Category: AYTIC-Year 4

Peter Mitchell’s book Memento Mori, originally published in 1990 and reissued in 2016 by RRB PhotoBooks, is a documenting of the demolition Quarry Hill Flats, which was a large housing estate in Leeds (a Northern city in the UK), that was built in the 1930s and which was built using advanced, then revolutionary construction techniques and  the estate had a distinctive modern continental design.

The flats were built as part of a “great social experiment” and intended to house an entire urban community. However soon after being built the flats were shown to have a number of serious infrastructure problems and this “daring vision for the future” began to crumble, literally.

Peter Mitchell arrived in Leeds just in time to record that demolition, with the resulting book not just being a photographic record but also effectively a tribute to those who engineered and built the Flats and those who lived there. It includes extensive archive material and reflects on the ideas behind the Flats, their construction, eventual demise and the reasons why they failed.

In connection to reflections on the demise of such building projects, in the Preface Bernard Crick says:

“Nobody welcomes decay, in the contrary; but contemplating such sights sets off a slow burning mixture of nostalgia and hope for a better future. These are somewhat conflicting emotions but if one is honest, it is useless to deny that many of us live with them both.”

Which is a conflicting set of emotions which could well be applied to much of, for example, a contemporary appreciation of brutalist architecture and hauntological orientated work and interests, particularly in relation to lost progressive futures.

The practical problems that caused the flats to fail include that the automatic waste disposal gummed up and was very costly and difficult to clean, the prefabricated steel and concrete blocks used in the Flats’ construction were either defective or poorly welded, leading to water seepage and rust and by the early 1960s repairs were going to cost more than building an entire new estate.

Alongside which due to the outbreak of the war many of the intended communal facilities were never completed.

These practical problems were accompanied by (and possibly in part were some of the causes of) vandalism and antisocial behaviour which plagued the Flats.

By the 1950s the flats were infamous and in the 1970s the decision was made to demolish this “stone jungle”.

Memento Mori is a curious book: Peter Mitchell’s evocative photographs of the demolition and dereliction of the estate are interwoven with period photographs, blueprints, historical details, quotes, news clippings etc – all of which tell a tale of both the initial optimism in regards to the estate and its subsequent decline.

Viewed now these various elements from different periods and their related optimism and sense of failure, defeat and sometimes anger seem to almost not connect with one another nor be records of the same place.

In one spread, which is fairly indicative of much of the book, children are pictured on a slide and swings next to news reports of the playground’s vandalising, while on the opposite page is one of Peter Mitchell’s photographs which shows a semi-demolished mass of concrete and steel that was once one of entrance’s to the Flats.

Adding pathos to that photograph, there is a small illustrated sign which contains an illustration of children playing with a ball and which appears to indicate that this was once an exit which lead to a play area.

The way in which different elements from different time periods and levels of optimism are placed in close proximity to one another in the book create a sense of disjuncture, a fracturing of the traditional photographic book narrative, which may well be appropriate to and a reflection on the fate of the Estate itself.

However, as Bernard Crick also says in the Preface, the book is:

“…no easy polemic against utopianism or modernism in architecture and planning, even though Quarry Hill failed: it is only, if a polemic at all, a polemic against utopias that fail.”

When viewed now the aesthetics and grand intentions of creating an entire urban community in such mass housing projects appear to be nearer in spirit to a top-down imposed Soviet/Eastern Europe attempt at social engineering.

As discussed in part by Bernard Click in the Preface, such projects in the UK may have had high and well minded ideals and initial intentions but they also seemed to ignore some of the often basic human needs or wishes for decent autonomous family units, home and hearth.

They appeared in part to neglect or overlook the possibility that say more traditional individual houses may have been more wished for or appreciated by residents and that an accompanying sense of a “home of your own”, which such traditional housing may instill, could be more important to the people who actually lived in such homes than a romantic outsiders’ intellectual sense of the importance of building communities within and via large scale, flat orientated modernist social housing projects.

Elsewhere:
Sample pages of Memento Mori at propagandaphotos
Memento Mori at RRB PhotoBooks
Peter Mitchell’s Strangely Familiar site

Elsewhere at A Year In The Country:
Ether Signposts #1/52a: Peter Mitchell’s Some Thing means Everything to Somebody

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 11th September 2018. Released 2nd October 2018. 

The album 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 wanders amongst deserted factories, discarded machinery, closed mines, mills and kilns and their echoes and remains; taking a moment or two to reflect on these once busy, functioning centres of activity and the sometimes sheer scale or amount of effort and human endeavour that was required to create and operate such structures and machines, many of which are now just left to fade away.

Featuring work by:
The Heartwood Institute
Quakers Stang
Depatterning
Embertides (The Hare And The Moon / United Bible Studies)
Dom Cooper (Rif Mountain / The Owl Service / Bare Bones / Circle/Temple)
Field Lines Cartographer
Grey Frequency
Howlround
The Soulless Party (Tales from the Black Meadow)
Keith Seatman
Listening Center
Spaceship
Sproatly Smith
Pulselovers
Time Attendant
Vic Mars
A Year In The Country

Preorders will be available at our Artifacts Shop and Bandcamp.

In Part 1 of this post I wrote about Langdon Clay’s photography book Cars – New York City, 1974-1976, which documents cars in that location and period parked at night, with very few people present in the images and how the photographs appear to have an almost spectral, eerie quality and that they could be seen as totemic signifiers of a country struggling in a socio-economic sense with a sense of its direction, power and virility.

At the time the photographs were taken America was indeed struggling with the fallout of 1960s progressive utopianism, which had curdled and in part turned towards a more sometimes nihilistic mindset, alongside the malaise and disenchantment caused by government scandals such as Watergate and the tail end of an unsuccessful and physically and psychically wounding conflict in Vietnam.

In this sense, to a degree they could be seen as a parallel reflection of some of the themes of British hauntology and the way it often focuses on and draws from a not dissimilar period in time and a related sense of social, economic and political schism or fracturing and lost futures – here cars that contain echoes of populuxe aesthetics, a connected optimistic philosophy and/or an almost strutting presence and expression of virility are now often ghosts or spectres of their former selves.

This sense of muscle car’s representing a tired virility can also be seen in two different era’s film adaptations of George V. Higgins novels; in Peter Yate’s 1973’s film adaptation of The Friend’s of Eddie Coyle the cars are relatively contemporary but as with the not dissimilar period depicted in Langdon Clay’s book they often appear a little worn, while the background millieux and atmosphere in which they are set depicts a country or society which is in a malaise, has lost its way and its inhabitants are often having to scrabble for every few cents whenever and however they can, whatever the cost or potential threats.

Accompanying and reflecting this, Robert Mitchum in the lead role, in contrast to the strident sense of presence and power he possessed and portrayed in films made in previous decades, has the air of a big, tired, world-weary bear of a man for whom things just don’t or won’t quite ever work out for.

In Andrew Dominik’s 2012 contemporarily set film adaptation of Killing Them Softly, a similar style and era of muscle car as those pictured in The Friend’s of Eddie Coyle appear. However in the later film adaptation they are often much worse for wear and/or feature patched repairs.

In a cyclical manner in Killing Them Softly they also are part of a representation and reflection of a society suffering from a sense of disenchantment and struggling financially due to being mired in problems connected to economic and other issues, resulting, as in The Friends of Eddie Coyle, in the characters in the film also having to scrabble, barter and take ill-advised routes out of their problems.

In the film even some of those involved in larger scale organised crime are depicted as being penny pinching and budget lead, while also being constrained and restricted by their own form of corporate bureaucratic paralysis, in a manner which appears to be a parallel with and comment on more mainstream society, government and business.

Further reflecting the sense of societal malaise depicted in the films, in both The Friend’s of Eddie Coyle and Killing Them Softly, the 1970s muscle/post-populuxe cars seem to often be featured amongst scrubby and even abandoned seeming edgelands and post-industrial spaces – even when the locations are more overtly urban there is a sense that you are looking at a literal and metaphoric hinterland.

Returning to Langdon Clay’s work, New York in particular during the period in which the photographs were taken was struggling socially and economically, being down at heel, financially strapped and near bankruptcy.

(The resulting cheap rents and effectively cracks or spaces that opened up in the fabric of the city were some of the factors which allowed the flourishing of what would become punk and new wave – Blondie, The Ramones, CBGBs etc.)

It is strange just how beguiling, alluring and beautiful these photographs of often beaten up and well-worn cars are: as writer and critic Luc Sante says in accompanying text, the cars are:

“…arranged like mugshots but lit like Hollywood stars.”

(Although actually they were not lit by the photographer – rather as Langdon Clay says: “The night becomes its own colour.”)

These cars sometimes initially appear almost nattily dapper, particularly as some of them have noticeably shining, lush wax finishes but when viewed closer the viewer begins to notice the signs of lives well lived.

Connected to that quote by Luc Sante, the photographs in the book remind me of author Peter Doyle’s curating of Australian police photographs of those in custody from the 1920s which were collected in the book Crooks Like Us – in those photographs the subjects viewed now appear nearer to say characters in a Hollywood noir rather than those residing at the authorities’ leisure.

In Langdon Clay’s Cars there is something about these vehicles which makes them seem as though they might be ne’er do wells; brooding, just taking time out but possibly up to no good some time in the future.

The book itself, while not cheap, is something of a beautifully produced, hefty tome and the “always the same and always different” nature of the photographs lends itself well to losing oneself in its physicality and the atmosphere it conjures and builds as you turn the pages.

Elsewhere:
Cars: New York City, 1974-1976 Langdon Clay’s own site
Sample pages of Cars at Joseph Chadleck’s photograph book site
And at Steidl
The Friends of Eddie Coyle at the Criterion Collection
The Friends of Eddie Coyle at Eureka!/The Masters of Cinema
The Killing Them Softly trailer
Crooks Like Us

Elsewhere at A Year In The Country:
1) Week #22/52: Fractures Signals #1; Flickerings From Days Of Darkness
2) Fractures – Night and Dawn Editions Released
3) Week #24/52: Fractures Signals #3; A Dybukk’s Dozen Gathering (/Looping?) From Around These Parts
4) Chapter 7 Book Images: 1973 – A Time of Schism and a Dybbuk’s Dozen of Fractures
5) Wanderings, Explorations and Signposts 33/52: Langdon Clay’s Cars – New York City, 1974-1976 – Post-Populuxe Ghosts That Brood While the City Sleeps

File under: A Year In The Country ocular explorations

At first glance the photography book Cars: New York City, 1974-1976 by Langdon Clay, published in 2016 by Steidl, can seem like something of a cuckoo in the often pastoral nest of A Year In The Country

However parallel stands could be connected between it, European hauntology and lost spectres of the past…

This book focuses exclusively on nighttime photographs of parked cars, in the city and period mentioned in the title.

Looking through the book it is as though the population of the world has disappeared, leaving only these automobiles and as the book progresses the viewer can find themselves beginning to question if the cars are merely vehicles/vessels for transport or are they living entities themselves – they instill a sense of being ghosts, both sentient and yet not.

However these are not the friendly, anthropomorphised “Cars” of Pixar fame.

Eerie is a word that has been used in connection with the photographs and that would seem appropriate – there is something subtly disquieting about these brooding, alone, nighttime inhabitants.

There are very few people in the whole book and where they appear they are not captured in sharp detail: they appear as a blurred figure in a diner which stands alone and apart from the city and could be from both the 1950s and/or the 1970s.

While in another photograph the faceless person pictured in a car, although probably the result of late night lighting conditions and a related long film exposure, here seems to edge towards a sense of being trapped, a form of possession, horror films etc.

There are occasionally signs of human habitation and activity – here and there lights are on in businesses and bars but rarely can anybody be seen inside nor entering or leaving and in a small number of photographs the lights of passing cars have been reduced to vapour like trails but these are few and far between.

Accompanying which and returning the “eerie” atmosphere of the photographs, these images of empty streets in a teeming, heavily populated city induce a subtle sense of unease or dread, in a not dissimilar way to that in which John Carpenter has often used empty streets in his films, which although in the middle of densely built urban spaces seem to be isolated and alone.

(And they possibly also connect to John Carpenter’s adaptation of Stephen King’s novel Christine and its central character which is a possessed, supernatural late 1950s American car.)

Although book is page after page purely of stationery cars at night, it does not impart a sense of repetition. Rather the endlessly changing or sometimes almost morphing from one to another character of the cars and the small details in the backgrounds of the photographs keep the viewer entranced – the changing businesses that stand behind where the cars are parked, the fallout shelter sign next to a meat company and its inspection certificate and so forth.

(It is surprising just how ubiquitous fallout shelters appear to be in these photographs, with them reappearing a number of times, in a manner which viewed today seems both surreal and a potent reminder of the threat of destruction which populations then lived under.)

Most of the cars in the photographs are “civilians” – cars for personal use – but one image features a police car which as a symbol of power/authority seems to be something of an interloper in amongst what is otherwise the empty frontier like nighttime city depicted in the book.

One factor which decidedly separates the photographs and the cars in the book from today is the capturing of signs of rust, advanced wear etc – something which you rarely seem to see today in cars.

The non-American made cars – the recurring Volkswagen Beatles etc – also seem like interlopers amongst what are often muscle car-esque and post-populuxe American vehicles.

(The phase muscle car is generally used to refer to often two-doored American sports cars that feature powerful engines and which are designed for high performance driving. They generally have an aesthetic which is quite distinct and separate from European sports cars.)

Populuxe was a consumer culture and aesthetic in the United States popular in the 1950s and 1960s – the term comes from a combination of popular and luxury. It is associated with consumerism and overlaps with mid-century modern architecture, Streamline Moderne, Googie architecture and other futuristic and Space Age influenced design aesthetics that were optimistic in nature, futurist and technology focused.

(Two editions of Thomas Hine’s book on populuxe style and culture.)

Viewed now such design can look like a vision of the future’s past – a more consumer and market lead, colourful and seemingly joyous American version of British progressive modernism and various related post-war state lead attempts at “building a better future” that included new towns, high rise flats and other brutalist architecture.

Often the style/aesthetic of the cars pictured in Langdon Clay’s book seem to hark back to that earlier 1950s-1960s era in America; a time of expanding power and influence on the world stage, optimism and excess production capacity (delineated by automobile’s extravagant design and physical size) but in this context – late at night, alone, empty, battered, worn and with temporary often rough repairs –  they seem to imply a sense of a society and/or nation that was tired, weary, past a peak.

To be continued in Part 2…

Elsewhere:
Cars: New York City, 1974-1976 Langdon Clay’s own site
Sample pages of Cars at Joseph Chadleck’s photograph book site
And at Steidl
The Vault of the Atomic Space Age
Thomas Hine, author of the book Populuxe

Elsewhere at A Year In The Country:
1) Week #22/52: Fractures Signals #1; Flickerings From Days Of Darkness
2) Fractures – Night and Dawn Editions Released
3) Week #24/52: Fractures Signals #3; A Dybukk’s Dozen Gathering (/Looping?) From Around These Parts
4) Ether Signposts #42/52a: Matthew Lyons and a Populuxe Mid-Century Modern Parallel World
5) Wanderings #48/52a: A Few Ether Gatherings… Ghost Signs, The Vault of the Atomic Space Age and Avantgardens
6) 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

File under: A Year In The Country ocular explorations

I have written about the semi-auto biographical memoirs of the Yorskhire based vet James Herriot’s before at A Year In The Country but I am returning to them as a while ago I finished reading the series of books and this post is something of a tip of the hat to Mr Herriot’s work both as a vet and author (and also something of a wandering down other parallel pathways.)

(I say semi-auto biographical as apparently, contrary to popular belief, the books are only loosely based on real events and people and are actually a melding of fact and fiction. James Herriot was actually the pen name of James Alfred Wight.)

They were originally published in seven books between 1970 and 1993 and have in more recent years been compiled into five books with a set of cover illustrations by Tom Cole which, if placed together, create a panorama that reflects both the passing of the seasons and of life in general.

(They were also made into a popular mainstream British television series in the 1970s.)

The books are set in the 1930s through to the 1950s, which within British life, farming and veterinary practise was a time of great change – a time when, to quote James Herriot, there was a “melting away” of the blacksmiths, the arrival of tractors on farms to replace horses and vast changes and advances in veterinary methods and techniques, which in some ways in the way it is presented in the books, particularly previously to the 1940s, seems to have not advanced all that much further from previous centuries.

It is often the small details of the changes in life and technology that are mentioned in the books which are particularly fascinating – such as in the days before heated windows were fitted as standard (or possibly even been invented) in cars, James Herriot receiving by mailorder a small car window de-icing heater device, which when clamped to the windscreen gave a few inches wide area of visibility in windows that froze up every few miles in cold weather

Previous to the arrival of this device the car would have to be stopped every few miles in order for the ice on the window to be scraped off, which as a then inherent part of driving is almost difficult to imagine today.

The books appeal to a sense or yearning for a rural escape and idyll but while they may have a gentleness to their tone, they do not flinch from the realities of this life.

The life and work of a vet depicted in the books seems curiously hard, both physically and mentally: vets are shown as having been constantly on call – a recurring event in the books seems to be James Herriot being called out in the middle of the night to help deliver a newborn farm animal in the middle of all kinds of harsh weather and primitive unsheltered conditions – a job which often was physically not just demanding but exhausting and could take many hours.

While the worry about sometimes not being able to successfully treat an animal is also a recurring theme in the books.

Having said which, James Herriot expresses a great pride and sometimes joy in his work, in amongst its rigours, particularly when seeing the successfully delivered newborn farm animals and in being able to return a beloved pet to good health and vigour.

That just mentioned yearning for a rural escape, of searching for a restful Arcadian idyll and repose seems to be an inherent part of the English/British character.

The interest in the flipside and undercurrents of pastoral and folk based culture in recent years – what could loosely be called “wyrd” culture – could be seen as an alternative expression of that yearning.

As I have mentioned before, author and lecturer Robert Macfarlane is quoted in the book The Edge Is Where The Centre Is as saying that this area of cultural interest and work may be an attempt to make sense, explain, account for and possibly act as a respite, allow refuge from and act as a bulwark against the current dominant economic/political system.

As also mentioned by Robert Macfarlane, part of the above work, acitivity and interest can involve a utilising or reconfiguring of the spectral or preternatural as a form of expression, exploration and escape from related turbulence and pressures.

This is in contrast to say the more overtly gentle views of the rural presented in James Herriot’s books, rather in such work etc the attempt to create a space for respite and repose has often taken the form of hauntological-esque pastoral inflected work and interests, which often contain eerie or unsettling aspects,

Elsewhere:
Details on James Herriot
Details on Robert Macfarlane

Elsewhere at A Year In The Country:
1) Wanderings #35/52a: All Creatures Great And Small And Non-Chocolate Box Chocolate Box-isms
2) Wanderings, Explorations and Signposts 2/52: Penda’s Fen and The Edge Is Where The Centre Is – Explorations of the Occult, Otherly and Hidden Landscape

File under: A Year In The Country ocular explorations

A while ago I watched an episode of the 1960s television series The Avengers called Murdersville.

The episode in question is from series 5, originally broadcast in 1967 and I think was the second to last in which Diana Riggs played the iconic Mrs Peel, accompanying the bowler hatted Steed as a duo of some form of loosely defined trouble shooting agents of authority with a somewhat flippant, irreverent attitude to the problems they encounter (although they invariably have a certain accompanying steely resolve in terms of getting the job done).

They are often called in and/or accidentally stumble on bizarre, surreal, grandiose plots to say take over the world or turn domestic pets into trained assassins via the use of brain wave modulators.

The episodes, particularly the later colour ones, have a set-in-the-real-world but not aspect, a sort of stylised cartoonish presentation that is not a million miles away from the 1960s television series of Batman.

The Murdersville episode could be considered something of a forerunner to Edgar Wright’s Hot Fuzz film from 2007 in the way it depicts an English chocolate box like idyllic village or small town gone bad.

Murdersville opens with a sign which says “Welcome to Little Storping-in-the-Swuff. Voted the best kept village in the country. Please help us to keep it that way.”, which caused me to think initially that as with Hot Fuzz the dastardly deeds would also be in order to maintain its “best kept village” status.

However, whereas in Hot Fuzz the village/townsfolk are involved in a murderous conspiracy to essentially keep out the riff-raff and make sure it retains a picture perfect appearance and its title of Village of the Year, in Murdersville the village has become a place run by the Murder Incorporated organisation and where for a fee you are able to lure people to and do away with them, which is then covered up by the villagers.

And as in Hot Fuzz, you know something is seriously wrong when the good old English bobby (a colloquial, possibly period phrase for a uniformed British police officer) and the “pint of warm ale” serving local pub are part of the corruption.

In Murdersville these symbols of civility are part and parcel of the corrupted ways of the village, while in a “keeping standards up” manner, even during an assassination the Silence sign in the local library is still pointed to by a librarian and obeyed.

As is often the way in fantastical depictions of villages, here the village and villagers are shown as the “unknown” or other to the city folk and at one point, as in The Wicker Man and The Village of the Damned, they become a mob handed mass and as also in The Wicker Man they are shown as employing medieval/olden ways methods when they use a witch trials like ducking device on Mrs Peel.

Mrs Peel looks wonderfully out-of-place in her purple, stylish, pop-art-esque outifit in amongst the olde worlde village, the village green and the countryside etc.

Towards the end of the episode it turns into a Tiswas like set of flan flinging fisticuffs and despite the life threatening, murderous aspects of the village, by the end the villagers run off when threatened by Mrs Peel armed with but a pie made for a traditional English produce competition alongside the likes of jars of homemade jam, knitting and needlework.

Which fits really with the subtly imaginary, cartoon-like world of The Avengers, where even quite traumatic events are treated as essentially jolly japes with seemingly little mental after effects on Mrs Peel, Mr Steed or their sartorial elegance and definitely nothing that a droll quip and a post-action cocktail won’t put to bed.

Elsewhere:
The Avengers introduction and credits sequences
The Hot Fuzz trailer

Elsewhere at A Year In The Country:
Day #173/365: “Douglas I’m scared”; celluloid cuckoos and the village as anything but idyll…

File under: A Year In The Country ocular explorations

A selection of further broadcasts, reviews etc of the Audio Albion album…

First up Audio Albion was reviewed by Mark Roland in issue 42 of Electronic Sound magazine, where you can find it nestled in amongst a cover feature on Mute Records, the usual selection of potentially bank balance worrying selection of gadgets and synths, The The, David Sylvian, A Flock of Seagulls, Finiflex/Finitribe etc. Count me in, as they say (!):

Visit the issue at Electronic Sound’s site.

Retromania author Simon Reynolds included the album in his June 2018 Hauntology Parish Newsletter, which serves as a gathering/round-up of all things (generally) musically spectral orientated. You’ll find Audio Albion in the company of the likes of Moon Wiring Club, Bloxham Tapes and Andrew Peckler’s Phantom Islands – A Sonic Atlas project which is described as “an interactive online map that charts the sounds and histories of islands that were once found on nautical maps but have since disappeared.”

Visit the Newsletter here.

Kim Harten has reviewed the album at her Bliss Aquamarine site, where it can be found in the company of previous A Year In The Country releases The Quietened Cosmologists and All The Merry Year Round, alongside a fine and eclectic selection of other album reviews:

“…each musical composition (incorporates) sounds of place whilst using music and sound-art to further explore the history, myth and atmosphere of these locations… Audio Albion is a fine selection of eerie, experimental, cinematic sounds inspired by folklore and landscape.”

Visit that review here.

Stephen Palmer and Andrew Young included a piece about Audio Albion as part of the Terrascope Rumbles for July 2018 gathering of over 40 (yep, 40) album reviews:

“There are some gems to be discovered… Time Attendant’s “Holloway”, is both immersive and impressive… Vic Mars Dinedor Hill… a slowly unwinding song all about said hill, a hill which Vic could see from his bedroom window as a child. Ebbing and flowing synth lines are punctuated by some very strange whir’s and pulses.”

Visit those Rumbles in amongst some rather lovely previous era letter press-esque designs and illustrations at Terrascope’s site.

In a rounding the circle manner, Audio Albion contributor Mat Handley of Pulselovers played Vic Mars’ and Widow’s Weeds’ tracks from the album on his You, the Night & the Music radio show, amongst the likes of Sharron Kraus, The Advisory Circle and Making Tea For Robots.

Originally broadcast on Sine FM, the show can be found archived here.

Stuart Maconie played Grey Frequency’s Stapleford Hill from the album on his BBC Radio 6 Music Freak Zone show,  where it can be found alongside the likes of Spacemen 3, Hannah Peel, Harold Budd and A Silver Mt. Zion.

Visit that episode of Freak Zone here.

A selection of previous broadcasts and reviews of Audio Albion can be found here at A Year In The Country.

It can be found there at the likes of radio shows including Late Junction, Gideon Coe, Fractal Meat, Flatland Frequencies, Gated Canal Community Radio, Pull the Plug, The Unquiet Meadow, Sunrise Ocean Bender and The Séance, plus various sites, magazines etc including We Are Cult, John Coulthart’s feuilleton, Touching Extremes, Goldmine, Music Won’t Save You, The Guardian, The Sunday Experience and Shindig!.

As always many thanks and a tip of the hat to everybody involved.

Audio Albion is a music and field recording map of Britain, which focuses on rural and edgeland areas. The album features work by Bare Bones, David Colohan, Grey Frequency, Field Lines Cartographer, Howlround, A Year In The Country, Keith Seatman, Magpahi, Sproatly Smith, Widow’s Weeds, Time Attendant, Spaceship, Pulselovers, The Heartwood Institute and Vic Mars.

Further details can be found here at A Year In The Country.