to the cinema. The Steve Reich-esque ‘Scala KX82’ (ah, the glorious debauchery of The Scala) and Keith Seatman’s quirky ‘Saturday Matinee’ mix things up a bit, but overall this newest addition to the AYITC journey is beautifully melancholic.” Sarah Gregory, Shindig! magazine issue 111

“[On the album] Keith Seatman gives us a Saturday carousel of a tune, menacing and scary… Sproatly Smith appears with a song inspired by his gran who worked in the Ritz cinema in Hereford, his merry band making mischief in the background whilst she reminisces to synths and birdsong. After Ice creams it’s time for a little armchair travel with Folclore Impressionista who visit an abandoned Russian cinema… Widow’s Weeds deliver a treatise on the ‘Celluloid Ghosts’ of Scottish cinemas long lost in the mists of time. A ghostly disinterred female voice calling us from our stupor…. The Heartwood Institute… draw on past experience as a cinema projectionist to imbue ‘Carbon Arc’ with a suitable ghostly aura…” Andrew Young, Terrascope

“The album is all about faded memories of faded grandeur; buildings with extravagant Art Deco designs and names to match – the Ritz, the Majestic… Much of the music here sounds shrouded in a haze, evoking distant, slightly blurred memories, with a sense of the unreal as if translating dreams into sound.” Kim Harten, Bliss Aquamarine

The album was also featured in Sonixcursions Random Orbitings, alongside fellow AYITC traveller Pulselovers and the associated Woodford Halse Tapes label. Visit that here.

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

“tells of… places that… have become relics of a dusty and ghostly post-modernity…”  Raffaello Russo, Music Won’t Save You

“Conceptually the label appears to exist in an intersection between music, folklore and science fiction… the themes [of their releases] are intrinsically linked between both audio and visual elements… [The album] focuses on an exploration of… cinemas… which have been abandoned, become derelict, reopened as something new or demolished and there is little or no trace of any more…” Luke Sanger, Flatland Frequencies

The album was also included in John Coulthart’s series of eclectic cultural wandering “Weekend links” posts (of which there are now over 570). Visit that here.

“music that… seems to hang just out of reach, distant melodies within the strains of time and place…” Dave Thompson, Spin Cycle at Goldmine

And then onto some of the broadcasts etc…

The Heartwood Institute’s “Carbon Arc” and Vic Mar’s “Only The Clock Remains” were included on the “…And Your Father, Hasn’t Been Born Yet” episode of Sunrise Ocean Bender’s radio show, alongside work by fellow AYITC travellers Grey Frequency and Field Lines Cartographer. Originally broadcast on WRIR radio, the playlist can be found here at Sunrise Ocean Bender’s site and the show is archived at Mixcloud here.

Keith Seatman’s “Saturday Matinee” and Vic Mars’ “Only The Clock Remains” were included in an episode of Kites and Pylons radio show, alongside a collaboration between Dolly Dolly and sometime AYITC fellow traveller Time Attendant. Originally broadcast on Sine FM, the episode is archived at Mixcloud here.

Field Line Cartographer’s “Faded Flicker” and The Heartwood Institutes “Carbon Arc” were included in an episode of The Golden Apples of the Sun amongst the show’s “musical odyssey through psych-tinged realms such as pastoral folk, glitch, lo-fi electronica, hauntology and hypnagogic pop”. The tracklisting for the show can be visited at their main site here and the show is archived at Mixcloud here.

And then rounding the circle, The Séance’s “Minor’s Club” was played on their “phantom seaside radio show”. Originally broadcast via Brighton’s Radio Reverb, totallyradio and Sine FM, the episode is archived at Mixcloud here and the show’s playlist can be found at The Séance’s site here…

…and archival pictures of the cinema which inspired Keith Seatman’s track can be found at his Test Transmission site here.

A tip of the hat and thanks to all concerned!

The Quietened Dream Palace is an exploration of the ghostly spectres of abandoned and former cinemas, intertwining personal and wider cultural memories as it wanders amongst the stories and times when they still cast their spell over audiences.

It 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.

More information on the album can be found here.

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 and 2021.

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 and 2021 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.

 

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Raven – Unearthing Hidden Buried Power and Battles to Safeguard the Future: Wanderings 15/26

There is a strand of 1970s British young adult television drama that draws from Arthurian myth and legend but rather than directly attempting to tell tales of King Arthur and related well known characters and stories such as the wizard Merlin who aided him, Arthur becoming king by pulling the mystical sword Excalibur from a stone, the quests of The Knights of the Round Table and so in it places the powers and magic related to Arthurian myth in more recent times.

Three notable examples of this strand are: the contemporary set The Changes (1975), in which a sentient lodestone that had once given magic powers to Merlin is attempting to take Britain back to a more ecologically balanced time by causing the population to fear and destroy machines and electricity; Moon Stallion (1978), which revolves around a blind girl in late Victorian times who encounters a plot to capture a white horse that is the mystical messenger of the moon goddess who is connected to Merlin’s story; and Raven (1977), where in contemporary times a teenage boy is revealed to be the latest in a line of King Arthurs and utilises his magical powers and charisma in order to prevent the building of a nuclear waste storage facility in a rurally located ancient underground cave system, which is simultaneously undergoing archaeological research. The caves are linked to King Arthur in some way, possibly containing the source of his powers and/or acting as a gateway through time for him and them.

Raven was a six part mini-series produced by the commercial British broadcaster and production company Associated Television (ATV) and was created and written by Jeremy Burnham and Trevor Ray, who also created the television fantasy drama series Children of the Stones (1977), which centred around an ancient stone circle’s magic and cosmic power that has been harnessed to keep the local population docile and in a repeating time rift. Both series explore and contain some surprisingly adult themes and atmospheres, particularly considering their intended younger audience.

However, while Children of the Stones is largely purely fantasy and science fiction based, Raven adds a real world edge to its themes as its story is based around ecological concerns related to the nuclear industry and related processes, in particular the long term safety implications of storing nuclear waste material that will stay hazardous for a quarter of a million years and moral responsibilities in relation to safeguarding the world for future generations. It also occasionally incorporates other aspects of contemporary events in the real world such as what some perceived as a malaise in the British workforce and trade union activity, which was a prominent aspect of the national conversation during the 1970s. This is referred to when workers at the waste facility refuse to continue their work due to worries about safety after a rockfall and a government minister says in a derogatory manner that “It’s the same old excuse, give the British workman the slightest excuse to down tools and he’s off to the pub.”

Adding a further both mystical and real world layering Raven heavily incorporates astrological concepts, with the cave system’s structure and symbols found in it relating to the twelve signs of the zodiac, which connects the series with the rise of New Age and mystical interests in the 1970s.

The series is named after its central character, who is an approximately 16-year-old former borstal inmate who as part of his rehabilitation is sent to live in a rural area with an archaeology professor and his wife. The professor is leading the archaeological investigation in the system of caves, which he believes are connected to the legend of King Arthur, and he strongly resists and wants to stop the building of the nuclear waste facility in them. The professor is confined to a wheelchair and surveys the archaeological work via CCTV and only has thirty days before work on preparing the caves as a waste facility is complete and his investigations will have to stop, and it is intended that Raven will assist him during this final month. After initially thinking that the professor is attempting to hold back progress by trying to stop the waste facility plans, Raven becomes passionately involved in the fight against them. This is due in part to him reading information on them and the background of the area which the professor gives to him, which results in him appreciating the value the professor places in the caves, and also being influenced by a young reporter called Naomi Grant who works for a local newspaper and who is opposed to the plans, in defiance of her paper’s official policy

Raven has a wiry street wise energy and initially he make for a marked, almost alien, contrast, and seems very much at odds with, his new chocolate box pretty rural home and the character of his hosts, the gruff and research driven professor and his gently maternal wife. Raven is played by Phil Daniels, who would later play the lead frustrated and rebellious teen role in the iconic mod film Quadrophenia (1979), and around a similar time as Raven was produced he also played a fatalistic borstal inmate in the Alan Clarke directed British television play Scum (1977). There are similarities between the three characters but Raven is almost like the flipside of his character in Scum; he has a pragmatic, realist attitude and acceptance of his past and former wrongdoings but after an initial almost recidivist recalcitrance, coupled with an also almost reactionary acceptance that those in power must know best in terms of the plans for the waste facility, he quickly grasps opportunities to change on a personal level and attempts to become what he considers to be a positive influence on society by working to stop the waste facility plans.

From early in the series there are suggestions that Raven may not be a “normal” person; he does not know who his parents were and he tells of how he was found as a baby in an earthwork maze, where a black raven stood guard and would not leave his side until it knew he was safe. He took his name from this type of bird and keeps a photograph of it, which he calls dad. Another bird appears to follow him on his train journey to the professor’s and it is subsequently revealed to be a merlin bird of prey, which through its Arthurian myth connected name further hints that Raven may not be a conventional teenager on the threshold of adulthood.

When discussing King Arthur the professor tells of how it is thought that Arthur may not have been the name of a particular person but rather the name given to a line of kings. He also says that in Arthurian myth and legend it is thought that the last Arthur is not dead but merely slumbering after recovering from a wound and will return when he is needed (which connects with the Arthurian plot aspect of the previously mentioned series The Changes, where the lode-stone’s power is awoken when it considers that the ecological system is under threat). The cave system is revealed to be the nexus for the return of King Arthur, or possibly acts as a portal that allows the channelling of power and magic so that it can be passed on to the latest in the line of kings.

Although he does not initially directly say it, the professor knows that Raven is the latest incarnation of Arthur, and he acts as a Merlin-like guide and helper to him. As he does so Raven experiences mystical visions of himself as King Arthur, which result in the physical anointing of him with an astrological sign by this otherworldly presence and he gains a charismatic, possibly magical, influence over others. He subsequently brings together a disparate group, who are effectively his Arthurian “knights”, and leads their efforts to stop the nuclear waste facility plans.

In Arthurian myth there are 12 such knights, including Arthur, and as suggested in the series this number and them gathering at a round table (hence “The Knights of the Round Table”) may be connected to astrology and the twelve symbols of the zodiac. Raven also has 12 knights or helpers and in a manner which further connects the story with ancient mythology and beliefs he takes his place as their “king” and inspires them to fight against wrongdoing during a night-time ritual, which takes place at a stone circle. This is sited in the rural landscape above the cave system, and next to the portacabin which serves as the headquarters for both the professor’s archaeological investigations and the waste facility plans, and along with the astrological symbols which are found in the caves the stone circle’s presence marks the area as a place of ancient beliefs, worship and possibly magic.

Another connection with Arthurian myth is provided towards the end of the series, when the young reporter Naomi Grant, who along with Raven has become the nucleus of the team or group of knights who fight plans for the waste facility, and for whom he has romantic hopes, leaves him to take up both a job and a romantic attachment with a television current affairs programme presenter who is instrumental in their fight. This plot strand connects with the story of King Arthur’s greatest ally and companion Lancelot and his adulterous affair with Arthur’s wife Queen Guinevere. However the presenter is portrayed more as a self-important glib opportunist rather than a close ally and friend, and Grant’s choosing of him merely leaves Raven a bit moodily bereft rather than contributing to the collapse of the land’s well-being and the ending of Arthur’s kingdom, as Guinevere and Lancelot’s actions do in Arthurian myth.

Alongside being a reporter, Grant writes the astrology column for the newspaper she works for and in the series she is the character who mostly suggests and explains possible astrological links in relation to events, the cave system etc. Perhaps reflecting the previously mentioned widespread interest in astrology etc in the 1970s (and also possibly the way that those of a younger age are often placed in almost wish fulfillment positions of central influence in young adult orientated fictional work) her astrological based theories and suggestions with regards to the caves and their structure are often given a high degree of credence by those in authority. They are even used to help save the supervisor of the waste facility’s development when he becomes trapped by a rockfall in the cave system, which happens after Grant has predicted some kind of disaster due to the waste facility workers digging a tunnel between two caves which had astrological symbols outside them that she says were fundamentally incompatible, and therefore connecting them would bring negative energy into the cave system. After the collapse she and Raven use their astrology based knowledge of the cave system’s structure to suggest an alternative quicker drilling site that will enable the rescue team to save the trapped supervisor before his air runs out, and despite the head of the rescue team’s scepticism he takes their advice, which leads to a successful rescue.

The professor’s archaeological team and the waste facility workers only discover 11 caves but Raven and Grant realise that there must be a hidden 12th cave in the middle of the others, which they think was King Arthur’s cave. They leave a public meeting that will decide if the waste facility is to be completed in order to find this cave, which when they find it has an ever burning “dragon’s flame” inside it, and this links with Raven’s earlier realisation that the structure of the cave system forms an approximate dragon shape. It also connects with Raven’s taking on the mantle of King Arthur and his inspiring of the fight against the waste facility plans and attempting to protect the land for future generations through its connection with Arthurian myth. One story in related mythology involves the wizard Merlin when he was young telling a king called Vortigan that the reason the tower he is attempting to build collapses each day is due to there being a red and a white dragon who are trapped beneath it and doing battle. Merlin tells the king that they must be freed in order that the tower can be built and when a hole is dug into the side of the hill they emerge and continue to do battle. Initially the white dragon looks to have won and then the red dragon launches a fresh attack and defeats it once and for all before flying off with a cry of victory. When Vortigan asks Merlin what this means he replies that the red dragon represents the people of Britain and the white dragon the invading Saxons, and that although the Saxons seem to be winning the war, one day a leader would come who gives the British the heart to fight back and drive them from their lands. This story connects with Arthur having been thought to be a king who lead the defence of Britain against Saxon invaders in the late 5th and early 6th centuries, which can be seen in some ways as being analogous with Raven battling the waste facility plans.

Discovering this final cave and his grasping of the flame in it appears to fully realise Raven’s magical powers and his transition into, or becoming a modern incarnation of, King Arthur. After it is noticed he is no longer at the public meeting it is thought he is trapped in the cave system, and when a rescue team arrives to save him it is, initially somewhat curiously seeming, headed by the government minister who is attempting to push through the waste facility proposal, and who is wearing a conventional suit rather than protective clothing. The minister’s presence is in fact due to him wanting to grasp the television publicity opportunity that he thinks this rescue will provide and he pushes to the front in order to be the first to see Raven in his cave. Raven makes a mystical mental connection with the minister by anointing him, as he himself was earlier, and shows him the dangers of nuclear power by causing the minister to have a vision of a nuclear explosion. After this it is revealed that the minister has suddenly and drastically changed his mind and the planned waste facility is cancelled. However despite this success the series does not end on a neatly rounded off note of positivity.

While the public meeting and rescue attempt take place the professor dies, with it being implied that he is able to do so as his work in aiding Raven assume the mantle and power of King Arthur is completed. However he has arranged for the continuance of the lineage of Merlin-like helpers by making his wife promise to burn a stuffed merlin bird from their home. This she does after his funeral and a new bird emerges phoenix like from the soil of the professor’s grave and flies off into the sky.

In the final scenes Raven is pictured stood apart from the mourners and dressed in his day-to-day casual wear rather than their formal black outfits. He then wanders off alone, passing through and away from the stone circle and stops to look around the landscape. It is unclear whether he is waking from a dream, leaving his role (or was it a form of possession?) as the new King Arthur behind or surveying the land of which he is the new crusading King and considering where else his work and help are needed.

Along with similarities in their themes this ambiguous ending provides a link with the acclaimed British nuclear industry conspiracy themed television drama series Edge of Darkness (1985), which ends on an equally open ended not dissimilar note and which in a number of ways Raven can been as a young adult orientated forebear of. Both explore ecological concerns in relation to nuclear power and the storing of related materials in rural underground cave systems, a sense of rebirth and regeneration through nature and also feature a crusading or questing knight-like figure who, despite their relative insignificance in terms of the hierarchy of power, prove to be an effective force or at least irritant to that hierarchy. As with Raven, at the end of Edge of Darkness its central character is shown stood alone aside from a group and amongst the landscape. His work is done in terms of one particular quest but the wider outcomes and results of ongoing related battles are unclear (although in Edge of Darkness the central character’s personal fate is almost certainly much darker due to his contamination by nuclear material during that quest).

In both series there is also a sense of rural and related subterranean areas being places that are away from the focus of potentially problematic public scrutiny, and that because of this they are useful as dumping grounds for the hazardous by-products of contemporary life. This is accompanied in both series by a sense of a lack of regard for both nature and also those who live in rural or non-metropolitan areas, and an assumption of the superiority of “civilised” urban-based society and infrastructure. This is given overt, and somewhat offensively glib, expression in Raven when the self-important television presenter says to his future romantic companion, the reporter Naomi Grant, after hearing some of her theories that he has “just made a momentous discovery… there are actually country folk with brains.” Slightly surprisingly, although perhaps not as she is shown to be very career orientated and more than a little ruthlessly ambitious and the presenter may be able to help with her advancement, she does not take task with this comment.

For the contemporary viewer who is accustomed to high-end production values there may be a certain amount of recalibration required when viewing a series such as Raven. In contrast with much of more recent television drama and film it does not attempt to visually fully and correctly portray every last detail and event, favouring a budget friendly almost impressionistic depiction. In Raven the drilling of rescue attempts is only heard offscreen and the rescue team arrives in one smallish vehicle that does not feature official insignia, the only indication of its purpose being a small flashing light on its roof; the entrance to the cave system and waste facility site, the development of which it is said a lot of public money has been spent on, is a ramshackle temporary looking shed-like structure made from just a few sheets of corrugated metal; the professor’s archaeology team and the waste facility workers are curiously underpopulated or almost non-existent and so on.

Accompanying this almost impressionistic view of the locations and events in the series, a number of the events in the cave system are only seen via fairly limited and often-indistinct CCTV surveillance in the professor and waste facility supervisor’s joint portacabin office. This adds an extra level of tension by creating a distancing and lack of being able to effect or control events, or even to know fully what is happening, for those who are viewing them.

The series is largely presented in a realist manner but also features a number of very effective mystical sequences that stand up well today, and make good use of limited special effects resources. These include sections where still images of the professor and the merlin bird rapidly intercut and their eyes begin to glow before they merge together, which have an abrupt and disquieting atmosphere. Elsewhere Raven and others have visions which are depicted as trippy cosmic sequences that layer swirling psychedelic patterns with astrological symbols and Raven shown as a returning King Arthur in a robe and crown, who seems to be travelling through time and space to pass on his power and anoint his next in line. These visions are accompanied by garbled whispered voices, synthesizer tones and white noise not dissimilar to work by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop during a similar period, which adds to their unsettling and otherworldly quality. Similar symbols also magically appear at times on the CCTV monitors, which serve to act as an intriguing combining and meeting of contemporary technology and mystical powers.

At the time of writing Raven is not available to stream etc online and it had its first (and so far only) DVD release in 2012 by Network, a company established in 1997 which specialises in the licensing and release of often semi-forgotten and overlooked corners of British film and television from previous decades. Alongside a number of releases of higher profile series such as the science fiction and fantasy series Space 1999 (1975-1979) and The Prisoner (1967), Network’s releases have included a number of hauntological and wyrd or otherly pastoral cultural reference points, such as the earlier mentioned Children of the Stones, The Owl Service (1969-1970), compilations of public information films and various examples of Nigel Kneale scripted dramas, including Beasts (1976) and the final series of Quatermass (1979).

Text which accompanied Raven’s release on DVD says that it had “long been believed to be incomplete in the archive but we tracked down the original 2″ VT tapes for transfer”. Through such work and digging up, restoring and sending out curios like Raven into the world Network could be seen as effectively carrying out commercially funded archival preservation and distribution, in a manner not wholly dissimilar to the archival orientated independent television channel Talking Pictures TV and their DVD release company Renown Pictures.


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Trader Horne’s “Morning Way”: Songs for A Year In The Country 14/26

I think more than any other song, this title track from Trader Horne’s eponymous 1970 album other was responsible for opening something in my mind with regards to folk music and culture… “Dreaming strands of nightmare are sticking to my feet…”

 

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Broadcast Findings and Anticipating Dreamlike Pastoral Explorations: Wanderings 14/26

A few pieces of Broadcast related findings from the time of Work And Non Work to Tender Buttons via The Noise Made By People…

Above is an interview with Broadcast from issue 24 of Fused magazine, which was published around the time when their album Tender Buttons was released in 2005 and when the band had slimmed down to the duo of Trish Keenan and James Cargill.

The interview is interesting in part because it feels like something of a non-capital centric media homecoming, as at the time Cargill and Keenan were based in Birmingham, as was the magazine, and the duo discuss the music scene, events and so on in their home town.

During the article Trish Keenan also discusses the influences on the album’s title of the Gertrude Stein book / poem Tender Buttons,  saying that:

“[The album’s] title is influenced by a Gertrude Stein poem. I got obsessed with, well really appreciated, the fact that she wasn’t hung up on making sense at all. It didn’t really inspire the writing as such but the technique of automatic writing is used all over the LP. That’s how I generate the lyrics.”

The photographs which accompanied  the article, taken by the interviewer David Osbaldestin, have an Alice in Wonderland and dreamlike pastoral feel to them, which looking back could be seen to anticipate the more otherly pastoral elements in the videos for the album Broadcast and The Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age released in 2009 and the duo’s rare EP/mini-album Mother Is The Milky Way, that was released in the same year.

The issue of the magazine seems fairly rare but the interview is available to read at Fused’s website (see link below).

And then wandering back to when Broadcast was a four piece consisting of James Cargill, Trish Keenan, Roj Stevens and Tim Felton, above is an interview with the band from issue 170 of Making Music magazine published in June 2000, just after the band’s first album The Noise Made By People had been released in March. In keeping with the music recording and technology nature of the magazine, much of the interview focuses on the band’s recording techniques and equipment but it also discusses the reimagining of psychedelia that can be found at times in Broadcast’s work, alongside touching on the hauntological aspects of their work at a time before that phrase had come to be used in relation to music around the mid-2000s:

“Sixties psychedelia first realised the power of technology to sonically capture altered states, and it’s the same exploration of inner space which Broadcast traverse… ‘The Noise Made By People’ is a haunting past recorded by twenty-somethings born in the variable lag of the sixties and reared on the seventies. Psychedelia, easy listening, jazz lounge – all sampled, twisted, looped and transmitted to a 21st Century audience in the the early hours on a disused frequency.”

The interview and magazine is something of a time capsule in terms of the history of music and related technology. Published around the peak and just on the brink of when CD sales began to fall as music increasingly went online and before computer’s and audio software became more capable of recording, processing and manipulating music, the magazine is full of adverts, articles etc on physical studio hardware such as effects units, keyboards and so on, most of which I expect are now obsolete or perhaps have sometimes gained a certain cachet in terms of their vintage appeal.

And then wandering back even further, a brief article and interview in a fold-out A5 zine called I think The Day The Earth Stood Still, which (I also think) was published at some point around the middle of 1997, just after Broadcast had signed to Warp and were a five piece that included James Cargill, Trish Keenan, Roj Stevens, Tim Felton and Steve Perkins.

The interview is part of an article on Warp records and although even back then the style and genres of the label’s releases could be quite varied, it was best known for dance and electronica including the likes of LFO, Autechre and Aphex Twin, and Broadcast probably seemed like quite a surprising cuckoo in the nest in terms of their label mates. Along which lines, I can imagine this gig was something of a contrasting eye opener, as discussed by an uncredited member of Broadcast in the zine:

“We played with Aphex Twin in Cambridge. He lies on the stage with a laptop, and we’ve got a full kit. We did get some weird looks and it wasn’t a very easy gig, but it’s good to cross over more and break down those barriers.”

The zine was published just after the Work And Non Work compilation had been recently released, and I’ll end this post with a succinct summing up of Broadcast’s early sound from the article:

“Work and Non Work… [is] a compilation of the band’s previously released singles, where lush aesthetics and dust covered analogue synths collide…”

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Midwinter’s “Sanctuary Stone” from The Waters of Sweet Sorrow: Songs for A Year In The Country 13/26

Early 1970s acid/psych folk / folk rock that for a long time wasn’t just a privately pressed rarity but rather the master tape’s sat in one of the band’s attic for a fair few years until eventually released 20 years later. Enchanting work and well worth the wait (!)

 

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The Straight Story – A Gently Lynchian View of Journeying Through a Near Mythical Landscape: Wanderings 13/26

The Straight Story (1999) is a road movie with a difference; based on a true story from 1994 it is set in Midwestern American and focuses on Alvin Straight, a 73 year old man who wants to visit his 80 year old brother, Lyle, who has had a stroke, and with whom he has not spoken for a considerable number of years since they had a severe falling out.

However his brother lives over 200 miles away and Alvin does not have a driving license because his eyesight and legs are too impaired, his daughter who he lives with cannot drive and even if she could he does not like or trust anybody else, including bus drivers, to drive him. Refusing to let any of this stop him he builds a trailer, fills it with supplies, hitches it to his decades old sit on lawnmower and sets off to his brother’s, travelling slowly along the roads.

Unfortunately his mower breaks down irreparably not far into his journey and so he has to return home and get help to fetch it and his trailer. Determined to complete his journey he then buys another newer, but still decades old, mower and sets off again. Due to this delay, the mowers only being able to travel at around five miles per hour, and him having to wait for repairs when the newer mower breaks down, his journey takes him six weeks.

The film was directed by David Lynch and written by his longstanding collaborator Mary Sweeney, in conjunction with John Roach. As many readers will no doubt know, Lynch is well-known for his distinctive, often unsettling, dark and dreamlike work that includes the films Eraserhead (1977), Wild at Heart (1990) and Blue Velvet (1986), the latter of which explores the flipside and underbelly of a seemingly idealized small American town, which is a recurring trope of Lynch’s work. With knowledge of this, beginning to watch The Straight Story may initially be a strange and almost disjunctive experience, where the viewer is expecting normality to fracture into a Lynchian dreamscape. This is added to by the opening image being that of stars at night and text saying “Walt Disney Pictures Presents”. While Disney at the time was not yet the ubiquitous multi-franchise owning cultural behemoth that it would go on to be, it was nonetheless a very well-known brand, one which was generally associated with family friendly entertainment, and not a company which would have normally been expected to be associated with Lynch’s work due to its often challenging nature.

These expectations of stepping into a Lynchian surreal world are heightened due to the opening scenes of The Straight Story seemingly intersecting with the above-mentioned flipside of small towns trope in his work.

The film opens with aerial shots of apparently idyllic rural agricultural fields and a small town, which is later shown to be Alvin’s hometown. The shot changes to show the main street, which is deserted except for a few fast running unsupervised dogs, which segues into a slightly cartoonishly portrayed woman sunbathing on a lawn, who goes to fetch garishly coloured snack food, during which somebody is heard to collapse in the house next to hers. Elsewhere in the earlier scenes set in the town there is a subtly surreal or unreal aspect to some of the characters, as though the reality of the world has been slightly heightened. Alongside this the film is soundtracked by Angelo Badalamenti, who has also worked on a number of other productions with Lynch including Blue Velvet, and the opening features his distinctive sweeping music. This all combines so that, as written by Roger Ebert in a review of the film, the viewer may well “keep waiting for the other shoe to drop – for Alvin’s odyssey to intersect with the Twilight Zone”. But as also noted by Robert Ebert in the same review, it never does.

Rather this is a gentle film which remains grounded in the day-to-day world, and shows us the people Alvin meets on his journey and the reciprocal generosity and kindness between these passing strangers.

The person who collapsed was Alvin, who is struggling with his health and is no longer easily able to stand unaided. When, before learning of his brother’s stroke, he visits the doctor he is told of his own multiple health issues, and that if he does not change his ways quickly then there will be serious consequences. The subtly vulnerable look on Alvin’s face shows that he knows this means at the very least his ability to live at all normally and quite possibly a genuine threat to his life.

Alvin refuses the tests and other medical interventions the doctor suggests, along with the possibility of him using a walker, in a way that is both stubborn, possibly even pigheaded, but also an indicator of his acceptance of the passing of time, his ageing and the resulting physical toll this takes, and the inevitability of mortality. His refusal of the suggestions, and also the journey he undertakes, are reflections of him attempting to maintain, in his own distinctive way, some kind of dignity.

This need for dignity is a continuous theme throughout the film. Elsewhere when his money runs low during his journey, and he needs to phone his daughter in order to have her send him his social security cheque, he asks Danny, a member of a family he meets, if he can use their phone, but uses it cordlessly in order that he can make the call in private outside their home.

At the same time Alvin is not too proud to accept help when it is offered during his journey, and is appreciative of it. But also he is aware of his own character and the importance of his journey and what it represents. When Danny, who witnessed the brakes failing on Alvin’s mower when he was going downhill and his narrowly avoiding a serious accident, concernedly offers to give him a lift in their car for the remainder of the journey, Alvin replies:

“You’re a kind man talking to a stubborn man. I still want to finish this the way I started it.”

During his journey it as though Alvin has stepped aside from the conventions and expectations of the normal contemporary world, and accompanying this during his journey Alvin is depicted as, despite and in defiance of his physical problems, possessing a rugged frontier-like independence. His mower has no cabin and so he is exposed to the elements (although luckily the weather mostly holds); he is at points genuinely alone, as the roads stretch on seemingly endlessly, often empty of all other traffic and distant from towns, supplies and anywhere that could repair his mower; or they are populated with impersonal seeming large lorries, which highlight both the dogged nature of his quest and also his vehicle’s and personal physical vulnerability. Alongside this the film is a time capsule snapshot, as Alvin has no mobile phone with which to call for help, which further adds to the sense of the bravely determined, perhaps also foolhardy, nature of his journey, alongside his isolation and vulnerability if he runs into trouble.

The Straight Story was filmed chronologically along the actual route taken by Alvin in real life, but even without knowledge of that the film could almost be viewed in part as a documentary travelogue in its depictions of the rural beauty and vast agricultural fields of Midwestern America. At the same time in some subtle and not obvious way it avoids purely bucolic or even twee depictions of the landscape. This is perhaps because the infrastructure of agriculture interjects in the flow of the film, in particular storage silos, which sometimes appear briefly as ominous, silent and almost aggressive structures. Also the beauty of the fields of crops is counterpointed with the isolation and industrial-like machinery, such as harvesters, that work amongst them, and the fields’ vastness highlights the relative insignificance of Alvin, and also possibly individuals in general, as he travels alongside them.

There is also an allegorical chronological aspect to the film, in that the age of the people Alvin meets on his journey advance as he travels: these include a teenager who has run away from home due to fearing her family’s reaction to her pregnancy; then a group of twenty something cyclists; a distraught woman in her early thirties, who keeps accidentally crashing into deers on her way to work; the previously mentioned Danny and his wife Darla, who are a middle aged couple who let Alvin camp in their garden while he is waiting for his mower to be repaired; and an older war veteran he meets while staying there.

For many of the people he meets, Alvin acts as a source and teller of the wisdom and philosophy that his age and experiences have leant him. He becomes a form of passing healer, acting as a catalyst for the teenager to realise the potential strength and support of family and to return home, and for the war veteran to unburden himself of the horrors he saw in conflict. This is not a one-sided process though as, for example, Alvin is in return able to share with the veteran his own troubles after fighting in World War II, and to finally be able to unburden himself of a distressing secret which he has carried ever since. And when he is almost at his brother’s he movingly and almost in a confession-like manner tells a priest he meets of their life together:

“We were raised on a farm up in Moorhead, Minnesota. Worked so hard… Me and Lyle… we made games out of our chores. A day’s work’d go quicker when it was just the two of us. He and I used to sleep out in the yard every summer night it wasn’t pouring… We’d bunk down as soon as the sun went down and lie there talkin’ ourselves to sleep. Talk about the stars …and other planets, whether there might be other people like us out there, ’bout all the places we wanted to go… made our trials seem smaller. We pretty much talked each other through growin’ up… whatever it was that made me and Lyle so mad… don’t matter anymore. I want to make peace, I want to sit with him, look up at the stars… like we used to do, so long ago.”

While Alvin, as depicted in the film, is not a man to wax loquacious if it is not necessary, the conversations with those he meets are often portrayed in considerable detail. This and the general level of detail of his journey shown in the film may cause the viewer to question the degree to which The Straight Story is a depiction of fact, and how much it is a fiction, which is only inspired by Alvin Straight’s actual journey. Although specific details regarding this are not easy to discover, Connie Dallenbach, a resident of Alvin’s real world home town who knew him, said to journalist Patrick Smith:

“The main thing I learned [after watching it] was if a film says ‘based on a true story’, there is a nugget of truth but then a whole lot of ‘story’: Alvin was not the wise philosopher as portrayed in the movie.” (Quoted from “How an old man and his lawnmower made David Lynch weep: the making of The Straight Story”, Patrick Smith, telegraph.co.uk, 14th April 2017.)

Also, in the film Alvin is shown as, despite a last minute engine problem, making it all the way to his brother’s on his mower, whereas it has been reported that a passing farmer helped him push it for the last two miles after it broke down. In the film at this point, when a farmer stops to see if he needs help, Alvin says, in a way that references his own journeys, both recent and through life “This thing’s just tired.” After a moment and at the encouragement of the farmer he tries the mower’s ignition again and this time it starts.

As Alvin Straight died in 1996, before the film’s completion, it is difficult, if not impossible, to know what he would have made of the film, or the focus and attention it may well have brought to him. After previous media coverage of his journey he turned down offers to appear on the high profile American television talk shows The Tonight Show with Jay Leno (1992-2014) and the Late Show with David Letterman (1993-2015), and he is reported to have said that “he made the trip to see his brother, not for the possibility of fame and money”. He did agree to the film being made however, as in 1995 he signed a contract in relation to it that ensured he would receive $10,000 plus 10% of the film’s profits, and his family are thanked in the credits.

Whatever the balance of “truth” and “story” in the film it remains a respectful depiction of an older man attempting to maintain some dignity and autonomy, and also to put behind him and make amends for past mistakes, as he approaches the end of his life.

There is also an intertwining of fact and fiction in terms of the film’s cast and their own lives; Richard Farnsworth, who plays Alvin, was himself terminally ill during its production and the paralysis of Alvin’s legs as shown in the film was in fact a real depiction of Farnsworth’s illness. The Straight Story was his last film role and he died the year after its release.

Accompanying this the film contains an honest and sympathetic depiction of the physical visual and potentially debilitating effects of ageing, and the older actor’s faces contain the wealth and experiences of their lives and years:

“The faces in this movie are among its treasures. Farnsworth himself has a face like an old wrinkled billfold that he paid good money for and expects to see him out. There is another old man who sits next to him on a barstool near the end of the movie, whose face is like the witness to time.” (Roger Ebert, as above.)

Throughout the film can be viewed as a hymn to a near mythical Midwestern small town and rural Americana, and its depiction of this becomes further distilled in the final scenes when Alvin finally arrives at his brother’s home.

The road which leads there is not tarmaced but rather is a well kept track, while the home itself is an isolated slightly tumble down wooden shack-like structure that could almost have tumbled from the 19th century. Alvin, as throughout the film, has the appearance of an older frontiersman with his white beard, checked shirt and jacket and Stetson style hat. When his brother responds to Alvin calling for him he steps out of his front door with the aid of a walker, and he has the look of an unkempt, but practically dressed hobo (although this may well be due to his convalescence and the isolated location of his home meaning he was not expecting visitors).

They sit on the porch together in silence. After a moment Alvin’s brother asks “Did you ride that thing all the way out here to see me?”, “I did Lyle’. They can both barely contain their emotions, the unspoken happiness at finally being reunited, quite possibly coloured with sadness of the years they have lost and an awareness of the little time they have left. They say no more, Alvin’s brother looks tearfully up at the sky and Alvin soon joins him. It is still daylight but the screen fades to a star-filled night. There is a sense of the circle of life being completed; they are finally reunited and at peace with one another. They can once more just sit side by side, helping one another to make their, now final, “trials seem smaller”, as they look at the stars together as they did when they were children.

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Kate Bush’s “Oh England My Lionheart” from Lionheart: Songs for A Year In The Country 12/26

Early(ish) Kate Bush that perfectly captures the otherly pastoral fantasia world of her work.

 

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The Wicker Man – Revisiting a Cultural Behemoth and Casting Aside Convention on Summerisle: Wanderings 12/26

At the A Year In The Country site there have been a fair number of posts that explored the  cultural offshoots from The Wicker Man such as documentaries, different home releases of the film, related books and soundtrack releases etc but I thought it would be good to revisit the actual film.

It is easy to forget just how odd The Wicker Man (1973) is. Even after numerous viewings it retains an ability to shock, intrigue, unsettle and even possibly even beguile and confuse the viewer.

This may in part be due to its mixing of genres and themes; at times it veers towards being a musical, running through the whole film is a crime mystery, at points becomes more an erotic thriller, while it ends on a note of, if not actual horror, then at least terror during its ending. Accompanying all of which it explores complex and morally ambiguous debates around different belief systems and practices, both directly via the characters’ dialogue and indirectly via the results of their actions.

In terms of genres it could be connected with, one of the things that struck me when I recently rewatched it was just how much it includes considerable elements of the con artist movie. More on that later in the post.

I suspect that if you’re reading this you may well already know of the film’s plot etc but just in case, below is a brief synopsis.

Directed by Robin Hardy from a screenplay by Anthony Shaffer and set in contemporary times, the plot focuses around Sergeant Howie, a pious and puritanically Christian police officer who receives a report of a missing child and travels alone via seaplane to the remote Scottish island Summerisle where she lived. The island has an economy largely based around agriculture and the growing of new strains of crops which are able to flourish in the island’s unusually temperate climate.

Sergeant Howie’s investigations are met with recalcitrance and deception by the villagers, and he is repeatedly shocked by them not following the Christian religion, instead having turned to the “old gods” and a form of pagan nature worship, which incorporates an uninhibited attitude towards sex and fertility, and incorporates folkloric rituals and song. Ultimately it is revealed that he has been lead a merry dance by the islanders and their patriarchal leader Lord Summerisle and that the sergeant is intended to be a sacrifice that it is hoped will restore their failed crops, which it is implied has happened due to them being grown in an area where they would not naturally be.

In the final sequence Howie is forcedly placed in a huge wicker man pyre structure, which is set fire to as the islanders serenade his sacrifice with a traditional sun worship song. As the wicker man structure burns, its head falls to one side and reveals the sun setting over the ocean.

(As an aside, looking back the film’s exploration of alternative lifestyles, pagan beliefs and “the old ways” could be considered to interconnect with the “psychic boom” in the 1960s and 1970s, when there was a considerable upsurge of interest in the paranormal, the occult etc which was accompanied by a growth in subcultural and mainstream media coverage of such subjects, alongside an increase in the release of related publications.)

Although the ending and Howie’s sacrifice are not easy viewing, their depiction, the reasons for what has happened and demeanour of those responsible are presented in a way that causes the film to stand apart from the gratuitous or almost nonchalantly callous inclusion of sadism that has become an increasing part of the horror, and other, genres:

“For [Christopher Lee who played Lord Summerisle], this is what sets the film apart from conventional horror movies: ‘The islanders are so sincere. Summerisle says [to Howie], ‘A martyr’s death – the greatest gift we can bestow.’ And everybody’s smiling. You know: what a lucky man you are! Joy, joy, joy. There’s no sadistic delight.'” (Quoted from “A Pagan Place”, Damien Love, Uncut, May 2002.)

The film plays with a sense of reality and fantasy and it opens with text that says:

“The Producer would like to thank The Lord Summerisle and the people of his island off the west coast of Scotland for this privileged insight into their religious practices and for their generous co-operation in the making of this film.”

Having been released at a time before the ease of access to information brought about by the internet, the film’s audience is unlikely to have known that no such community or island existed, nor have been able to quickly look it up.

(There is a similarly named island called Summer Isles off the coast of Scotland but none of The Wicker Man was filmed there.)

The blurring of the lines between fantasy and reality in the film is also increased through it using a considerable number of songs that either draw from traditional folk songs and/or are similar in style and content. Alongside this it features a number of folk traditions, rituals and characters that also draw from real world traditions, and which lend a familiarity and layered grounding in semi-known and half-remembered reality to it, of which the film’s director Robin Hardy has said:

“What we hoped would fascinate people is not that they would think these things are still going on in Europe, but that they would recognize an awful lot of these things as sort of little echoes from either out of childhood stories and nursery rhymes or things they do at various times of the year… But they’re not dead. The thing about these beliefs is that people do these things today and not know why they do them. We call them ‘superstitions’. There are millions of people who know nothing about [ancient trees gods and mythology] who will… ‘touch wood’… [Such things] all have profoundly important and real origins in pagan belief.” (Quoted from “The Wicker Man”, David Bartholomew, Cinefantastique – Volume 6, Number 3, David Bartholomew, 1977.)

The changing use and depiction of music in the film further blurs the sense of reality and unreality. At times it is apparently played and sung by those onscreen in a fairly realist manner and appears to be a diegetic or natural part of the film’s world, such as during a sequence when a bawdy song is sung by the patrons of a pub, the music for which was recorded on location and played by those who appear onscreen. Elsewhere the film becomes more similar to a conventional musical as obviously studio recorded singing and instrumentation play, with at times only the vocals being mimed by the onscreen characters, while at other points both the vocals and the instrumentation are mimed, which blurs the lines between the “real” world of the film and its characters and its more obviously artificially constructed aspects. Also at one point the performance of music in the film possibly briefly breaks the fourth wall, which happens when an islander sings and performs an erotic song and naked wall thumping dance in order to tempt and seduce the puritanical Howie through his bedroom wall. During this she is accompanied by studio recorded non-diegetic instruments on the soundtrack which have no “real” world source in the film and she appears to look directly at and acknowledge the camera. The resultant continuous switching of modes adds a shifting sense of reality to the film’s world and the viewer’s perception of it.

There is also a further blurring of reality in the film due to it being shot in real world locations, meaning that there is an authenticity to them which connects with the film’s deliberately misleading introductory text thanking Lord Summerisle, and also

their appearance is not leant a potentially dated studio bound appearance. This sense of authenticity is added to by many of the islanders being drawn from members of the local public rather than being professional actors, and so subconsciously they seem “right” for their location. However, in contrast with the resulting sense of the film being located and grounded in the real world, although the film was set in contemporary times, many exterior signs of modern life such as street lights and television aerials seem to be largely absent, which adds an atemporal “out of time” aspect to the island.

The film also uses a recurring trope in cinema, that of islands and rural areas as places where it is possible for conventions and norms to be stepped away from, and their populations to be an unknowable or threatening “other” who have their own ways and beliefs that are at odds with wider society. As part of the exploration of this the investigating outsider Howie represents two forms of mainstream or conventional authority, being both a devout Christian and a police officer.

The clash between Howie’s beliefs and authority, and therefore those of the conventional and dominant society, and the islanders’ beliefs and Lord Summerisle’s authority throws up questions about assumptions of moral right and superiority around different forms of religion and authority. Accompanying this the film explores what happens when assumed positions of power and superiority are challenged in various ways, which in this instance involves a society wide lack of compliance and the individual who represents those positions being removed from their supporting infrastructure. When Howie, his investigation and authority are not met with cooperation by the islanders he, at least for much of the film, keeps straightforwardly ploughing on, assuming that somehow he will get to the truth of the matter. This may appear somewhat obtuse, or imply that he is not all that skilled as a detective, but may in fact be due to him being used to operating in a setting and society which respects his authority and the hierarchy and system he represents, and so he is essentially unable to correctly function, or understand how to, when that is no longer the case.

Howie is only on the island for two nights but the islanders’ lack of cooperation quickly has him and his rigorous adherence to the law coming apart at the seams. After exhuming the missing child’s supposed grave he finds only a hare in her coffin, which he had previously been told by the islanders she had transmuted into upon her death. The islander who has helped him in the exhumation just laughs mockingly at him discovering this, and when Howie confronts Lord Summerisle with his finding the response he receives is a knowing and dismissive humouring of him. Thus far in the film whenever in public Howie has been wearing an immaculately kept uniform, in a way that both represents and heightens his own personal sense of authority and also his controlled, buttoned up and even priggish and prissy personality.

(Edward Woodward who played Howie is said to have worn a police uniform two sizes too small in order to enhance the sense and appearance of the character as controlled and overly buttoned up.)

In the above confrontation with Lord Summerisle his tie is loosened and his police jacket undone, which although small things, and even allowing for him having been engaged in the physical labour of digging up a grave, are a notable indicator of just how much he is unravelling.

Rather than attempting to contact the mainland for backup he seems obsessed with solving the case on his own, perhaps because if he can it will prove the continued superiority of his belief systems and authority. He takes it upon himself to set aside the law he represents and effectively carries out acts of breaking and entering as part of his investigation. This is further exacerbated when he does eventually attempt to return to the mainland and finds his seaplane inoperable, most probably due to sabotage by the islanders, after which he becomes a form of vigilante. He knocks a man unconscious in order to steal his masked costume and surreptitiously join the islanders in their May Day parade and hopefully find the missing child, who he now believes will be sacrificed in order to restore the island’s failed crops. While his actions may have a practical legal and moral basis, i.e. the protection of a child to the best of his ability, his actions seem equally those of a man who has come untethered from his own strict moral and legal code. Ironically, and perhaps in part as a form of retribution which reflects his transgressing from his own codes and also possessing a vain pride in his beliefs and authority, this untethering or abandoning becomes the final contributor to his own damnation. As a result of joining the parade he is completing a ritual being enacted by the islanders, and discovers that he has effectively been herded and lead as an unknowing participant in a complex ritualistic game they have been playing with him.

As just suggested there is a hubris, or even arrogance, to Howie and his actions. Until almost the very last moment he does not seem to be able to countenance that his position of legal authority can be defeated. However the strength of his belief in this authority rapidly, and almost instantly, seems to crumble when the islanders surround him and he realises his fate as their sacrifice, and that his authority in the face of overwhelming societal wide non-compliance is now worth little.

There is also a degree of hubris and possibly arrogance to the islanders’ actions. Their game playing, plotting and hoodwinking of Howie is so convoluted that it is difficult to believe they could ever think it would work, and that it did so may well be more due to chance than design. Them achieving their aims is dependant on the entire population knowing and playing their parts consistently and without constant direct supervision, and Howie also consistently responding in the desired way. In relation to this the film connects with the con artist movie genre, and has more than a little in common with the critically and commercially highly successful period film The Sting, also released in the same year as The Wicker Man, in which a large group of people work together to carry out a complex gambling related con which requires an almost absurd level of organisation, cooperation and secrecy.

(The Wicker Man and The Sting – an alternative early 1970s double bill?)

There are also numerous other practical considerations that could have scuppered the islander’s plans, and which indicate a sense of over confidence in the islanders. For example if the weather had been particularly bad and subject to heavy downpours prior to and on the day of the parade that Howie joins as he unknowingly heads towards his doom, it is likely that the islander’s spirits would have been considerably dampened and their costumes and Lord Summerisle’s make up potentially ruined. This would have made the bizarrely upbeat and celebratory nature of their ritual sacrifice of Howie considerably less easy to achieve, while the wicker man pyre they use in this ritual would possibly not have easily burned.

The Wicker Man is ambiguous on a number of levels and it does not have easily or well defined good versus bad protagonists and sides. While nominally the “goodie” or hero, Howie is difficult to warm to or view as such, due in part to his priggish, close minded and judgemental personality, and also him having and representing a puritanical personal and societal viewpoint. Alongside which Lord Summerisle and the islanders may be acting for what they consider the collective good in sacrificing the sergeant but they are still carrying out an act of murder.

Also, despite presenting itself as being benevolently organised and ruled by Lord Summerisle and containing a contented population there is an ambiguity to the structure and society of Summerisle.

The islanders accepted and embraced Lord Summerisle’s grandfather as their ruler, and subsequently Summerisle’s father and then himself, after their lives of near starvation were drastically improved by Lord Summerisle’s grandfather who, as referred to at the start of the chapter, introduced new strains of crops which were able to flourish in the island’s unusually temperate climate. Accompanying this Lord Summerisle says that his grandfather thought that:

“the best way of… rousing the people from their apathy [was] by giving them back their joyous old gods and [by telling them that] as a result of this worship the barren island would burgeon and bring forth fruit in great abundance.”

Part of this process of worship and creating social cohesion appears to have included the introduction of the aforementioned playful religious and folkloric rituals, and an open-minded acceptance of revelry in the form of sexual freedom, communal singing and drinking. This proved a seductive and efficient mix, and caused the Christian ministers to flee, with the island’s isolation presumably allowing this way of life and beliefs to become deeply embedded.

But all this has a flipside; is Summerisle a sexually uninhibited society which has cast off puritanical strictures, or an amoral and licentiously creepy form of cult and its brainwashed victims? Or perhaps a mixture of both? Accompanying this, although not overtly, the film can also be viewed as a reflection of real world post 1960s hippie-like ideals and free love that are still “happy clappy” but which have corrupted and curdled into something darker and self-deluding.

In essence the Summerisle family’s methods of maintaining control can be seen as a variation on the classic “bread and circuses” concept, which has its origins in Roman times, i.e. the family have kept control over the island’s population through keeping them happily fed and entertained. There is considerable moral complexity and ambiguity to this, as the islanders’ lives have been materially improved and they generally seem quite happy under their benevolent patriarch’s rule, while equally their acceptance may be due to the successful embedding of an imposed belief system, rather than due to acts of free will.

Related to which for the viewer there is a potentially ambiguous and morally confusing sense of sirenish seduction to the life and world of Summerisle as presented in the film. The folkish songs on the soundtrack and which at times are performed by the islanders, in particular “Corn Riggs”, “Willow’s Song” and “Gently Johnny”, are hypnotic lullabies that linger in the memory and draw the viewer in, the islanders appear to have all their practical and spiritual needs taken care of and the island itself is a timeless rural idyll. Accompanying this the ideology and beliefs that underpin the islanders’ way of life are eloquently and logically presented by a charismatic and benevolent leader (albeit who is also slightly pompous and bufoonish), who seems to intellectually out manoeuvre and rationally refute Howie and conventional and/or Christian society’s arguments at every step. All this can create a heady mix which obscures the realities and problematic nature of Summerisle’s society, not least issues around compliance and control, and also the way it is prepared to solve problems relating to agricultural issues and social cohesion in an extreme and unhinged way (i.e. by entrapping and sacrificing an outsider).

In order for the Summerisle society to continue functioning how it does, all outside influences and contact must be kept to a minimum. Connected to which, in terms of how the islanders are kept entertained through their own homegrown forms of entertainment, such as communal singing and folk rituals, Summerisle seems removed from the rest of the world and time. Also, although there are examples of contemporary branded food, alcohol and other consumer items on the island, alongside some electrical appliances such as hairdryers in the salon, there is little evidence of contemporary electronic entertainment media. It is almost as if in some unspoken and undisclosed manner record players, radios and television have largely and quietly been kept off the island. Perhaps this was instituted by the Summerisle family for fear that they would threaten or usurp the more traditional communal forms of entertainment and ritual which bind the islanders together in their pagan beliefs. Or maybe the islanders themselves have had no need for them, preferring their own more homegrown folklore orientated entertainments. Whatever the reasons this aspect of the film can be seen as a reflection of how in the real world sections of society were drawn to traditional, rural and folkloric places and culture in the 1970s as a form of escape from the troubles of contemporary life, and as part of an attempt to find alternative or more authentic forms of experience and ways of life, which is also discussed elsewhere in the book.

To a degree watching the film is to be given a view of the last decades or corner of a particular way of life. The islanders have been able to live how they do due to their isolation, but it is unlikely that this could have been maintained indefinitely in the face of technological advancements, in particular the relentless and all conquering nature of digital technology and internet communications which would gain considerable pace within a few decades of the film’s events. However, although maintaining their isolation in future decades would have been unlikely, it would not have been impossible and such ambiguities about the film’s story and world, and the way they leave space for the imagination to wonder, may well be part of what has led to it having such an ongoing fascination:

“We don’t know if Summerisle’s sacrifice fails – the apples could come tumbling out of the trees that year, but if they don’t, the people will have to have another go next year… But if the apples do return, whether it was because of the sacrifice or by a natural process – it’s not unknown for crops to fail and grow the next year – who knows? It’s not, after all, the continuing story of Summerisle. You have to be left with a certain doubt.” (Anthony Shaffer quoted from “The Wicker Man”, Cinefantastique, as above.)

Existing alongside this sense of “doubt” about the future of Summerisle are the almost myth-like stories around the films production, which include how footage was disposed of and buried in motorway foundations and no “full” version of the film is still known to exist, which creates further imaginative space around the film:

“And this, perhaps, is the final clue to the uncanny hold it has over its admirers – the notion that, even in the longest extant cut, what we’re seeing is not The Wicker Man, not quite. Its ultimate version may never be seen – the lost movie Christopher Lee made decades ago, existing now only in scenes that haunt his memory.” (Quoted from “A Pagan Place”, as above.)

Which seems like an appropriate place to leave this “cultural behemoth”.

Elsewhere at A Year In The Country (well, a few of such things, I expect there are more):

 

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The United States of America’s “Cloud Song”: Songs for A Year In The Country 11/26

Gentle, drifting, softly woozy psych-ambient from 1968… Apparently the band were an influence on Broadcast and Portishead…

 

Links:

 

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Boards of Canada, the Past Inside the Present and Parallel World Interconnections with Hauntology and Otherly Pastoralism: Wanderings 11/52

If you’re reading this it’s quite likely you already know who Boards of Canada are but just in case below is some background information on them:

Boards of Canada are a duo of Michael Sandison and Marcus Eoin, who for a considerable period were based in rural Scotland near to the capital city Edinburgh. They are known for creating distinctive and influential often electronic melodic music that incorporates a hazy, nostalgic, distant dream-like and almost hallucinatory atmosphere which utilises vintage synthesisers, samples from 1970s public broadcasting programmes and other previous decades’ media, analogue production methods and aesthetics/flaws such as tape flutter and hip hop inspired breakbeats.

They originally formed in 1986 and have a somewhat enigmatic public persona, in part due to rarely performing live or giving interviews, and when they do so these are often conducted via email, alongside increasing lengths of time between releasing new work (they have released various singles and EPs and the albums Twoism, Boc Maxima, Music Has the Right to Children, Geogaddi, The Campfire Headphase and Tomorrow’s Harvest in 1995, 1996, 1998, 2002, 2005 and 2013 respectively). Adding to this enigmatic air, their work appears to contain cryptic, unexplained, subliminal meanings and messages, either through the use of spoken word samples and/or in a more hidden way in the atmospheres it creates, alongside the use of esoteric methods of production and inspirations:

“They have based a number of… songs on mathematical equations (working out frequencies for melodies that directly correlate to the changing amount of light in one day, for example).” (Quoted from “Breaking Into Heaven”, interview with Boards of Canada by Emma Warren, The Face Volume 3 Number 48, January 2001.)

Their work could be considered to represent a form of midway or transitional point between the likes of instrumental downtempo electronica released by the likes of  Wall of Sound and Mo’Wax around the mid-1990s and the hauntological electronica that began to be created and released from around the mid-2000s by Ghost Box Records etc, with the founders of the latter having spoken of how Boards of Canada could be considered an early example of and influence on work that has come to be labelled as hauntological.

One of the relatively few interviews in general, and in person in particular, that Boards of Canada have given was with Rob Young for issue 260 of Wire magazine which was published in October 2005. Looking back both the date of that issue’s publication and also the interviewer now seem to have a particular significance in the lineage of hauntology and where it interconnects with otherly pastoral culture, the themes and expressions of which intersect with Boards of Canada’s work: Rob Young would go on to write the book Electric Eden (2010), which was possibly the first book to extensively explore the fringes and undercurrents of folk and pastoral music and culture and also to intertwine that hauntology; while the mid-2000s was the time when hauntology began to coalesce as a music and cultural form, with for example Ghost Box Records being founded and beginning to release records in 2004; and it was also around this time that the writers Simon Reynolds and Mark Fisher were amongst the first to use the phrase hauntology to describe such work.

There are a number of similarities in terms of recurring inspirations, themes, aesthetics and so on between Boards of Canada’s work and hauntology, with the duo’s work both anticipating and exploring such things in parallel with hauntology. One example of this is how much of hauntology tries to create the sense of a parallel world and how similar could be said of Boards of Canada:

“It’s like we’re inhabiting an alternative, parallel present where maybe someone in the past took a different branch to the way things actually went.” (Quoted from “Boards of the Underground”, interview with Boards of Canada by Richard Southern, Jockey Slut Volume 3 Number 11, December 2000.)

Boards of Canada also share with hauntology a sense and exploration of “the past inside the present” (which is a phrase that is sampled on the “Music is Math” track on the duo’s album Geogaddi) and both often invoke a form of nostalgia without being a straightforward replication of past eras’ music and culture, which can create a comforting sense of familiarity and also an unsettling atmosphere of something unexplained and untoward on the edge of memory and consciousness:

“There are textures in what we try to do… which borrow from certain sounds or eras – even in visual things that we do as well, artwork – to trigger something, almost a cascade. It’s like a memory that someone has – even though it’s artificial, they never even had the memory; it’s just you’re ageing a song. And then people feel, is that something familiar I knew from years ago?” (Quoted from “Protect and Survive”, interview with Boards of Canada by Rob Young, The Wire issue 260, October 2005).

Boards of Canada also share with hauntology an interest in certain strands of 1970s television and an accompanying hazily skewed or eldritch take on educationalism, public information films,  government organisations and so on, with the duo taking their name from a Canadian government organisation called the National Film Board of Canada which is dedicated to distributing educational film, the output of which they watched when young after their families emigrated for a time to Canada. They have spoken in interviews about how the aesthetic of their work was influenced by viewing such films, in particular the characteristics and flaws of their era’s media (such as tape flutter etc) and this interconnects with Boards of Canada and hauntology drawing from a wider sphere of older educational and children’s television and its electronic soundtracks:

“Among the many common concerns [between Boards of Canada and Ghost Box artists such as The Focus Group and the Advisory circle]… a nostalgic fascination for television stands out as the major connection. During the ’70s especially, children’s TV programming in the UK featured a peculiar preponderance of ghost stories, tales of the uncanny, and apocalyptic scenarios (like “The Changes”, in which the populace rises up and destroys all technology). In between this creepy fare, young eyes were regularly assaulted by Public Information Films, a genre of [government-commissioned] short British programs made for TV broadcast and ostensibly designed to educate and advise [but which often contained suprisingly unsettling atmospheres and themes]… The unsettling content of all this vintage kids-oriented TV seeped into the brains of Sandison and Eoin at a vulnerable age. But what seems to have lingered even more insidiously in the memory of BoC, and the hauntologists that came after them, is the music. For many Brit kids, the sound effects and incidental motifs made for these programs by outfits like the BBC Radiophonic Workshop were their first exposure to abstract electronic sounds. Speaking in 1998, Sandison claimed that these theme tunes and soundtracks were ‘a stronger influence than modern music, or any other music that we listened to back then. Like it or not, they’re the tunes that keep going around in our heads.'” (Quoted from “Why Boards of Canada’s Music Has the Right to Children Is the Greatest Psychedelic Album of the ’90s”, Simon Reynolds, pitchfork.com, 3rd April 2018.)

There is at times a form of melancholia present in both Boards of Canada’s work and hauntology:

“[Hauntological music and culture] draws from and examines a sense of loss, yearning or nostalgia for a post-war utopian, progressive, modernist future that was never quite reached, which is often accompanied by a sense of lingering Cold War dread.” (Quoted from A Year In The Country: Straying From The Pathways, 2018.)

Connected to which in the above article Reynolds writes:

“Another hauntology theme that Boards of Canada anticipated is the notion of the lost future. Again, this tends to be identified most with the ’70s and that decade’s queasy ambivalence about runaway technological change: on the one hand, there was still a lingering post-World War II optimism abroad, but it was increasingly contaminated with paranoid anxiety about ecological catastrophe and the rise of a surveillance state. ‘Looking back at TV and film from that decade, a lot of what you see was pretty dark,’ says Sandison. By the early ’90s, when BoC were finding their identity, ‘all the sounds and pictures from back then seemed like a kind of partially-remembered nightmare.’” (Quoted from “Why Boards of Canada’s Music…”, as above.)

Boards of Canada’s 2013 album Tomorrow’s Harvest contains a hidden, layered and possibly even bleak connection with and evocation of the Cold War and dystopian futures. The album’s title was inspired by a US website which sells survivalist supplies intended for use in a crisis scenario such as dried foods, solar power equipment and so on, while the front cover image of a sun bleached city skyscape off in the distance doesn’t seem to so much represent a view of the vitality of sunlight but rather has a queasy unsettling air:

“The cover appears to be a photo of the San Francisco skyline, shot from the vantage point of Alameda Naval Air Station, a now defunct military base operational during the cold war.” (Quoted from “Boards of Canada: ‘We’ve become a lot more nihilistic over the years'”, Louis Pattison, theguardian.com, 6th June 2013.)

When, in the above interview with Louis Pattison, Boards of Canada were asked if this image and its location were a coincidence or did it point towards themes and concepts in the record, Eoin replied:

“Yeah, definitely – of course that’s an ingredient of the theme on this record. In fact if you look again at the San Francisco skyline on the cover it’s actually a ghost of the city. You’re looking straight through it.” (Quoted from “Boards of Canada…”, as above.)

The album booklet and insert artwork which accompanied the release of Tomorrow’s Harvest appears to futher explore and infer such dystopic and unsettling themes and feature grids of often indistinct and cropped photographs that also often incorporate the scanlines and/or pixel dot patterns of older cathode ray televisions and monitors. They are unaccompanied by any explanatory text and while they were presumedly created for the album  there is something about them which makes them appear as though they are possibly unsanctioned stills from some form of official surveillance.

The images include a number of communications masts and infrastructure that also unstatedly infers a sense of some indefinable past Cold War paranoia infused decade, alongside the likes of a potentially broken down car, featureless silhouettes of people off in the distance, brutalist concrete architecture, arid desert and a forest or crops which has been decimated by some unknown event. These sit alongside occasional views of still healthy seeming natural landscapes, which only seem to highlight the desolate and unsettling nature of the other images and to leave the viewer with a sense that they may well be isolated last pockets of such things after a time of catastrophe.

Exploring the flipside and undercurrents of the pastoral and folk music is something of a recurring theme in Boards of Canada’s work and in interviews they have included the British psychedelic folk band The Incredible String Band, that were formed in 1966, as one of their “likes” or influences. Such elements were given more overt expression on the Campfire Headphase album, which included more organic instrumentation such as acoustic guitars, albeit still heavily treated, alongside more conventional song structures. The resulting work in part appears to represent an hallucinatory time stretched event experienced around a campfire and at times is not dissimilar to listening to a group of friends jamming around the embers of the fire late into the night, although as filtered through the half-memory of a distant dream rather than being a straightforward recording or recollection.

Such pastoral elements could be considered to connect with the way in which and location that Boards of Canada make their music. For much of the time when working as Boards of Canada they have been based, as mentioned at the start of the post, in rural Scotland near to the capital city of Edinburgh and at a remove from wider and/or urban trends and influences:

“[Eoin spoke of how ] ‘This whole project has come about with us living on the outskirts of Edinburgh… and for the last two decades we’ve been working on it from here, and we’ve had no reason to want to relocate to the city or to the south or anything, it’s as simple as that. In fact, we actually find to some extent this so-called hermetic bubble that we live in is actually making it a lot easier for us to do our thing and not feel any urge to make it DJ friendly, or make it work for a certain social or club environment.'”

Their music’s creation of a self-contained seeming world and its distinctive character can also be seen as, in part, a reflection of that “hermetic bubble” and a reaction against the city and urban aesthetics:

“They stand for… above all, a rural ideal completely opposite to the fast-paced urban excitement that has powered pop music for nearly 50 years.” (Quoted from “Breaking Into Heaven”, as above.)

Another distinctive aspect of Boards of Canada’s work that it shares with and anticipated in hauntology is the use of previous eras’ synthesised sounds alongside, as referred to at the start of this post, audio aesthetics which recall older analogue recording equipment and media, such as tape wobble, vinyl imperfections etc:

“[In hauntology the] use and foregrounding of recording medium noise and imperfections, such as the crackle and hiss of vinyl, tape wobble and so on calls attention to the decaying nature of older analogue mediums and… can be used to create a sense of time out of joint and edge memories of previous eras.” (Quoted from A Year In The Country…, as above.)

At times such elements were present in other downbeat and trip hop related work from around the mid to later 1990s:

“Tricky, Massive Attack and Portishead’s [used vinyl crackling] in order to create particular atmospheres and effects… it is not clear whether it was actually present in the original vinyl records which they sampled or added afterwards. In DJ Shadow’s work, the use of [vinyl] crackle in his recordings from a similar period is possibly more likely to have been both an inherent part of the way his records from the 1990s were created as soundscape collages built from old ‘found’ records rather than, as in Tricky, Massive Attack and Portishead’s case, vocal-led songs which utilised samples. In this respect, it also serves as a reminder of this recording process, an acknowledgment and homage to the layers of recording history from which his tracks were built and its reconfigured spectral echoes… In Tricky, Portishead and DJ Shadow’s work from the 1990s [such aesthetics instill] a sense, at points, of the music belonging to a time the listener cannot quite place; one that is both contemporary in style and its production techniques but which also seems sometimes to exist in an atemporal timeline of its own.” (Quoted from A Year In The Country…, as above.)

As commented on by Simon Reynolds in the above-mentioned article on Music Has the Right to Children, the creation of music which exists in a time of its own has long been present in Boards of Canada’ work, and he writes that their intention “was to create a haunted haven outside the onward flow of Time”.

Which seems like something of a suitable (and somewhat Sapphire & Steel-esque) point on which to end this post.

Elsewhere:

Elsewhere at A Year In The Country:

 

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Emerald Web’s “Flight of the Raven” from Dragon Wings and Wizard Tales: Songs for A Year In The Country 10/26

A rare vocal track from cosmic new age synth explorers Emerald Web… an arpeggiated fairy tale flight of fantasy…

 

Links:

 

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A Year In The Country Sale and Bargains

The A Year In The Country CDs etc are now sold out but the albums are 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 A Year In The Country books are available at Amazon UKAmazon US,  Amazon Australia and their other worldwide sites and also from Lulu.

The books may also available to order from other bookshops etc, please direct any queries regarding that directly to them.

Starting today, Friday 7th May 2021, there is a sale and bargains to be had at the A Year In The Country Artifacts Shop and Bandcamp.

The 2018 The Corn Mother CD album and its explorations of a lost folkloric fever dream film and cassettes of Airwaves: Songs From The Sentinels and its gathering and weaving of scattered radio signals plucked from the ether are available at reduced prices.

Also there are some copies of the Wandering Through Spectral Fields and Straying From The Pathways books that have slight print variations, imperfections etc, also at reduced prices.

Thanks as always to those who created the music for the The Corn Mother album: Gavino Morretti, Pulselovers, The Heartwood Institute, United Bible Studies (David Colohan, Dom Cooper of The Owl Service / Rif Mountain and Alison O’Donnell of Mellow Candle), Widow’s Weeds, Depatterning, Sproatly Smith and Field Lines Cartographer.

Also thanks for the dab hand editorial and design work on the A Year In The Country books and The Corn Mother album by Ian Lowey and Suzy Prince of the online and bricks and mortar bookshop Bopcap Books, of which I have written previously:

“Where else are you likely to hear Blue Note Strikes a Radical Chord, Serge Gainsbourg, The Advisory Circle’s Ways of Seeing and The Sound of Music as ‘interpreted to gloriously kitsch effect by Slovenian industrial ironists Laibach’ while perusing a selection of carefully curated vintage cult books and literature curios?”

“You want to see the film as described in the liner notes, and as conjured in the songs on the album, and that’s an incredible trick to pull off… This is hauntology – the genre, rather than the philosophical dystopic – in its finest form, where buried memories of film, TV, music, and life come to the surface, often unverifiable because the hard copy has been lost or was never properly recorded in the first instance.” Alan Boon, Starburst on The Corn Mother

“Spectral sounds made for wandering the moors [while] radio waves permeate the fog-cloaked air… interference, plain piano song, shimmering electronics, remote listening and shadowy melodies make for an elegant and sinister experience…” Include Me Out on Airwaves: Songs From The Sentinels

“Straying From The Pathways is a comprehensive and hugely satisfying read, both as a book and as a reference guide to the liminal and the eerie in popular culture. There are numerous rabbit holes and recommendations for the reader in which to wander or to explore, and the book as a whole rewards repeated readings, such is the wealth of ideas or intriguing cross-referencing between genres and mediums… Highly recommended; a haunted house of a book that you will wish to frequent time and time again.” Grey Malkin, Moof on A Year In The Country: Straying From The Pathways

“A new book caught my eye recently – the title A Year In The Country: Wandering Through Spectral Fields, that goes in search of the darker, eerier side of the bucolic countryside dream by looking at films of a certain genre, books, TV series, music; it is great to have this fascinating subject explored so thoroughly and brought together under one title.” Verity Sharp, Late Junction, BBC Radio 3

 

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Dominik Scherrer and Natasha Khan’s Soundtrack for Requiem and the Unexpected Appearance of the Language of Angels: Wanderings 10/52

In 2020 the normally heavy and doom metal orientated label Svart released on CD and vinyl Dominik Scherrer and Natasha Khan’s soundtrack for the television series Requiem (2018), a supernatural thriller in which an urbane London sophisticate classical cellist comes adrift as she attempts to unravel a set of mysteries connected to her past in a Welsh town and its surrounding rural area.

The soundtrack brings to mind a classic darkly playful ethereal release back when on 4AD that you never knew existed – think His Name Is Alive’s debut Livonia (1990) – and as with the series contains an air of what Scherrer describes as “pastoral spook”.

There is something about the series that seems to hint at hidden layers in the story, and this somehow places it at a subtle, eerie remove from much of mainstream television drama.

The album’s booklet includes writing by Erik Stein which reveals that the series does indeed include (semi-hidden) layers. Stein discusses how the series and album refer to and draw from the work of real life 16-17th century Anglo-Welsh mathematician, astronomer, teacher, occultist and alchemist John Dee, with the series featuring one of his books and the (imagined) work of his son.

Stein discusses how Dee and his collaborator John Kelley:

“formed the foundations of so-called ‘Enochian’ magic, a system of ceremonial sorcery based on the evocation and commanding of various spirits. Dee and Kelley claimed that they could communicate with these spirits through their own ‘Enochian’ language, [which they said] had been revealed to them directly via a series of angels.”

Stein describes how Scherrer and Khan used the names of those ‘Enochian’ angels for the album’s track names (“Aigra”, Naa”, “Izraz” etc) and also that Khan “uses ‘Enochian’ words and phrases as her lyrics” during the album.

Dee also claimed to speak to angels and spirits via a black mirror and created an esoteric figure called the Monas Hieroglyphica (which is said to embody his vision of the unity of the cosmos and has a horned devil-like meets Einstürzende Neubauten logo appearance), both of which interconnect with elements that appear in the series.

Requiem made for intriguing yet unsettling viewing before I knew all that. Now… well, brrrrr indeed.

Elsewhere:

 

Elsewhere at A Year In The Country:

 

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Midnight Movies’ “Just to Play”: Songs for A Year In The Country 9/26

Otherworldly pop with shades of Nico and Broadcast, all wrapped up in artwork by Julian House of Ghost Box Records. A b-side discovered a fair old time ago now via the “lucky dip”-esque racks of cheap promo CD singles that you used to find in second hand record shops.

 

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Shadows Television Series Episode “The Inheritance” and the Layering of Ancient Folklore and Myth: Wanderings 9/52

Shadows was a supernatural and fantasy young adult orientated British television anthology drama series that featured 20 approximately half-hour stand alone episodes, and was produced by the commercial broadcaster Thames Television and was broadcast for three seasons between 1975 and 1978. It is part of the strand of late 1960s and 1970s British television that also included the likes of The Owl Service (1969-1970), The Changes (1975), Children of the Stones (1977) and Raven (1977), which often contained and explored surprisingly complex, challenging and at times dark themes and atmospheres, particularly considering its intended younger audience, and which in part due to these characteristics has become a reference point for hauntological related and/or otherly pastoral or wyrd culture.

“The Inheritance” episode, originally broadcast in 1976 as part of the series’ second season, and written by Josephine Poole involves a son called Martin, who is on the threshold of adulthood and though he lives in an urban area he wants to work in the countryside. As with other episodes previously discussed it explores issues around youthful autonomy as he is at odds with his mother, who wants him to take up an office job in insurance.

Martin’s aged and ill grandfather, who has spent his life working rurally as a deer harbourer, comes to stay with them and shows him a deer antler he once found, which is from a type of deer he had never seen and which mysteriously left no tracks. The grandfather, who very much seems like he belongs to another era and has little time for modern ways nor the mother’s wish for her son to work in an office, goes on to tell Martin of how in the old days antlers were worshipped and people used to do a horn dance, the meaning of which he says went back to “the dark days”. He also tells Martin of how a close bond grows between the harbourer and the deer, who seem to know when one of the harbourers has died or will do soon, and come to pay their respect.

His grandfather’s tales and connection with the land further fuel Martin’s desire not to work in an office, and they both set off to a nearby park early in the morning in order to watch the wild deer. When Martin subsequently wanders through the park on his own he sees a group of five men in Medieval style costume, who are wearing deer skull and antler horn headdresses, and who undertake a form of folkloric ritual dance to also Medieval style music before fading away, after which he finds a similar rare antler to the one his grandfather has.

The horn dancer’s appearing seems not so much due to a form of time travel or portal but rather to be an intrusion onto the mortal plane of the spirit world. Curiously Martin seems largely unperturbed by seeing the horn dancers, or even to find it especially unusual, and after being told about it his grandfather replies by saying the dance was incomplete as there should have been six participants, and that he wishes he could have seen the dance before he died.

Following this the episode features a very visually striking sequence where it steps away from realist aesthetics when Martin has an unsettled nights sleep and has fever dream-like visions of the horn dancers but this time in a form of tinted negative. As the sequence segues into colour it is revealed that one of the dancers is his grandfather, who says his grandson’s name as Martin awakes.

The grandfather has died in the night, apparently not being able to see the horn dance before he died, but rather to have joined it in the afterlife. Martin’s mother gives Martin his grandfather’s inheritance, which is the key to his harbourers cottage, and therefore a way for Martin to more easily fulfil his wish to work in the countryside.

In a final discussion, or relatively mild mannered showdown, between Martin and his mother over his futures plans, she says how she grew up in the countryside and just wanted better for her children and to “get away from the mud”. Martin’s reply is that he has to make his own choice and that he is “opting for the wind”.

Martin’s wish to work in the countryside in the episode connects with the back to the land movement which gathered pace after the late 1960s, as part of which people wished to reconnect with the basics of life, nature and agriculture and were drawn to a rural way of life. As with Martin’s similar desires, this was not so much a strictly counter cultural movement but it overlapped with it in terms of participants and inspiration, such as a rejection of rampant consumerism and careerist defined lives.

As previously mentioned the episode was written by Josephine Poole, who since 1961 has published more than two dozen books for children, young adults and adults. These include the young adult novel Billy Buck (1972), which shares some similar themes with “The Inheritance”, in particular the way it revolves around an ancient horn dance. However, whereas in “The Inheritance” the dance is depicted in a positive light, in Billy Buck it is used in conjunction with bonfire night revels as a way of exploiting a rural village for sinister purposes by driving the locals to hysteria and tapping into their appetite for persecution in order to destroy an ancient family.

(As an aside Josephine Poole also worked on the animation of the 1978 film Watership Down, in which a group of rabbits flee their doomed warren, and which mixes mythology and a gritty realism that borders at points on darkly tinged horror. She also wrote six of the episodes of supernatural anthology drama series West Country Tales broadcast between 1982-1983, the first season of which had a then fairly unique premise as it was based on purported real-life experiences sent in by viewers in response to a BBC appeal for submissions.)

Billy Buck can be grouped with two other young adult books published in the early 1970s, William Rayner’s Stag Boy (1971) and Penelope Lively’s The Wild Hunt of Hagworthy (1971), all three of which draw from similar mythical and folkloric associations with deer and related real world folk rituals:

“They share the setting of Exmoor and the Devon/Somerset border, where a deeply-buried folk heritage rises from the landscape – [including] a horn dance of the type still enacted today at Abbots Bromley, a wild hunt, [and] an ancient antlered helmet.” (Quoted from “Running with the Deer – 1971 in Children’s Literature”, Jem, whistlesinthewind.wordpress.com, 2012.)

(As a further aside, Penelope Lively also wrote the “Time Out of Mind” episode of Shadows, which involves a form of magic realist-like time travel into the world of an antique doll’s house.)

Alongside sharing these folkloric themes the books also connect with a wider trend in 1970s literature:

“The invasion of ancient folklore and myth into the present is a feature of many novels for ‘young adults’ of the late sixties and early seventies. There had been… the Alan Garner effect: in 1967 [his novel] The Owl Service redefined the remit of this type of writing, beyond ‘writing for children’, ambitious in the way it dealt with human emotions against an older, wiser and more powerful landscape. The stories were different because they were as rooted in everyday realism as the kitchen-sink dramas of British film… They existed against a particular sense of modernity at the time: heritage culture hadn’t really begun; things were either ‘old-fashioned’, or they were ‘modern’… [A possible name for this type of story could be] ‘British Ancient Landscape Hauntological Domestic Realist Wilderness'”(Quoted from “Running with the Deer – 1971 in Children’s Literature” and “Appreciating Josephine Poole – Moon Eyes”, Jem, whistlesinthewind.wordpress.com, 2012.)

This “invasion of ancient folklore and myth into the present” in fictional young adult orientated work was something of a recurring feature of 1970s British television including the likes of the previously mentioned The Changes, Raven and The Moon Stallion (1978) that draw from Arthurian legend, alongside “The Inheritance” and also some other episodes of Shadows. It is particularly present in “The Dark Encounter” written by Susan Cooper, which seems to exist in and explore a similar world and themes as her The Dark is Rising Sequence of five contemporary set young adult novels that were published between 1965 and 1977, which at the Wyrd Britain website were called “one of the [young adult fiction] cornerstones of Wyrd Britain” (as in culture which could also be called otherly pastoral, wyrd rural or wyrd folk and where it intertwines with hauntological culture) and which draw from Arthurian legends, English folklore and Celtic and Norse mythology.

I may well visit “The Dark Encounter” episode further another time…

Elsewhere:

 

Elsewhere at A Year In The Country: