Category: AYTIC-Year 4

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.

Preorder today 13th November. Released 4th December 2018. Price £12.95.
Preorder available at our Artifacts Shop and at Bandcamp.

Dawn Rising edition – factory pressed CD in matt 4-panel gatefold sleeve.

Features 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.

Tracklisting:

From what I know the Plant a Tree in ’73 campaign, which encouraged people, organisations etc in Britain to plant trees in 1973, was a well-known campaign and resounding success.

In line with that and a modern-day plethora of merchandise that tends to be available for campaigns, projects etc, I thought there would be all kinds of related promotional items both online and at “a certain well-known online auction and commerce site”.

But no, apart from some Royal Mail postage stamps releases to commemorate the campaign I found very little.

There are not even all that many photographs archived online of activities surrounding the campaign, which was also rather surprising considering the high-profile success of the campaign – and also in these days when you expect nearly everything ever to have a substantial repository of archival recordings, photographs etc scattered around the web.

The booklet featured on this page is one of the few physical items relating to the ’73 campaign other than Royal Mail stamps which I found; it features information on popular tree types in Britain and an encouragement exhortation to help enrich the environment and living conditions by planting a tree.

It was published by a paper company and doubled as promotional literature for their paper stock and has quite high production values, with the various parts folding out to be multiple page information sheets etc.

The only other item I’ve seen at that “well-known online auction and commerce site” was a badge for the campaign.

There is an interesting dichotomy between the positive, encouraging, wholesome, communally minded nature of the Plant a Tree in ’73 campaign and the background of strife and conflict in the UK at the time, where clashes between the government and unions had led to the introduction of a 3 day working week and electricity restrictions/blackouts.

In a wider international sense in 1973 there was a politically motivated oil embargo placed on a number of countries including the UK and USA, leading to fuel shortages while domestically America was embroiled in the Watergate political scandal and conspiracy.

Three notable books which look back on this historical and cultural period are Andreas Killen’s 1973 Nervous Breakdown: Watergate, Warhol, and the Birth of Post-Sixties America, Dominik Sandbrook’s State of Emergency: The Way We Were: Britain, 1970-1974 and Francis Wheen’s Strange Days Indeed: The Golden Age of Paranoia, the titles of which reflect the wider turmoil that the Plant a Tree in ’73 campaign was backgrounded by.

Elsewhere:
The Tree Council (founded in 1974, in the wake of the ’73 campaign)
Andreas Killen’s 1973 Nervous Breakdown
Dominic Sandbrook’s State of Emergency
Francis Wheen’s Strange Days Indeed

Elsewhere at A Year In The Country:
1) Day #253/365: One For Sorrow; Helter skelter, hang sorrow, public minded urgings from times when the lights may well go out of an evening and heading towards Rocket Cottage-isms…
2) Week #52/52: An Arboreal Collection Or Two And Hello And Goodbye…
3) Chapter 7 Book Images: 1973 – A Time of Schism and a Dybbuk’s Dozen of Fractures
4) Fractures – Night and Dawn Editions Released

 

File under: A Year In The Country ocular explorations

Further reviews of The Quietened Mechanisms album:

First up is Kim Harten’s review at Bliss Aquamarine:

“An evocative album that effectively combines dark and strange electronics and field recordings. Held together by a common theme both topically and musically, the album makes for a complete, cohesive listening experience.”

Next up is Raffaello Russo’s review at Music Won’t Save You:

“…la raccolta offre un nuovo spaccato di un immaginario creativo condiviso da un cenacolo di artisti sempre più ampio, inesauribile come gli spunti narrativi, sonori ed emozionali che possono scaturire da ogni singolo miglio quadrato della periferia post-industriale britannica.”

You can also visit an online (approximate) translation here.

Thirdly the album was revisited by Terrascope and included at Terrascope’s November 2018 Rumbles roundup:

“Listening Center ‘Clarion of the Collapsed Complex’ is next, full of long dead factory machinery, echoes of once thriving industry, all rendered on analogue synths… Pulselovers give us ‘Fuggles’ which is the name of a variety of hop, visiting an abandoned brewery in the north of England, where ghostly bottles are delivered via Shire horse and cart to the surrounding alehouses… The record ends with A Year In The Country’s ‘The Structure/Respite’ a song referencing an old decommissioned railway track, slowly being reclaimed by the land, ghostly reminders encountered along the way, left to slowly rust and decay.”

Fourthly and finally Finlay Milligan reviewed the album in issue 46 of Electronic Sound magazine.

Links to previous reviews, broadcasts etc of The Quietened Mechanisms by John Coulthart, The Sunday Experience, We Are Cult, an earlier review at Terrascope, Goldmine, Shindig!, Flatland Frequencies, Sunrise Ocean Bender, Pull the Plug, Evening of Light and The Unquiet Meadow can be found here.

Thanks and a tip of the hat to all concerned.

The Quietened Mechanisms is an exploration of abandoned and derelict industry, infrastructure, technology and equipment that once upon a time helped to create, connect and sustain society.

It features music and accompanying text on the tracks by Howlround, Grey Frequency, Listening Center, Sproatly Smith, Embertides, Keith Seatman, Time Attendant, A Year In The Country, Dom Cooper, Field Lines Cartographer, Vic Mars, Depatterning, Pulselovers, Quaker’s Stang, The Heartwood Institute and Spaceship.

More details on the album can be viewed here.

 

The album Summer Dancing by Judy Dyble and Andy Lewis was released in 2017 and is something of a fine cuckoo in pop’s nest which has a cultural background and set of connections that make it seem that as though it should only really exist in some alternate left-field pop universe.

Judy Dyble was the original vocalist in the 1960s with folk rock stalwarts Fairport Convention, after which she worked with a group of musicians who would go on to form the progressive rock band King Crimson and later went on to make the album Morning Way as Trader Horne with ex-Them member Jackie McAuley, a record which could loosely be classified as acid or psych folk.

In 1973 she stopped performing and ran a tape duplication business, later  going on to work as a librarian and became known as one of the lost women of folk, alongside the likes of Vashti Bunyan and Shelagh Macdonald.

She made a few guest appearances with Fairport Convention in the 1980s and 1990s but did not begin recording her own music again until 2003, since when she has released a number of albums.

Andy Lewis was the original DJ at Blow Up, a club in London which was part of a mod revival connected to Brit Pop around the mid-1990s, released a number of number of records on Acid Jazz, in 2007 collaborated with Paul Weller on the Top 40 single “Are You Trying To Be Lonely”, after which until 2016 he performed in Paul Weller’s band.

(Acid Jazz was a record label founded in 1987 by Eddie Piller, who was active in the late 1970s/early 1980s mod revival, and Gilles Peterson. It is known for releasing a number of records which incorporated amongst other influences elements of jazz funk, jazz fusion, soul and pop, with some of the label’s earlier releases being by James Taylor Quartet, Corduroy, Brand New Heavies, Mother Earth, Galliano and Jamiroquai. In more recent times they have also put out the sometimes pastoral/folkloric/prog/psych whimsy, sometimes largely instrumental synth based and sometimes television theme tune reimaginings of Matt Berry, including the albums Witchazel, Music for Insomniacs and Television Themes.)

So, Summer Dancing – acid folk meets acid jazz?

The above cultural reference points aren’t ones which you would naturally think of as coming together but in the parallel pop universe of Summer Dancing that would appear to be the case and they have combined and melded rather well and cohesively to produce an album which while it subtly reflects some of the above background, has an individual and charming character all of its own.

Summer Dancing has been described as being:

“…made of the very stuff of British psychedelia, an obsession with childhood, the country and the city. It emerges from a place somewhere between Broadcast, the soundtrack to The Wicker Man and Stereolab.”

And text on the back of the album says of the album’s collaborators:

“Born either side of the 60s, it’s the same culture, history and open attitude that unites the two, as well as rural-urban backgrounds. Church bells, red kites and the stories of E. Nesbit swirl gently in the imagination beside lost loves, London lives and an evergreen… otherness.”

That mention of Broadcast and “an evergreen… otherness” offer a sense of some of the territory in which the album travels; accessible left-field avant pop might be an appropriate genre title, a sort of more pop accidental counterpart to the milling around the village of Broadcast’s Mother is the Milkway album.

There is a very English, subtle and charming (that word again, which seems rather apt in connection to the album) eccentricity to the album for reasons that I can’t quite describe or put my finger on, although it seems to possibly be connected to Judy Dyble’s almost clipped, received pronunciation singing on the record – a description which makes her singing style sound cold or detached but it is in fact anything but.

That subtle, charming eccentricity is also present in An Accidental Musician, a biography that Judy Dyble co-wrote with Dave Thompson, which along with the retrospective collection Gathering the Threads or its offshoot Judy Dyble – Anthology: Part One, would make a fine companion for Summer Dancing.

Alongside the music on Summer Dancing, the Broadcast connection could also be made in terms of the album’s cover art by Liz Lewis, which in its cut up geometric forms shares some similar territory with Julian House of Intro and Ghost Box Records design work for Broadcast.

In connection to the “lost loves” mentioned on the album sleeve, there is a sadness and even melancholia present on the album, particularly on A Message but this is not a maudlin song or record, rather a joyous remembering and yearning for those who have departed.

The song The Day They Took The Music Away appears to be a brief biographical account of Judy Dyble’s earlier not always so great experiences in the music business and people she met’s lack of dependability, which seems to be a setting the record straight and settling of scores to a degree and is a little surprisingly vituperative amongst an otherwise largely positive, if as just mentioned at times melancholic, album.

A Net Of Memories (London) is a psychogeographic wandering in song form around the capital city and connections to it, which tails off into a radio travel report about swans who have mistaken the road for a river (!), accompanied by a montage of music, its isolated tones and reversed recordings.

As a final note, above is the CD promo single for the album, which feels like something of a stepping back in time in these digital days and took me back to when second-hand record shops seemed to be full of racks of them for 50p and a time when they were something a good, pot-luck, almost lucky bag, affordable way of discovering music.

I shall end this post with a quote from Andy Lewis on the promo single’s cover sticker:

“In a parallel universe, you (Judy) could have ended up making records for Deram and been a sensational pop siren.”

 

Elsewhere:

1. Summer Dancing at Acid Jazz
2. Judy Dyble’s site
3. Andy Lewis’ site (something of an older archive)

 

Elsewhere at A Year In The Country:

1. Day #3/365: Gather In The Mushrooms: something of a starting point via an accidental stumbling into the British acid folk underground
2. Week #43/52: Broadcast – Mother Is The Milky Way and gently milling around avant-garde, non-populist pop
3. Ether Signposts #16/52a: Vashti Bunyan: From Here To Before and Whispering Fairy Stories Until They Are Real
4. Ether Signposts #29/52a: Judy Dyble And The Lost (And Thankfully Found) Women Of Folk
5. Chapter 8 Book Images: Broadcast – Recalibration, Constellation and Exploratory Pop
   

 

File under: A Year In The Country ocular explorations

 

In Part 1 of this post I wrote about the books On Roads: A Hidden History by Joe Moran, which is a multi-layered, interconnected wandering along sometimes semi-hidden or semi-forgotten history in relation to roads and Autophoto by Editions Xavier Barral and Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, which is a collection of car and road orientated photography, often with a more fine art/expressive slant.

Some of the photographs in Autophoto document cars abandoned amongst nature and plantlife; online there is a considerable amount of similar photography alongside that of abandoned roads, which is a subsection of imagery that focuses on recording  abandoned and derelict buildings, infrastructure etc.

Photographs of cars abandoned in natural settings can often appear quite stylised and arranged but this “styling” has happened naturally with the passing of time, something such photographs record via the decay of the vehicles and the spread, growth and reclaiming nature of the plants.

Both the photographs and the cars/locations themselves also are often a form of time capsule in the way that they can provide fading but resilient snapshot of previous eras’ design and aesthetics and the cars themselves can be seen to become a form of three dimensional recording of echoes from the past.

The books, images and web pages in Part 1 and 2 of this post could be filed alongside previous wanderings at A Year In The Country amongst the dust, history and spectres of cars and roads:

1) Edward Chell’s Soft Estates which is an artistic and text-based exploration of the edgeland areas that surround roads.

2) Landgdon Clay’s Cars New York City, 1974-1976 which is a beautifully photographed and produced book of cars parked in almost peopleless streets at night which have a subtly eerie quality.

3) Martin Parr’s Abandoned Morris Minors of the West of Ireland which is a very specific documentary recording that as with some of the above photography at times reflects the contradictory beauty that can be found in images of abandoned examples of people’s industry against a backdrop of nature.

Elsewhere:
Joe Moran: On Roads and Asphalt Memories
Autophoto
Stub Streets & Ghost Ramps: The Abandoned Motorways of Britain
A Brief Compendium of Abandoned Roads to Nowhere
NH4939 : Abandoned van, in Boblainy forest
Theo Van Vliet’s photographs of a forest full of abandoned cars
Dieter Klein’s “250 cars in a wood”
Edward Chell’s Soft Estate
Langdon Clay’s Cars – New York City, 1974 – 1976
Martin Parr’s Abandoned Morris Minors of the West of Ireland 

Elsewhere at A Year In The Country:
1) Day #115/365: Edward Chell’s Soft Estates – documents of autobahn edgelands
2) Wanderings #7/52a: Brutalist Breakfasts
3) Ether Signposts #19/52a: Martin Parr’s Abandoned Morris Minors of the West of Ireland via the Café Royal Books Archive
4) Wanderings, Explorations and Signposts 33/52: Langdon Clay’s Cars – New York City, 1974-1976 -Part 1 – Post-Populuxe Ghosts That Brood While the City Sleeps
5) Wanderings, Explorations and Signposts 34/52: Langdon Clay’s Cars – New York City, 1974-1976 – Part 2 – Totemic Spectres and Signifiers
6) Wanderings, Explorations and Signposts 43/52: Wandering the Roads Part 1 – On Roads a Hidden History and Ballardian Close-Ups

 

File under: A Year In The Country ocular explorations

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.

Preorder 13th November 2018. Released 4th December 2018. Price £12.95.
Available to preorder on 13th November 2018 at our Artifacts Shop and at Bandcamp.

Formats: factory pressed glass mastered CD in gatefold matt card sleeve / download

Something of a gathering of the flipsides of automobiles and roads…

The book On Roads: A Hidden History by Joe Moran was published in 2009 and is a written (rather than say walked) psychogeographic wandering amongst, well, the hidden history of roads.

There is a slight hauntological like mourning for the shape of the future’s past to the book here and there, particularly in the title of the chapter “The motoring we used to dream about” and when the book focuses on the events surrounding the birth of the British motorway system and related modernist intentions.

That is highlighted by Joe Moran mentioning on his blog the I-Spy On The Motorway book from his childhood which viewed now, even though some similar scenes and motorways exist today, seems in some subtle, indefinable manner to belong to an almost impossibly distant other modernist, if slightly utilitarian and possibly worn seeming, world.

(The I-Spy books were a form of children’s “spotter” books that were particularly successful in the 1950s and 1960s –  each book focused on a particular subject and as children spotted the items listed in the book they recorded the event in the book and gained points based around how unusual the sight.)

I could well be writing for the rest of the year and then some about On Roads, as it is so full of and strewn with observations, history, facts and connections; it seems to represent the summation of a monumental amount of research.

There are a few pieces of information in particular that have stuck with me from the book; the way that in a time of a major emergency/impending apocalyptic conflict, major roads would be reserved for the use of official and “important” persons – nice to know that many of the people who would have potentially been part of the process of getting us into such a situation wouldn’t be stuck behind a lorry on their way to work/refuge.

Also that when the first motorway was being built-in Britain the concrete spreaders used were left over from laying instant airstrips during the war, while amongst the standard bulldozers were also some recycled Sherman tanks, which while I applaud the make-do-and-mend nature, the appearance of these tanks in that situation was probably also somewhat surreal and almost film-set comedy like.

And so onto more automobile, autobahn and related wanderings…

Autophoto is a handsomely produced book published by Éditions Xavier Barral and Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in 2017 to accompany an exhibition of the same name and which collects a wide range of car related and often more expressive/fine art photography.

This takes in frontier like edgeland car racing, Ballardian close-ups of damaged cars, almost folk art-like temporary automobile home repairs, cars left in the middle of forests that have been largely overgrown, documentary images of people and their cars, the almost abstract patterns of huge stores of used car parts, images which blur the line between forensic recording and expressive intentions within photography etc.

There is often a form of framing and/or guiding of the eye in many of the photographs in the book; the windows and body work of cars create a natural, inherent form of framing of their subjects, whether of the occupants of the cars or looking from the inside out to the landscape and other subjects.

Also straight-ish roads leading off to the horizon, which feature in a number of the photographs in the book, naturally draw the eye and create a central focus point to the images.

Connected to which, although cars and roads are often associated with urban areas, much of the photography in Autophoto is rurally located, often being documents of isolated areas and/or say photographs of roads in wide open prairies with just a distant dust cloud to mark the movement of a car.

To be continued in Part 2…

Elsewhere:
Joe Moran: On Roads and Asphalt Memories
Autophoto
The I-Spy books

Elsewhere at A Year In The Country:

1. Wanderings #22/52a: George Shiras – In The Heart Of The Dark Night (also published by Éditions Xavier Barral)
2. Ether Signposts #19/52a: Martin Parr’s Abandoned Morris Minors of the West of Ireland via the Café Royal Books Archive
3. Day #115/365: Edward Chell’s Soft Estates – documents of autobahn edgelands
4. From The Unofficial Countryside to Soft Estate – Edgeland Documents, Memories and Explorations: Chapter 18 Book Images
5. Langdon Clay’s Cars – New York City, 1974-1976 – Part 1 – Post-Populuxe Ghosts That Brood While the City Sleeps: Wanderings, Explorations and Signposts 33/52
6. Langdon Clay’s Cars – New York City, 1974-1976 – Part 2 – Totemic Spectres and Signifiers: Wanderings, Explorations and Signposts 34/52
   

 

File under: A Year In The Country ocular explorations

In 1960s and 1970s science fiction novel covers seemed to often allow space or free rein for quite out there, slipstream like illustration and design.

Along which lines a while ago I came across these covers for science fiction novels published in Norway by Lanterne, with illustrations by Peter Haars.

Some appear to be books by local authors and others are (I assume) translations of the likes of Stanislaw Lem, Ursula K. Le Guin, Brian W. Aldiss, C.S. Lewis and Kurt Vonnegut.

(Somewhere in an alternate universe the promotional art for Sapphire & Steel looked like this – as did the series.)

Looked at now they seem to combine and collide some kind of parallel-to-the parallel world of a hauntological record label and a point in time when the likes of “speculative fiction” magazine New Worlds and Michael Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius captured and expressed a moment where science fiction and related writing was hiply, exploratively psych like.

There is space in the world for a vast variety of takes on particular areas of culture and purely escapist and/or demographically targetted fan pleasing science fiction and fantasy orientated work has a place in that world.

However, at the moment it seems to be almost all of its particular world, which is a shame and a little too much of one shade when there are many available/possible.

Accompanying which, despite, potentially, digital technology could be a way of opening up channels of creativity to a multitude of shades, when I look at many independently produced and/or micro-budget science fiction etc films they seem often to be more, well, low-budget shadows of more mainstream fare.

Which again, there is a place for in the world but it seems to be much or nearly all of its particular world.

It seems a fair old while since I have seen the likes of Jonathan Weiss’ 2000 film adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition or even the new worlds and visions jarring shock of say the earlier work by David Cronenberg.

Along which lines, illustrator, designer and writer John Coulthart has written this:

“New Worlds was one of the most important magazines of the 1960s, mutating under Moorcock’s editorship from a regular science fiction title to a hothouse of literary daring and experiment. As with so many things in that decade, the peak period was from about 1966–1970 when the magazine showcased outstanding work from Moorcock himself, JG Ballard, Brian Aldiss, Harlan Ellison, Samuel Delany, M John Harrison, Norman Spinrad and a host of others. For a time it seemed that a despised genre might be turning away from rockets and robots to follow paths laid down by William Burroughs, Salvador Dalí, Jorge Luis Borges and other visionaries. We know now that Star Wars, Larry Niven and the rest swept away those hopes but you can at least go and see covers that pointed to a future (and futures) the world rejected.”

Elsewhere:
Slipstream source 1 / Slipstream source 2
An archive of New Worlds covers at Multiverse
John Coulthart: Revenant volumes: Bob Haberfield, New Worlds and others
Whatever happened to Reel 23 ?

Elsewhere at A Year In The Country:
Week #11/52: The Modern Poets, otherly pastoralism and brief visits to flickering worlds…
Chapter 7 Book Images: 1973 – A Time of Schism and a Dybbuk’s Dozen of Fractures

 

File under: A Year In The Country ocular explorations

 

 

As you may well have noticed, with second-hand books, CDs and DVDs etc often online they seem to either cost literally a penny or so plus postage and there are lots of them available or there are the odd ones that are rather rare and pricey – and there doesn’t seem to be all that much middle ground.

Along which lines is Brian Freemantle’s novelisation/tie-in of the 1968 film The Touchables, which was directed by one time Beatles photographer Robert Freeman – I’ve only ever seen one other copy of it for sale other than this one and that was going for a pretty penny or two.

Connected to which, the book is one I would probably file under a small selection of “books that I hardly ever see for sale and/or have spent a fair old amount of time wandering if I can afford and/or justify buying them on the very occasional time I do see a copy”.

I’ve written about the film before and as I mention in the A Year In The Country: Wandering Through Spectral Fields book, along with Tam Lin aka The Devil’s Widow (1970)  and Queens of Evil aka Le Regine or Il Delitto del Diavolo (1970), The Touchables it could be seen as being part of a:

“…mini film sub-genre of pastoral fantasy, with at times elements of folk horror, wherein late 1960s and turn of the decade high fashion mixes with grown up fairytale high jinx, wayward behaviour and sometimes a step or two or more towards the dark side, all carried out in dreamlike isolation in the woods and pastoral settings…”

In terms of its plot, setting and visual style/fashions, as I also mention in the A Year In The Country book, it is a:

“…very modish tale of a group of stylish sixties women who live in a huge see-through plastic bubble in the middle of the countryside who kidnap a pop star as “a temporary solution to the leisure problem” and in order make him their plaything…  at heart it is a caper romp but one that is more than one remove from the mainstream and quite surreal in its setting and the mixture of elements it contains… (a surreal) adult pastorally-set fairytale or fantasy…”

As I have written before, the film has never had an official home release and is rarely shown at cinemas, which is a shame as it is something of an intriguing oddity and also quite a visual and period treat and because of its very visual/stylish nature a good quality restored release would not go amiss.

(The BFI’s Flipside, I’m looking in your direction !).

The Touchables book tie-in could also be filed alongside the likes of other novelisations of intriguing flipside/undercurrents of pastoral/nature set and focused films, such as John Boorman’s 1974 adaptation of Zardoz, a film he wrote, directed and produced (with the book being co-written with Bill Stair) and the 1973 book adaptation of Saul Bass’ Phase IV film – although they’re generally much easier to find and somewhat cheaper.

Elsewhere:
The Touchables trailer

Elsewhere at A Year In The Country:
1) Day #177/365: Zardoz… in this secret room from the past, I seek the future…
2) Day #149/365: Phase IV – lost celluloid flickering (return to), through to Beyond The Black Rainbow and journeys Under The Skin
3) Day #213/365: Artifacts of a curious mini-genre (and misc.)
4) Week #15/52: Phase IV / a revisiting / the arrival of artifacts lost and found and curious contrasts