Category: AYTIC-Year 4

A while ago four new releases from Rif Mountain arrived through my letterbox, which was a not-half-bad start to the day.

Since 2010 the label has released nearly 50 records and been a home to the likes of The Owl Service, Jason Steel, Nancy Wallace, Alasdair Roberts, Robert Sunday, Michael Tanner and Nicholas Palmer’s The A-Lords and sometimes A Year In The Country fellow travellers The Straw Bear Band and Bare Bones amongst others, with releases often having a fluid and interlinked movement of collaborators, writers and performers.

(The 2016 Rif Mountain releases.)

For a few years after 2013 things were quieter around Rif Mountain but since 2016 there have been a number of new releases.

The four new releases from 2017, which are all listed as being part of Phase III, are Robert Sunday’s Cold Little Roses, Hold Music’s Hold Music (featuring amongst others Jason Steel and Daniel Gardner), Phases I-IX and Reliquary (Parts I-VII) by Bare Bones (featuring at their core Dom Cooper and Jason Steel).

One thing that struck me when listening to these releases was that though (I think) they were all recorded in the UK there is a certain dusty or almost mythic Americana aspect to the recordings at times, particularly so on say Robert Sunday’s Hushed and Hold Music’s Howl & Whoop.

Along which lines, on the Rif Mountain site the following is said about Cold Little Roses:

“…set to melodies that would make a hungover Kris Kristofferson blush (in his prime!)…”

While the site says this of Bare Bones’ Phase I-IX:

“Moon Phases by Bare Bones is an album of nine vignettes. These correspond with the nine phases of the moon.

The duo has moved beyond the ritualistic drones of earlier work, creating nuanced, textured soundscapes. These twilight recordings are informed by improvisatory techniques, ethnographic field recordings, and the sonic spaces of Dub; a narcoleptic Ennio Morricone soundtrack.

The tracks inhabit a moonlit world, reminiscent of the hazy pacing of Peter Fonda’s film ‘The Hired Hand’ or the fragmentary/searching writing of Fernando Pessoa’s ‘The Book of Disquiet’.”

On these two new Bare Bones’ releases that dusty, mythical Americana (or “narcoleptic Ennio Morricone” to quote the above text) sits alongside an exploratory or even possibly experimental take on elements of traditional British folk music – a lineage it draws from without replicating.

Rather it has it’s own unique character and an atmosphere that seems to suggest some kind of unknowable mystery… while at times there is a gentle, heartbreaking subtle and evocative melancholia to the recordings.

(As an aside “dusty, mythical Americana” and the undercurrents of British folk and rural/edgeland orientated culture could be considered counterparts of one another – the likes of for example the film Searching for the Wrong Eyed Jesus (2003) and the gothic gospel preacher-isms of the band Sixteen Horsepower explore the flipside, undercurrents, myths and sometimes the beliefs/faiths of rural America and the American South in a similar way that British work which has been called amongst other things wyrd or weird Albion-esque explores and expresses not dissimilar themes and atmospheres in relation to the UK.)

The tracks on these two Bare Bones releases are largely instrumental, although here and there voices and incantations appear: (what I assume are) organs create drone like textures and soundscapes, on one track there is a field recording of falling rain and Phases I-IX ends with the sound of something mechanical winding down – possibly the tape machine on which the album was recorded, possibly one of those just mentioned organs.

As with previous releases, the packaging and accompanying design is rather fine – put together by (I assume) Dom Cooper of Bare Bones/The Straw Bear Band, who has also created the design for a number of earlier Rif Mountain releases. Opening them is something of a treat: a sort of “I wander what I’ll find in here” moment or two, with them containing the likes of illustrations, quotes, collages of music equipment and at one point intriguing and quietly unsettling verse – which could well be a “from this side of the seas” counterpart to that previously mentioned “dusty, mythical Americana” and “gothic gospel preacher-isms”.

Elsewhere:
Rif Mountain
Bare Bones’ Moon Phases
“Factory” folk flipsides and counterparts:
The Straw Bear Band’s version of Dead Souls / Sixteen Horsepower’s version of Heart and Soul

Elsewhere at A Year In The Country:
Day #30/365: The Owl Service – A View From A Hill
Day #51/365: General Orders No. 9… wandering from the arborea of Albion to…
Day #170/365: Who’s afear’d: Dom Cooper & reinterpreting signs, signals and traditions…
Day #198/365: Wandering from the arborea of Albion (#2) and fever dreams of the land…
Wanderings #5/52a: A Return Visit To And From Rif Mountain

File under: A Year In The Country ocular explorations

The 1976 film Robin and Marian is an interesting take on the myth and history of the tales of Robin Hood.

This isn’t a flash, escapist take on those tales, rather it is in parts a quite melancholic film about in part ageing, loss, past glories and what happens to the life, loves and myths of a living legend as the years pass.

While a number of the locations seem to be fairly undisguised and barely reconstructed actual crumbling rural castles/keeps.

It was directed by Richard Lester, who is also known for the likes of The Beatles’ romps A Hard Day’s Night and Help!, The Knack… and How to Get It, post-apocalyptic curio and BFI Flipside release The Bed Sitting Room, the star studded 1973 version of The Three Musketeers and in the 1980s the superhero blockbusters Superman II and III.

The film features Sean Connery as Robin, Nicol Williamson as Little John (who would go on to play Merlin in John Boorman’s 1981 film Excalibur, which reimagines of the myths of King Arthur) Audrey Hepburn as Marian (returning to cinema for the first time in eight years) and Robert Shaw as the Sheriff of Nottingham.

Alongside which the film is also noticeable for the number of classic British dramatic and comic actors in the cast: Richard Harris, Denholm Elliot, Ronnie Barker, Ian Holm and Bill Maynard (the one time Selwyn Froggitt).

In the plot many years have passed since Robin led the fight for the poor of Nottingham, he has been off fighting in the Crusades under the command of King Richard the Lionheart. He has returned to England, which is now ruled by “mad” King John and Robin regroups the members of his old Sherwood Forest band of merry men.

Robin’s old nemesis the Sheriff of Nottingham is ordered by the king to remove the clergy from the countryside, causing Robin to go to the aid of and rescue his old love Marian, who is now part of a religious order.

Even after his extended time away Robin retains a legendary status and following amongst the common folk of the land, who gather around him in his forest stronghold to stand against the forces of authority and the scene is set for a final confrontation between Robin and his men and the Sheriff and his troops.

As I just mentioned though, this isn’t a swashbuckling rerun of the myth of Robin Hood – possibly reflecting a wider trend in 1970s television and film it is in parts quite downbeat and even a gritty realist film.

(Although accompanying which at times it seems to almost be two films in one, as at points it becomes a sort of old fashioned Hollywood melodrama accompanied by a traditional and possibly even old fashioned cinematic score.)

(The curiously glam packaging for the Japanese edition of the soundtrack.)

Robin and the other characters are all shown in a largely unstyled manner, with their ageing allowed to be on show in a naturalistic way, in contrast with much of modern film: there is a sense that they are well past their prime but still trying to carry out physically demanding feats of courage.

Robert Shaw as the Sheriff seems to just be almost acceptingly weary of the whole inevitability of the Robin/Sheriff game of cat and mouse, of the battles between folk hero and upholder of the laws of the land and the whims of its rulers: in fact in the film they are shown to be men who as much as anything seem to be more just carrying out their expected roles, fates and duties, with a certain acceptance of that inevitability and there seeming to be a certain recidivism to the character and actions of Robin.

The ending which (spoiler alert) effectively involves a double suicide/murder/poisoning between Robin and Marian, is also not what would be expected from say a Hollywood take on the tales of Robin Hood. It is curiously both downbeat and also strangely affirming of the enduring love and acceptance between Robin and Marian, seeming to be a final acceptance of this being the only way out of an otherwise unending cycle of violence and conflict due to the inherent character and restlessness of Robin.

(Although Marian is not shown as at all weak willed, there is a certain dichotomy portrayed between her femininity and searching for peace and the opposite characteristics in Robin – something which is made more explicit in the film’s French title La Rose et la Flèche, which translates as The Rose and the Arrow.)

Acceptance as the years pass and an accompanying affection, even tenderness, seems to be some of the main themes of the film – between Robin and Marian, Robin and Little John and even a certain not-all-that-grudging respect and affection between Robin and the Sheriff, which includes a certain gentlemanly chivalry being shown during their final conflict.

Alongside the film’s open depiction of the ageing process and its effects, the final conflict between Robin and the Sheriff is shown in a more realist manner than is often the way in cinema, with the two men becoming relatively quickly increasingly physically tired and almost unable to fight due to their exertions and injuries.

(Audrey Hepburn’s personal copy of the script – which sold for a fair few pounds and pence at auction.)

In some ways the film could be seen as a battle between the old ways, the freedoms and unrulability of the traditional untamed forest lands and the castle dwelling rulers and forerunners of the more “civilised” or centrally controlled town/city settlements.

Robin and his men normally hold sway and a strategic advantage over the better equipped King’s/Sheriff’s men within the forest. However the powers-that-be are shown as being prepared to gather and camp outside its boundaries, waiting for the rashness of Robin to be his force’s undoing and he eventually breaks cover from the forest to meet his enemy.

His ensuing attempts to settle the conflict through a more evenly matched duel solely between him and the Sheriff are cast aside when the promise of acceptance of the outcome as the deciding factor in the conflict, which was made before their duel by the Sheriff, is ignored by the authorities when Robin is victorious (although this victory is nominal due to the mortal injuries he sustains).

His men are hunted down and defeated – the underlying implication being that this is possibly the end of a certain way of life, freedom, resistance and the rallying call of the legend of Robin, a passing of the old into the new accompanied by the strengthening of the authorities’ rule and power.

The film is well worth a look-see for a different take on the longstanding myths of Robin Hood and performances by a gathering of actors nolonger in the first flush of youth but undoubtedly at the top of their game in terms of charisma and their invocations of character and a sense of experience gained and life lived.

Elsewhere:
The Robin and Marian DVD – which at the time of writing is available for a rather reasonable pocket money price.
The trailer.

File under: A Year In The Country ocular explorations

Well, Halloween III. Where to start and where to finish, it’s something of a multi-layered subject and film…

Back around Autumn 2017 I started to find myself increasingly interested in the work of John Carpenter. I’d been watching his work on and off since a young age but something sparked off a renewed interest…

…and then during the weekend just before Halloween last year I found myself in one of the bargain-about-£1-per item shops that dot the land…

There for but £1 was the DVD of Halloween III: Season of the Witch – I rather liked the synchronicity of coming across the film at that time of year and so I wandered home with it.

I’m not quite sure I was completely ready for it as a film. It’s an odd (but also intriguing) cinematic and cultural experience.

Originally released in 1982, it’s not actually a John Carpenter film, rather part of the Halloween franchise which was created by John Carpenter, with the film being co-produced by John Carpenter, with a soundtrack by him and Alan Howarth and was written and directed by Tommy Lee Wallace.

Well, sort of written by him. More on that in a moment.

How to describe it? Well, if you imagine a mixture of the work of John Carpenter at one step remove, Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, The Stepford Wives, a more b-movie and less arthouse take on earlier David Cronenberg and the work of Nigel Kneale, you may not be far off.

Why Nigel Kneale? Well, he wrote the original screenplay and was asked to do so in part because John Carpenter was an admirer of his Quatermass series. Nigel Kneale delivered a script that was apparently based more on psychological shocks rather than more conventional horror and physical ones but Dino De Laurentiis, who owned the distribution rights, wanted more traditional horror/violence.

Director Tommy Lee Wallace revised the script and Nigel Kneale asked for his name to be taken off the finished film.

However, watching the film I think it has a surprisingly small amount of gore and violence considering the above and its genre – much of such things happen offscreen and in comparison to the often gratuitous imagery and special effects of a number of films today, this seems relatively tame (if still at times quite shocking).

The spirit of Nigel Kneale’s work remains quite strongly in the finished film; the plot involves a novelty toy/trick manufacturing company that has incorporated a microchip which includes fragements from one of the stones from Stonehenge in their halloween masks – which are proving massively popular with the children of the US.

The stone fragments contain some form of ancient power, which via the microchip will be triggered by the flashing images in the company’s television adverts on Halloween, causing the death/sacrifice of the wearers and those nearby, effectively reviving a ritual that last happened 3000 years ago and bringing about the resurrection of an ancient age of witchcraft.

Ancient, buried rituals. The power of standing stones. The collision of ancient powers and modern science. Nothing Nigel Kneal-esque there then.

As mentioned earlier, Halloween III brings to mind the earlier films Invasion of the Bodysnatchers and The Stepford Wives –  this is in particular due to the company’s power over and replacement of the local town and it’s population.

The town is completely run and controlled by the company, complete with a threatening sense of electronic surveillance, a curfew announced in the evening over a tannoy system and a sense that the population is being replaced by androids.

Returning to David Cronenberg, Halloween III, put me in mind in part of Cronenberg’s Videodrome, which was released around a similar period in 1983.

Although more overtly b-movie like than Cronenberg-arthouse-esque, at times Halloween III seems to have some of the emotional distance that Cronenberg’s films can have.

(As an aside, John Carpenter’s films – particularly his earlier work – could well be considered the less arthouse but possibly at times more entertaining flipside to David Cronenberg’s earlier films).

As with the manipulative organisation in Videodrome, in Halloween III, despite planning on effectively taking over/changing the world and having the resources to mass-manufacture convincingly human androids, the novelty manufacturing company, their factory and infrastructure seems curiously low-key and non-high tech: this isn’t some big gleaming futuristic corporation, more a small-ish local factory with a slightly down-at-heel, paint chipped locale.

(As a further aside the town where the factory is based seems to be a fairly typical small sized town, with the factory work seeming quite blue collar manual when carried out by humans, while in contrast the android “workers” are corporately, white collar suited.)

And in both films television/video are shown as being used for a form of signal transmission which controls the minds and/or causes a physical alteration/mutation and/or destruction in those who watch it.

Along which lines, the opening sequence where CRT television scan lines, pixels and glitches build into the graphic of a Halloween pumpkin capture a sense of early 1980s technology and it’s at times period use as a malignant or threatening force particularly well.

John Carpenter and Alan Howarth’s minimal synth score for Halloween III is well worth seeking out and to my mind it is one of the finest of John Carpenter’s classic synth soundtracks. In but a few notes, synth washes and spare percussion it creates an intriguing, entrancing and possibly seductive atmosphere while also being almost subtly, gently ominously portentous.

(For those who should appreciate vintage synth and audio equipment.)

The original releases of the soundtrack are now quite rare, as are most of the re-issues: it has been re-released several times, first on CD in 1989, a complete extended CD version of the soundtrack was released by Alan Howarth in a limited edition of 1000 in 2007 and a vinyl version was issued by the Death Waltz Recording Company in 2012, all of which are out of print.

However, the complete version is still available as a print-on-demand CD in the US and on import elsewhere and can also be found on various online streaming services if you should have a hankering to listen to it.

Elsewhere:
The various editions of the soundtrack.
The soundtrack’s Main Title.
The trailer via the Shout! Factory Collector’s Edition Blu-ray.

The Meadow is a book by Barbara Bosworth & Margot Anne Kelley, published by Radio Books, which is part photographic exploration/documentation, part journal and part scientific study.

The two authors have been wandering, studying and photographing the same single meadow in Carlisle, Massachusets for more than a decade and the book is a collection of the resulting work.

There is a reflective, thoughtful calm to the photographs of the meadow, with them seeming to reflect the unhurried character of this space and the sense of the book being the result of the authors both (to quote the publishers) “meandering” and studying this one place over an extended period of time.

Accompanying Barbara Bosworth’s photographs are a number of text pieces by Margot Anne Kelly, many of which provide a fascinating insight into the meadow and the nature that has made its home there.

This includes explaining how different species of fireflies co-exist relatively peacefully in the same areas by dividing time and space, which they do by flying at different heights, times of the day etc and also that the lichens which you may find on stones are actually a symbiotic co-operation of fungus and algae rather than being just one plant – and even through millions of years of evolution they have remained separate but connected species.

One of the things that struck me on perusing the book was just how few animals there are in the photographs – a bird appears just once and there are some photographs with glowing specks that are actually those just mentioned fireflies, although you would not necessarily realise that without reading the accompanying text.

That may well reflect the reality of wandering through such fields – apart from if they contain livestock, animals are generally hidden from view, with possibly (in the fields I’m used to wandering through) just the occasional flash of say a hare or rabbit off in the distance and even the noises that you may hear will generally largely only be those of birds.

A fascinating aspect of the book are the Bird Doors, which date from the 1930s onwards and which document the details of birds visiting the meadow etc.

The book is somewhat sumptuously and beautifully produced with inserts, a de-embossed inner cover, foldouts, separately printed and bound sections and so forth. A labour of love in a number of ways I expect.

The Meadow is well worth a perusal, particularly for the way in which it interlinks and interweaves an expressive exploration of one particular meadow with the rigour of scientific study, albeit a form of study which in keeping with the character of the project still retains a literary, creative character.

Elsewhere:
The Meadow at Radius Books
Peruse The Meadow at Idea Books

The Edge Is Where The Centre Is is a book that focuses on Alan Clarke and David Rudkin’s 1974 British television play Penda’s Fen.

Aside from the intriguing and multi-layered nature of Penda’s Fen, the book is a fascinating and rather lovely cultural artifact in itself – and a good example of the way in which a relatively small core of television and film work from previous decades which focuses on for example the flipside and undercurrents of the landscape and folklore continues to inspire contemporary work and projects, which draw inspiration from that core but which can also be appreciated, exploratory and inspirational in their own right.

The book has been released in two editions, both prior to the play’s official DVD/Bluray restoration and release by the BFI in 2016, at a time when it was generally only viewable as a not-officially sanctioned multi-generational blurred digital copy online or at one of the rare public screenings.

At the core of the book is a conversation between Gareth Evans, William Fowler and David Rudkin where Penda’s Fen is discussed – hence the subtitle of the first edition of the book: David Rudkin and Penda’s Fen: A Conversation.

In the first edition of the book this was accompanied by several articles, a short biography of David Rudkin, a synopsis of the film and a screening history.

(Above is the “short” synopsis of the play – which considering the multi-layered nature of Penda’s Fen rather surprisingly captures and represents its themes concisely in but a few words.)

The second edition has been considerably expanded, redesigned and at times rewritten to include the core conversation, articles, the synopsis etc but with the sections now numbering fourteen, the addition of a flexi-disc by Mordant Music and the subtitle changing to be: David Rudkin and Penda’s Fen: An Archaeology.

Both books were designed by Rob Carmichael of SEEN and are collages that seem to reflect a sense of a multi-layered, spectral or hidden/occult exploration of the landscape.

This is enhanced by them having been printed using the Risograph process, which utilises copying machines which produces print output that seem to exist in its own hinterland somewhere between digital photocopying and hand screenprinting and has a particularly appealing tactile, matt quality.

That spectral/hidden sense of the landscape is one of the core themes of the book, with it taking Penda’s Fen as something of a starting point or wellspring for what a number of year/decades later has grown to be a loosely defined cultural exploration of “weird”, “wyrd” or “eerie” Britain – an otherly, at times hauntological unearthing of rural pastures and interests.

(A number of reasons for such cultural phenomena and interest could be put forward, one of which – as referred to in a quote by Robert Macfarlane in the book – is that it is an attempt to make sense, explain, account for and possibly act as a respite/allow refuge from/act as a bulwark against the current dominant capitalist system: in part a utilising or reconfiguring of the spectral or preternatural as a form of expression, exploration and escape from related turbulence and pressures.)

The books were published by Texte und Töne in collaboration with the Colloquium for Unpopular Culture: the first edition coincided with/marked the screening of the film/play at The Horse Hospital on the anniversary of King Penda’s death in AD 655 and the second edition coincided with/marked a screening at the Whitechapel Gallery.

They seem to form a continuum of the unearthing of the weird, wyrd, eerie, occult, otherly, hauntological landscape of Britain by Texte und Töne and the Colloquium for Unpopular Culture which has taken in public events and Risograph printed publications.

These include the book The Twilight Language of Nigel Kneale, which was released to mark the event A Cathode Ray Séance: The Haunted Worlds of Nigel Kneale and The Stink Still Here book which is a conversation between Paul Myerscough and David Peace which centres around his novel GB84 and The Stink Still Here: The Miner’s Strike on Film event, both of which focus around the 1984-1985 British Miner’s Strike.

The Edge Is Where The Centre Is books are edited by Gareth Evans, Will Fowler and Sukhev Sandhu, who aside from taking part in the core conversation, all also have articles in the book/s.

Sukhev Sandhu’s “You’re Like The English, You Have Foreign Parents” article positions the film in amongst an interior English countryside that is often unknown or unexplored territory:

“If cities are in the ascendant, it’s the countryside that is increasingly terra incognita in the public imagination. British people, weaned over twenty years on cheap international travel delivered by budget airlines, are as likely to be familiar with Spanish and Greek pastures as they are with their own national interiorities.”

William Fowler’s Deep Dreaming article considers the countryside as a focus for exploration within film in the 1970s, placing Penda’s Fen within a background of the likes of Psychomania, Children of the Stones, The Ballad of Tam Lin, Winstanley, The Wicker Man and the work of Derek Jarman:

“The green space became a place to resist authority, explore sexualty, open-up portals between different time zones and expose the soul…”

As an article it explores not dissimilar territory to that which he, alongside Rob Young, wrote about in the The Films of Old Weird Britain issue of Sight & Sound magazine in 2010 and indeed could well be a companion piece to their articles in that issue.

Indeed “open-up portals between different time zones” implies a not too dissimilar sense of cultural exploration as Rob Young has referred to as a form of “imaginative time travel”.

If you have never seen Penda’s Fen or are not likely to watch it, the two editions of The Edge Is Where The Centre Is are able to stand alone as fascinating explorations and documents of the underlying patterns, myths and stories of the landscape and rural areas – books which, as Sukhev Sandhu says of Penda’s Fen, are:

“…a deconstruction of the pieties of the English landscape tradition at the same time as a loving wassail to the occult potential of that very cartography…”

Elsewhere:
The Edge Is Where The Centre Is at Texte und Töne.
The Edge Is Where The Centre Is at SEEN.
The Edge Is Where The Centre Is at the BFI.

Elsewhere at A Year In The Country:
Day #4/365: Electric Eden; a researching, unearthing and drawing of lines between the stories of Britain’s visionary music
Day #15/365. The Twilight Language Of Nigel Kneale
Day #80/365: The Films Of Old Weird Britain… celluloid flickerings from an otherly Albion…
Day #143/365: Central Office Of Information + Mordant Music = MisinforMation
Day #191/365: Penda’s Fen; “Cherish our flame, our dawn will come.”
Wanderings #36/52a: The Wicker Man Revisited / Refreshed – The Long Arm Of The Lore

For the first cultural wandering of this still new year I thought I would post about something that I stumbled on online a while ago and which I’m rather fond of…

The Hazel’s Kaboodles “Corn Husk” Doll Kit.

This is boxed kit that comes with all that you need to make various different sized corn husk dolls and accessories and I think it is American in origin and was made or originally released around 1976.

If you should not know, corn husk dolls are, well, dolls made from the husks of corn.

A connected phrase and form of traditional craft is corn dollies, although that is more often associated with the decorative, symbolic shaped harvest orientated designs that originated in pre-Christian, pagan European culture.

In those times it was thought that the spirit of the corn lived amongst the crop and that the harvest made it effectively homeless. Hollow shapes were made from the last sheaf of wheat or other cereal crops and the spirit of the corn would live there until this “corn dolly” was plough into the first furrow of the new season.

There a were number of traditions based around corn dollies, including one where the person who cuts the last ears of corn makes them into a doll, which is called the Corn mother or the Old Woman and is brought home on the last wagon.

Or alternatively, there were beliefs that the Corn Spirit lived or was reborn in a plaited straw ornament or corn doll made from the last sheaf of corn cut, which was kept until the following spring to ensure a good harvest, with the corn dolly often having a place of honour at the harvest banquet table.

(As an aside “dolly” is thought to be a corruption of “idol” or possibly the Greek word “eidolon” which means apparition or that which represents something else, which read about today and with a certain cultural mindset invokes a sense of it having a hauntological folklore aspect.)

However, the Kaboodle kit is for the creation of actual dolls or rather corn husk dolls, although sometimes such dolls are also referred to as corn dolls or dollies.

Before the availability of the mass production of dolls for childrens and ornaments, leftover husks from corn were an accessible and I suppose probably cheap material with which to make dolls, with it thought to be a traditional form of crafting that was probably carried out in America since harvesting began around a thousand years ago.

The kit is a lovely thing, designed to make 22 dolls and accessories and comes with all the required husks, twine (Hazel’s Ribbon Straw), dried flowers, balls for the dolls’ heads, paper based gingham and patchwork fabric, instructions etc.

Opening the box feels like stepping into a small time warp or capsule from back when…

…and I particularly liked that the kit I bought came with an unexpected surprise as it contained its own little piece of repurposing from back when, as one of the doll heads had been used by a former owner to create a traditional Halloween-esque witch on broomstick hanging ornament, complete with black cat riding on the tail of the broomstick.

There can be something slightly sinister or subtly unsettling at times about faceless corn dollies but generally this kit has a quite friendly, welcoming air to it.

Although possibly the illustrations on the side of the box that shows how many dolls can be made from the kit wanders a bit more towards having a quietly worrying aspect or possibly even 1970s British science fiction and fantasy television scary monsters along the lines of something that had come to life in say Doctor Who or it’s like in that era.

Although I expect if they had been featured in that era’s television fantasy then they may well have had featureless faces, as the more eerie creatures and characters from then seemed to, such as the one above from Sapphire & Steel.

It turns out that tales of such faceless characters have a folkloric precedent…

Delving further into the history of corn husk dolls, I discovered that there is a reason that they often don’t have faces or features, which can be found in a traditional Native American legend called The Story Of The Corn Husk Doll, which tells of how the Spirit of Corn, one of the Three Sisters (the sustainers of life – the three main agricultural cops of various Native American groups in North America), made a doll or dolls from corn husks.

As is often the way with folkoric tales, there are a number of variations on the story and why the Spirit of Corn made the doll/s: these include because after making moccasins, salt boxes, mats etc from corn husks she wanted to make something different or because she was so thrilled at being one of the sustainers of life that she asked the Great Spirit or Creator what more she could do for the people and was told that she could make a doll from her husks that could entertain children.

One of the dolls the Spirit of Corn made and which was given life to was very beautiful and when she want into the woods and saw herself in a pool she saw how beautiful she was and became very vain and badly behaved (or in different tellings she began to spend less time with children and more time merely contemplating her own loveliness or when travelling from village to village to entertain the children she was repeatedly told she was beautiful, which resulted in her becoming vain).

The Great Spirit spoke to her and warned her that her vanity was not the right kind of behaviour but she ignored his warning and was given a punishment where she would have no face and not be able to converse with the birds, animals or people: she would be left to roam the earth forever, looking for something that would enable her to regain her face.

(An alternative telling says that when she walked by a creek she glanced into the water and as she admired herself couldn’t help thinking how beautiful she was, because indeed she was beautiful. Worried about her vanity, the Great Spirit sent a giant screech owl out of the sky and it snatched her reflection from the water. When she looked again, she had no reflection, which was her punishment in this telling of the tale.)

Well, that started out as a cheery consideration of a 1970s corn husk doll kit and seemed to wander somewhere a little darker – and as a plot the above would not seem out of place in a more contemporary television or cinematic fantasy and indeed does not seem all that far removed from say the twists in the tales of for example The Twilight Zone, a 1970s horror/fantasy anthology film or their television series equivalent.

I have wandered towards the sometimes darker, at times faceless and/or otherly folkloric intertwinings of such things before, such as the images above from a 1970s book on corn husk dolls.

Links to related posts can be found below…

Elsewhere at A Year In The Country:
Day #87/365: Faded foundlings and Tender Vessels…
Week #47/52: Shirley Collins voyages anew…
Wanderings #17/52a: Not So Abounding Faceless Automatons And Not-Quite-So-Mainstream Crafting

File under: A Year In The Country ocular explorations

For a fair old while I’ve been fascinated by traditional cathode ray images, broadcasts and related analogue video recordings – their visual characteristics, the way that they connect with or imply a particular now rapidly vanishing into the distance period of history and technology.

Just as traditional chemical film based photography has its own distinctive grain, cathode ray images have their own “grain” or loss of quality – the scan lines, the glitches and wobble of analogue video tape and their degradation over time and multiple generation copies, the snow, noise and ghosting that results from a poor quality broadcast signal etc.

At times there can be something accidentally beautiful about such characteristics – close up or enlarged they can become abstract patterns.

Within visual work, as with sections of music/audio, the above characteristics and related technology have come to have a form of romance or even nostalgia attached to them, accompanied by an at times hankering after an era before the loss of loss that digital replication may be thought to have brought about.

(Although it could be argued that through the compression techniques of digital storage and replication that the contemporary era has its own form of loss, we just have not necessarily overly recognised it at as such yet. Just as modern digital technologies, restoration, audio, photography, video etc all have their own distinctive character and transformation processes.)

Within visual art there has been the use and application of some of these “lossy” previous era characteristics, alongside the likes of exploring earlier data limited imagery: essentially using modern technology to say create the sense of an image being stored on a degraded multi-generational video tape recording, captured via the ghosts of faded analogue transmissions, having been replicated over and over again on an uncalibrated early photocopier or created via early digital computer technology, resulting in 8-bit art, glitch art and so forth.

Generally such aesthetics and styles are used in connection with imagery of an urban nature and I thought it could be intereresting to see what would happen if I took such styles and applied them to those of a more rural or pastoral origin.

The plan is to take the “classic” A Year In The Country style and effectively transmit and broadcast it through a contemporary portal that in some ways connects it back to the aesthetics and visual fingerprints of earlier eras: a re-interpretation and interweaving rather than a replication, allowing the signals to at times fade and be scrambled as they tumble backwards and forwards through time…

That “classic” and the “transmitted” styles may well become intertwined and/or sit next to one another as the weeks and months pass by. We shall see where the year takes us (!)…

So, the start of a New Year…

…and behind the scenes of A Year In The Country I have been working away on something (and at times burning the midnight oil)…

The result of that beavering away is the now completed book A Year In The Country: Wandering Through Spectral Fields, subtitled Journeys in Otherly Pastoralism, the Further Reaches of Folk and the Parallel Worlds of Hauntology.

Across 52 chapters and 340 pages the book gathers, revisits and revises writing from the first three years of A Year In The Country, alongside some new wanderings and is intended to draw together and connect layered, at times semi-hidden cultural pathways and signposts; wandering from acid folk to edgelands via electronic music innovators and pioneers, folkloric film and photography, dreams of lost futures and misremembered televisual tales and transmissions.

The book will be published most probably around the start of Spring 2018 (i.e. March or April). I will post more details around these parts soon.

In the meantime, here’s to the New Year and I trust this finds you good, well and full of (post) festive cheer…

PS Details of the book and the collection of its accompanying online images can be found at the Book’s Page, which will be added to throughout the year.