Category: Trails and Influences: Touchstones

File under: Trails and Influences: Touchstones. Case #26/52.

Well, where to start with Penda’s Fen?

There have been are a few films and television series along the pathways of A Year In The Country that have been “How did that happen? How was that allowed onto/into mainstream television and cinema?” moments.

But I expect they all pale somewhat in that sense before Penda’s Fen, created for television by David Rudkin and Alan Clarke.

While The Ash Tree (see Day #188/365), also created by David Rudkin, is an unsettling film, it still exists and can be located within conventional film/horror narratives and genres. The same cannot be said for Penda’s Fen.

This is a film that takes in the revival of ancient pagan kings, hidden underground government facilities (cities?), left-wing truths/ranting/paranoia, substitute Mary Whitehouse-esque self-appointed moral majority figures, awakening sixth form adolescent sexuality, fancying your local milk man, alternative religious histories/theological study, demons, army cadet forces, William Blake’s Jerusalem, the threat and worry of the never stopping industrial conveyor belt, returning dead classical musicians who wish to see the silver river and verdant valleys but who are actually staring at a flaking brick wall, the battle of religion against older gods, a birthday cake, adoption, fertility, almost breaking the fourth wall self-criticism about himself in David Rudkin’s script, angelic riverside visitations, Kenneth Anger-esque phallic firework dreams…

…and that’s just off the top of my head as it were. Oh and I’d forgotten about the voluntary bodily de-appendaging scene that’s a cross between some 1970s swingers get together, an episode of Tales Of The Unexpected, a folkloric gathering in The Wickerman and who knows what else.

It could be a head spinning melange and collage of freakish/cult film making but it’s not. Although in its hour and a half (actually, its first half hour) it manages to have covered more topics than a whole catalogue of other films may do, this is a very cogent and coherent film. It is a film which at its core I think deals with conformity, coming of age and mankind’s sacred covenant with the land. I think.

This is visionary film making (though made for television). Challenging, unique.

With which, 28 sentences, quotes, images, thoughts, from and about Penda’s Fen:

1) “What’s in a name… the devil of a lot or in light of this film, a demon of a lot…”

2) Image: bloodied hand grasping barbed wire superimposed over the idyll of the English landscape.

3) “Don’t be silly Stephen.”

4) “Hear the angel and the demon on those hills.”

5) Thought: schoolboy soldiers as England’s last hope.

6) “The house rules that the media are a source of evil to society.”

7) “The manipulators, the fixers, the psychopaths who have real power in the land.”

8) Thought: in the beginning he is a priggish, conservative youth… by the end…

9) Thought: shades of the hidden subterranean subterfuges of Edge of Darkness?

10) “What is it that is hidden beneath this shell of lovely earth? Some hideous angel of technocratic death?”

11) “You can tell he’s not a nice man from his television plays…”

12) “The lonely (lovely?) places technocrats choose for their obscene experiments.”

13) “…you’ll find the sick laboratories built on or beneath these haunted sites.”

14) “Are you interested in the occult?”

15) “Not in the least, I’m a writer, demons of my own.”

16) “Some say the spire of a church acts as an aerial, attracting around it the old elemental forces of light and darkness in combat.”

17) “They believed light is a valuable spark in man, under constant attack from the forces of darkness.”

18) “The public have lost the imaginative strength they had, their sight and will to see what’s really going has been steadily weakened by the entertainment barons for gain, the yes men for craveness.”

19) “We’re not people anymore with eyes to see, we’re blind gaping holes at the end of a production line…”

20) “You hanker suddenly to join your generations underside.”

21) Image: Elgar returned, wheelchair bound in a deserted, derelict building.

22) “When the church, any church goes to war against an older god, it has to call that older god the devil.”

23) Thought: ah, interesting, pagan actually means/is derived from “of the country, of a village.”

24) “Revolt from the monolith… come back to the village.“

25) Thought: the woman from the moral majority crusaders even looks like Mary Whitehouse’s silhouette from a distance as she comes over the hill.

26) “I am nothing pure, my race is mixed, my sex is mixed, light with darkness.”

27) “You have seen your true guardians of England, sick father and mother who would have us children forever.”

28) “Cherish our flame, our dawn shall come.”

Mr Rudkin, a tip of the hat to you sir.

You can read the full text of the above interview here.

 

File under: Trails and Influences: Touchstones. Case #25/52.

Subtitle:
A Triple Bill For One Night Only
Curse Of The Crimson Altar – A queen escapes from beneath…
A Field In England – Box Fantasma reimagining…
The Equestrian Vortex – Released from the ferrous loops…

And in the theme of a curious disconnect between what a film is actually like and how your imagination thinks of it (see Day #181/365 and Day #183/365)…

There are two versions of The Curse Of The Crimson Altar in my mind; one is the actual film, which is a pleasant enough, fairly mainstream potboiler… and the other version which lives in the basement of the main film, drenched in green light, with a soundtrack by Trish Keenan and James Cargill and where Ms Barbara Steele reigns supreme… in this other version, the sections lorded over by their queen have grown and taken on a life of their own, to become a fully fledged feature that has quietly subsumed that which originally spawned it.

When taking in this film, it does feel like for brief moments it steps down into the basement and into another place, giving just a glimpse of what could have been…

…and I suppose in a way, there’s a connection between such things and the creation of imaginary soundtracks to films that never existed (see Day #167/365).

Why Trish Keenan and James Cargill?

Well, partly because of this quote from an unedited interview transcript with Ms Keenan:

“I’d like people to enjoy the album as a Hammer horror dream collage where Broadcast play the role of the guest band at the mansion drug party by night, and a science worshipping Eloi possessed by 3/4 rhythms by day, all headed by the Focus Group leader who lays down sonic laws that break through the corrective systems of timing and keys.”
(see Day #33/365)…

…which tends to make me think of Curse Of The Crimson Altar and this other version that I hold in my cultural wishes and dreams list…

…and partly because of them creating the soundtrack for Berberian Sound Studio and it’s film within a film, The Equestrian Vortex… somewhere in my mind and the universe that inner loop of celluloid also exists. I know it must do…

…just as somewhere there is also a version of A Field In England reimagined by Julian House (see Day #73/365).

And talking of Ms Barbara Steele… although I’m not a huge horror fan, sections of Mark Gatiss A History Of Horror series for the venerable British Broadcasting Corporation have stuck in my head… in particular when he interviews Barbara Steele about Black Sunday; the chap can barely contain himself or his utter excitement at hearing her talk about the phantoms and shock of the film and she fantastically plays up to the part. A fine meeting of your childhood nocturnes…

You can watch that section starting around 20.32 here (careful, careful, this is not for the fainthearted)…

File under: Trails and Influences: Touchstones.
Case #24/52.

Talking about “curious disconnect(s) between what you think/hope a film/piece of culture will be like and what it actually is like…” (see Day #181/365), some of my favourite pieces of work leading up to and through A Year In The Country have been the introduction and end title sequences to particular cathode ray series produced in this island state around the late 1960s to about 1980.

In these days of instant zero and ones access to knowledge about almost all culture, I find that sometimes I don’t want to know about a piece of culture, sometimes I just want to enjoy and soak it up, to travel with it… or sometimes to not actually watch, say, the series itself but just to let it and what it represents exist in my mind only. Accompanying that,  title sequences act as hints or clues to these imaginary, unseen stories…

Sometimes when I do sit down and watch a series, it feels like a separate piece of work to the imaginary version that I think of… or if I saw it when I was younger, this new set of images I’m sat watching bear only a passing resemblance to my stored memories of the series I once watched (along similar lines, a perusal of James Cargill’s considerations of such things is well worth a look-see; more on that at Day #33/365 and here.)

I’m not quite sure why but my interest in such introduction/end title sequences halts at programs recorded around 1980.

Why is that?

In a more easily definable sense its possibly because after around 1980 British fantasy/science fiction television began to try and compete with the slickness and spectacle of cinema blockbusters but it couldn’t and in the process it lost some of its own character or mystery…

But there’s something not quite definable at play here. Compare the title sequence for the mid-1980s Tripods with that for the late 1960s The Owl Service; the first is part of now, of today, of here, the latter is from then, before and elsewhere.

Trying to work out why such things have become such icons or touchstones of something otherly, of hidden layers and meanings would appear to be quite a large part and parcel of the A Year In The Country journeying…

…in a more abstract sense, possibly it’s because that point in time was a tipping point in society, it’s direction, aims, wants and needs; a move towards more individualistic concerns, accompanied by a move economically, politically and socially towards the right.

Programs made up until that point somehow are imbued with an antideluvian quality, they are now broadcasts or remnants from an “other” time; in many ways, that is one of the defining features of what has become known as hauntology – a collective mourning or melancholia for this time before, these lost futures, this reaching for the stars (in a socially progressive sense).

So, programs made before 1980 were produced before the beginning of the end of the sway of a certain kind of progressive modernism/utopianism thought and ideals, replaced by a monotheistic capitalist/scientific belief system…

…and they are both belief systems; the more a system of thought shouts that it is the only way, that it is logical, rational, right, backed by hard evidence, it’s advocates have a particular prescribed clerical uniform etc (robes become white lab coats?) then… well, I expect it’s not.

The march of history is endless and one day I suspect scientific theories based at their core on matter we can’t see, feel, touch, hear or often definitively proven will be considered in the same way that… well, previous eras forces, spirits, gods and malevolences that couldn’t be seen, touched or proven are often considered now; one way of looking at the world but kind of quaint, not true, belonging to a less sophisticated time and so forth.

This is not to be dismissive of any of such things. They arise when needed and are (in some ways) suitable/useful for their times. Scientific and capitalist beliefs are that now. Sometimes it’s just steam engine time, so they happen:

“You know steam engine time? Humans have built little toys, steam engines, for thousands of years. The Greeks had them. Lots of different cultures. The Chinese had them. Lots of different cultures used steam to make little metal things spin around. Nobody ever did anything with it. All of a sudden someone in Europe did one out in a garden shed and the industrial revolution happened. That was steam engine time.” William Gibson here.

One day, it may nolonger be steam engine time.

And so, on this page, a selection of remnants from transmissions before the flood.

Children Of The Stones / Sky / Day Of The Triffids / The Omega Factor / Noah’s Castle / The Owl Service / Quatermass.

Thanks to Mark Fisher for helping bring together threads of thought and a cohering of ideas around the sense of lost futures associated with hauntological thinking in his Ghosts Of My Life book (see Day #163/365).

 

File under: Trails and Influences: Touchstones. Case #24/52.

I was watching The Village Of The Damned and it seemed like the perfect summing up of one of the themes of A Year In The Country: an imagined sense of an underlying unsettledness to country idylls, of something having gone wrong and rotten amongst the hills, valleys and sleepy little high streets of this green and pleasant land.

I think I was rewatching the film as I expect I saw it when I was young and I knew one particular piece of dialogue very well but consciously I couldn’t remember having seen it…

So, the film: a quick precis of the plot; a typical English village suddenly finds all its inhabitants have passed out and anybody who tries to enter the village or its surrounding lands also loses consciousness. The army and authorities are called in to try and find out what’s going on. The villagers awake apparently unharmed and it would appear life can go on more or less as normal in these bucolic surrounds but months later all the child-bearing age women find themselves unexplainedly pregnant. When born, these children all have similar piercing eyes, striking hair, advanced intelligence, powers of mind reading/control and possess a hive mind where if one of them learns something they all do. They are truly the cuckoos in the nest and their powers, possible amorality and drive to survive threatens the villages way of life, lives and possibly mankind’s rule and existence.

It is a film full of iconic imagery, nearly every scene arriving with at least one more: the early collapse into unconsciousness of that most British symbol of pastoral civility, the bobby on a bicycle, via nighttime mobs with burning torches and the children themselves with their emotional detachment, silver hair and glowing eyes.

In many ways it could be seen to be the flipside or even accompaniment to the film version of Quatermass and The Pit: that film is a post second world war consideration of the battle for genetic superiority/purity/control as experienced in the still recent historic conflict. In The Village Of The Damned an amoral, Aryan  race are seeded amongst the population, determined to survive and colonise whatever the cost.

There’s more than a touch of horror fictions previous and future to the film: shades of Frankenstein when the villagers take it upon themselves to form the aforementioned burning torch bearing mob in order to rid themselves of this technologically biologically advanced new life form and later The Omen, with its sense of a cold detached cuckoo in the nest, with telepathic/telekinetic powers beyond our ken or control and who will use those powers to despatch any threat or adversary.

One thing I found interesting was that the scenes set in the local village shop/post office look like a modern-day drama recreation of such things: it’s full of the now simplistic looking boxes and cans of food from that era, that I am so used to seeing in slightly over neat and tidy contemporary period drama productions that they don’t like they were real or ever truly existed.

This is a world that seems to only be populated by perfection diction upper middle-class figures of control and authority or the local pub drinking working class and it’s terribly, terribly white. Which was possibly indicative of how things actually were then but to the modern eye it’s such a set, defined and delineated society…

…and those upper middle classes seem to take it all curiously in their stride and apart from the very occasional emotional outburst (mostly from a female and rarely the educated males) don’t get too het up about the fact that they have essentially given birth to and are being threatened by some unexplained, actually very other biological force. It is generally dealt with the same level of emotional alarm and froideur as if it was merely some socially rather unacceptable gaffe.

Although these cuckoos are essentially a hive mind or colony, their leader or more vocal spokesperson is played brilliantly by Martin Stephens, just the touch of a smile playing about his lips as he stares otherwise without emotion at his mother after sending someone to a fiery departure (he would appear to have been the go to young actor for such quietly unsettling preter-naturalness in the early 1960s as he also appears amongst the reeds and willows of The Innocents: see Day #106/365).

(Above the past tries to face off the future.)

And going back to the analogies with the recent(ish) historical conflict: the way the British or at least the social class with authority, deal with these invaders, these colonising cuckoos, is shown to be very decent in comparison to how the rest of the world might. Reason generally prevails and we are for talking, consideration, study and compromise: elsewhere there may well be brutality and the simple application of military force to deal with the problem.

The film is based on the novel The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham, which I read when living in a tiny country village when really rather young, I suppose not to dissimilar to the setting of the book.

And in common with the book/film, although it was most definitely a country idyll, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere in these pages we were surrounded by symbols of a readiness or warnings against those who might be tempted to trespass on these lands; low flying planes flew overhead regularly, practising avoiding enemy radar, there were abandoned concrete pill box defences in the fields, unexploded military ordinance would be found from time to time and the disposal experts would have to be called in and there was a map in the local information centre which as youngsters we considered near mythological as it apparently showed where aeroplanes had crashed during wartime…

…oh and that’s before we get to the two ancient looking even then brown Bakelite boxes in and around my domestic home life that were nuclear air raid sirens (see the About page for more on that) or why my friend had a working Geiger counter (that also appeared to be from another earlier technological age, all valves and flickering needles) that was used as a toy. Why and wherefore did it come from? I’m not sure…

 

File under: Trails and Influences: Touchstones. Case #24/52.

Well, after a somewhat longer, more theoretically heavy post yesterday, I thought I would take things down a gear or two via a visit to a saggy old, baggy old cloth cat.

When I was young (really quite young) Bagpuss seemed to be playing on television on a more or less permanent loop. I used to sit there with bated breath, hoping it was the one about the chocolate biscuit factory (I can still hear the “Breadcrumbs and butterbeans” ingredients cry of the mice as I type).

In case you should not know, Bagpuss was an animated British television series from 1974 that featured the goings on of a set of normally inanimate toy creatures in a shop for ‘found things’, who come to life when the shop’s owner, a young girl called Emily, brings in a new object and they debate and explore what the new thing can possibly be.

It’s something of a classic and has a sweetness, uniqueness and gentle melancholia even that I don’t think has ever been repeated or equalled. It was made by Peter Firmin and Oliver Postgate, who also created such other exemplary and distinct work as softly psychedelic and just a touch pop-art space age animation The Clangers and Ivor The Engine, which features dragons who instigate a search for the pre-decimalisation coinage that they need for the gas meter in the dormant volcano where they live.

Theirs was work that didn’t feel like it had been created as part of an assembly line, targeted at a cultural marketplace, it was more personal and precious feeling and feels nearer to examples of some kind of folk art.

Which makes it somewhat appropriate that the soundtrack albums to The Clangers and Ivor The Engine have been put out by Jonny Trunk’s Trunk Records, as I would concur with Julian House of Ghost Box Records when he said that rather than being an archivist record label proprietor “Jonny’s more like a folk art scholar.”

He goes on to say “That vision of a lost Britain that Ghost Box draws its energy from is hugely influenced by Trunk’s commitment to the neglected artists of post war UK culture”…

…that sense of a lost Britain is something that I could link to Bagpuss as in many way it is the lost, arcadian, edenic, idyllic and idealised vision of a golden age of England incarnate. A sleepy village world full of shops full of discarded nick nacks, eccentrics, a sense of never-ending lazy afternoons, gentle exploration and industriousness, all sepia and vintage vignette tinged.

And this is a world curiously unsullied by the dirt, grime and grasping of commerce; the shop where Bagpuss and his compatriots lives doesn’t sell anything, everything in the window is just a collection of things that people had lost.

It was only a couple of years ago when I was heading towards A Year In The Country that I listened to some of the music from Bagpuss again, possibly for the first time since those young years.

I was surprised to hear that some of it was particularly accomplished folk music. I think to my young ears it had just been music (and since hearing it again, part of me also wandered if somewhere along the line seeing this program and its accompanying music, soaking in the pleasant escape of its way of life might have been one of the roots that grew amongst a fair few others to become some of the culture I’m wandering amongst in A Year In The Country. Hmmm, scratches beard and ponders).

Anyway, delving further I discovered there was a surprisingly cultural/political connection to the music:

Some of the voices and all the music in Bagpuss was played and in part written by Sandra Kerr and John Faulkner, who via Rob Young’s Electric Eden book I discovered had been former alumni/apprentices with Ewan Maccoll and Peggy Seeger’s The Critics Group (a kind of “master class” for young singers performing traditional songs or who were writing songs using traditional song/folk structures).

Maccoll was a left-wing folk musician, activist and poet. who was married to fellow folk singer and activist Peggy Seeger, who was once-upon-a-time blacklisted by the American government for what they considered politically unsafe travel to various communist countries. Maccoll was barred from travelling to the US with his wife due to his political views.

By gosh and balderdash. The things and people that we allow our children to be exposed (indirectly) to. Bolsheviks, lefties and trouble makers the lot of them.

And there was me just thinking of Bagpuss as a sweet, hazy television program from my childhood.

Well, actually, that’s precisely what it was.

Curiously, a little more delving and I discovered that Sandra Kerr went on to lecture in folk music and taught future generations of folk musicians including The Unthanks and Emily Portman…

Anyway, back to the music from Bagpuss. I think my favourite is still The Miller’s Song. You can view its gentle, folkloric, snapshot of agricultural work, life, seasons and produce here (featuring  a curiously out-of-place and anachronistic modern combine harvester).

Read about a live performance of the Bagpuss music by Sandra Kerr and John Faulkner here and maybe, if like me you have a fondness from younger years for a certain saggy old cloth cat, mildly rue missing it.

The full text of the article on Ghost Box Records that the Julian House quote is taken from can be found via Mr Simon Reynolds here.

The Clangers and Ivor The Engine soundtracks are available via Trunk Records here and here.

 

File under: Trails and Influences: Touchstones.
Case #23/52.

Now, I’ve been waiting for this particular book to arrive for a good year or two… and yesterday it did indeed do that.

One of the quotes on the back, from Bob Stanley, says “A must read for modernists, and for anyone who misses the future. This is the first book to really make sense of the fog of ideas that have been tagged as “hauntology”“.

And in but the first chapter, The Slow Cancellation Of The Future, it does start to de-fog those ideas. Thoughts and theories that I had but which I hadn’t quite been able to put all the jigsaw pieces together suddenly started to connect and form the picture on the front of the box.

In fact, there are enough ideas, clarification and de-fogging in those 27 or so pages to fill a book or two.

One of those “I don’t want to put this down” and looking forward to getting up in the morning so that you can read some more publications.

So, where to start? Well, at the beginning I think… and with a quote or two from that most odd television series, which it would be even if it hadn’t been made for mainstream transmission, Sapphire and Steel…

“There’s no time here, not any more… This is the trap, it’s nowhere and it’s forever… Temporal anomalies are triggered by human beings’ predilection for the mixing of artefacts from different eras.”

Which is a somewhat apposite quote for the cultural times we live in and also quite possibly hauntology as a cultural idea and project.

“In conditions of digital recall, loss itself is lost… It is no longer necessary to physically move in order to access the whole history of culture…”

“ It was through the mutations of popular music that many of us who grew up in the 1960s, 70s and 80s learned to measure the passage of cultural time…

“…it doesn’t feel as if the 21st century has started yet. We remain trapped in the 20th century… in 1981, the 1960s seemed much further away than they do today… cultural time has folded back on itself, and the impression of linear development has given way to a strange simultaneity…

Or to semi-quote William Gibson, music and culture have become atemporal.

“Why did the arrival of neoliberal, post-Fordist capitalism lead to a culture of retrospection and pastiche?… Could it be that neoliberal capitalism’s destruction of solidarity and security brought about a compensatory hungering for the well-established and familiar?

“…the intensity and precariousness of late capitalist work culture leaves people in a state where they are simultaneously exhausted and overstimulated…

“Despite all it’s rhetoric of novelty and innovation, neoliberal capitalism has gradually but systematically deprived artists of the resources necessary to produce the new… If there’s one factor above all else which contributes to cultural conservatism, it is the vast inflation in the cost of rent and mortgages…”

Phew, about time somebody actually properly talked about this. He goes on to say how it was no surprise that in the late 1970s/early 1980s there was a huge upsurge in creative innovation in New York and that this happened at a time when rents were cheap and accessible.

Although I don’t know Mark Fisher’s personal financial situation (and that’s his right and choice to keep that private), I find it interesting that a book/set of thoughts as well-developed as The Ghosts Of My Life has been penned by somebody who, according to the short biography at the front, is employed in academic institutions.

They could be seen as one of the last bastions where the resources for new thought, dreaming and exploration hasn’t been as restricted. Unfortunately, that space to dream and explore is being paid for in part by the future debts of some of its participants rather than being factored in/acknowledged/respected and dare I say it, funded, as part of societies needs.

 

 

 

Curiously, when you think about it, all this space for cultural expression via new digital forms has at the same time often brought about a big reduction in and/or few viable business models that underpin those forms for the creators of the content and culture that make them interesting and viable; plenty of cash for those who design/produce/market etc the physical devices and delivery systems, pin money for those who fill and supply them.

The monetary side of how people create cultural work and also fill the cupboards and keep the lights on isn’t something that’s generally considered or discussed in interviews… it’s like some dirty little secret but without the correct underpinning it’s hard for the work to happen and/or for the whole process to be socially inclusive.

(That inclusion of people from less financially cushioned backgrounds is something which Mark Fisher also touches on in terms of its degradation and decay in recent decades in this first chapter… well I was saying there are enough ideas in this one chapter to fill a book or two… as an illustration of that I think this Day/post about it contains the most words of any post so far in this A Year In The Country journey ).

“Producing the new depends upon certain kinds of withdrawal from, for instance, sociality as much as from pre-existing cultural forms but the currently dominant form of socially networked cyberspace, with its endless opportunities for micro-contact… has made withdrawal more difficult than ever before… in recent years, everyday life has sped up but culture has slowed down…”

Bleep bleep bleep (x near infinity).

“Why hauntology?… When it was applied to music culture – in my own writing and in that of other critics such as Simon Reynolds and Joseph Stannard – hauntology first of all named a confluence of artists. The word confluence is crucial here. For these artists – William Bansinski, The Ghost Box label, The Caretaker, Burial, Mordant Music, Philip Jeck, amongst others – had converged on a certain terrain without actually influencing one another. What they shared was not a sound so much as a sensibility, an existential orientation…

Which I think is something I was trying to root out and get out in my previous post (see Day #162/365); what has been labelled hauntology isn’t a strictly defined thing but those who have been associated with it do share an interconnected but disparate vision or interests. Sometimes there’s something in the air culturally that people somehow connect with at the same time even though they have not physically or consciously been aware of what the others are doing along similar lines (another example from a different culture was Madness and The Specials both coming to a kind of mutated version of ska music and culture at similar times in the late 1970s before they met and worked together).

“The artists that came to be labelled hauntological were suffused with an overwhelming melancholy… As to the deeper cause of this melancholia, we need look no further than the title of Leyland Kirby’s album: Sadly, The Future Is No longer What It Was. In hauntological music there is an implicit acknowledgement that the hopes created by postwar electronica or by the euphoric dance music of the 1990s have evaporated – not only has the future not arrived, it no longer seems possible. Yet at the same time, the music constitutes a refusal to give up on the desire for the future. This refusal gives the melancholia a political dimension, because it amounts to a failure to accommodate to the closed horizons of capitalist realism…

“Haunting… can be construed as a failed mourning. It is about refusing to give up the ghost or… the refusal of the ghost to give up on us. The spectre will not allow us to settle into/for the mediocre satisfactions one can glean in a world governed by capitalist realism…

“What has vanished is a tendency, a virtual trajectory. One name for this is popular modernism… popular culture definitively established that it did not have to be populist….

“The kind of melancholia I’m talking about… consists not in giving up on desire but in refusing to yield. It consists… in a refusal to adjust to what current conditions call ‘reality’ – even if the cost of that refusal is that you feel like an outcast in your own time…”

These passages are part of the book’s expression of anger at the ways things have become in society and culture, the current discarding of popular modernism and it’s sense of a progressive, inclusive direction in society and how in part hauntology may be a response or resistance to that.

The anger isn’t presented in a hectoring form, rather as reasoned and thought-provoking arguments/observations, accompanying which the academic/theoretical considerations of the book are presented in an accessible, inclusive manner and language.

“Music culture was central to the projection of the futures which have been lost. The term music culture is crucial here, because it is the culture constellated around music (fashion, discourse, cover art) that has been as important as the music itself in conjuring seductively unfamiliar worlds.”

In many ways much of the culture around hauntology has attempted to recapture a holistic form of culture, to create those “seductively unfamiliar worlds”. The visual aesthetics and physical objects that contain and present some of the associated music has come to be of great importance, of equal if not sometimes more so than the music it contains.

 

 

 

Curiously in this case those “unfamiliar worlds” have often been created by reinterpreting and reusing the familiar from times gone by, whether visually or in terms of sounds. You could say they are haunted by spectres of the past (which kind of neatly brings me back to the origin of the word hauntology).

I expect I may well be revisiting the pages and thought of Ghost Of My Life somewhere and sometime around these parts…

Visit Ghosts Of My Life in the ether here. Read an extended extract from the first chapter here. Read more digital missives and considerations from Mark Fisher here. Visit Laura Oldfield Ford (who illustrates the book) and her Savage Messiah work here.

File under: Trails and Influences: Touchstones. Case #22/52.

Renowned designer Saul Bass (think The Man With The Golden Arm if you’re wandering who that is) only made one film: Phase IV.

Something of a favourite around A Year In The Country. If I was only going to get to make one film then I would hope it would equal this.

In some ways it’s a film which could be said to fit with other ecological disturbance films of the 1970s (No Blade Of Grass, Soylent Green, Silent Running etc) but this is a much stranger piece of culture and I expect Paramount Pictures were a little suprised when they saw what they had financed.

Essentially two scientists and one young lady they rescue are held hostage in a desert research facility by ants who seem to have gained some form of collective consciousness and higher intelligence.

In some ways it could be seen as an alternative mirror view of the rising of the apes in other films…

Now that could easily result in a man vs beast horror exploitation film (and some of the posters attempt to show it as that) but this isn’t that story. It’s a much stiller, more contemplative film which has something else, something otherly running under it’s surface, which more or less literally explodes in a psychedelic coming of age sequence at the end…

Well… sort of.

I say sort of because there was a full flight-into-and-through-the-new-world fantasy sequence filmed as an ending but it wasn’t used for the general release and it has only fairly recently been shown to the wider public via a limited cinematic outing and has never been officially released for home viewing.

The film that most people have seen ends with a taste of this new world but it’s but a brief taste.

I can understand the logic of film studio executives thinking they wanted to try and salvage something a little more normal from the film they’d been presented with but it was too late really and to have cut this quite frankly fantastic sequence feels like a crime against culture.

Fortunately, due to the magic of the ether, it can at least be seen, though in a degraded quality version. View that here. View the trailer of the film here.

I have to say that this is quite a beautiful and beautifully shot film. A strange beauty but beauty nonetheless. It’s not all 1970s grim and grime and there is some kind of utopian undercurrent to what occurs.

And it’s one of those films that though not all that well known (and the semi-lost ending hardly at all), feels as though somehow or other it has reverberated through and influenced culture since it’s inception: some of it’s themes I can recognise in much later big budget Hollywood science fiction films and I can connect it’s very particular take on psychedelia to the videos made for Broadcast and The Focus Group (see Day #33/365).

Along such lines… It’s not a long hop, step and jump from the atmosphere and lost ending visuals of Phase IV to Beyond The Black Rainbow and it’s Arboria Institute. Not always a pleasant film but an astonishing, hypnotic dream of one; or a Reagan Era fever dream to quote it’s author…

Or even from there and before to Under The Skin and it’s dream like processing sequences…

File under: Trails and Influences:
Touchstones. Case #21/52.

I think I first came across this song a few years ago when I was first properly discovering and exploring the fringes of folk music after hearing the Gather In The Mushrooms compilation and it’s on and off haunted me since.

I’ve just set it to play and every hair is stood on end.

It’s on the Ladies From The Canyon compilation and is just one of two songs that Jennie Pearl, then 15, ever wrote and recorded at the time. Many years later when she was asked why she had stopped writing songs she said “I had never heard anyone other than family members say anything good about any of them” which is just heartbreaking. It makes me wonder what might have been or arrived later if she’d kept recording or if just one person outside of her family had said “That’s really good”.

Because it is. It’s really good. I know that sounds like a simplistic thing to say but it’s just what I consider to be the case. It’s a beautiful, simple and yes haunting song, one which makes me think it should be accompanying a subtly dark, quietly terrifying tale of cinematic alienation in the 1970s.

Listen to it here and here.

There’s a lovely, sweet blog post about somebody who is/was Jennie Pearl’s neighbour and accidentally discovered about her singing/this CD via Jennie’s husband that really conveys a sense of genuine excitement and discovery at who is living next door to him and the first time he heard the song. You can read that here.

You can read the story of the reporter who tracked her down here.

Jennie Pearl’s two recorded songs were originally released on the Peoria Folk Anthology Volume Three, which was initiated by Chuck Perrin. Read about him and that album here and here.

The Ladies From The Canyon compilation is an album of lost and/or often overlooked American female folk musicians, released by Wayfaring Strangers: “Each of these Wayfaring Strangers walk in the handmade aesthetic of lyrics scribbled into faded denim, of delicate movements captured and released”. Read more here. I discovered it in amongst the racks, bricks and mortar of that now rare of creatures, the physical record shop. It was this one here.

There seems to be something of a theme of “lost ladies of folk” in culture, whether it be the now more well-known such as Vashti Bunyan and Linda Perhacs or Gather In The Mushroom travellers Shelagh Macdonald and Judy Dyble. In part their stories and sometimes disappearances from music add more than a touch of interest and back story to their music but also in the cases of Maybe In Another Year, Morning Way by Judy Dyble/Trader Horne or Shelagh Macdonald’s Liz’s Song these are fine pieces of music in themselves, which would stand up with or without their lost and found stories.

(Photographs of Judy Dyble via Psychedelic Folkloristic. Always good to mention those particular ether fields. You can wander towards them at A Year In The Country at Day #36/365).

The Gather In The Mushrooms compilation was a very early starting point when I was heading on my way towards A Year In The Country. It is subtitled The British Acid Folk Underground 1968-1974 and is a fine collection of such things. Tip of the hat to Bob Stanley who put it together. You can read more about it at Day #3/365.

 

File under: Trails and Influences:
Touchstones. Case #20/52.

This record,  with music by David Cain and “poetry” by Ronald Dunan, is one of those shake your head and be pleasantly slightly stunned moments in culture.

This was music for “designed to stimulate dramatic dance, movement, mime and speech”. It was part of series of radio broadcasts by BBC Radio For Schools called “Drama Workshop”, which apparently was a a creative drama programme for children in their first and second years of secondary school.

Well, I guess then it was at least aimed at 11-12 year old. Still rather odd and surreal but probably not quite as nightmare inducing as if it was say for 5-8 year olds.

Why do I say that? Well, to a minimal Radiophonic musical backing (or is it a suite of Ghost Box Records recordings that fell back through time?*), here are a selection of the lyrics:

“Like severed hands, the wet leaves lie flat on the deserted avenue. Houses like skulls stare through uncurtained windows. A woman dressed like a furled umbrella, with a zip fastener on her mouth steps out of number 53 to post a letter. Her gloved hand hesitates at the box. Then knowing there will be no reply, she tears it up and throws it in the gutter. And autumn with it’s pheasants tail consoles her with crysanthemums.”

Pardon? That would be a touch odd for a later 60s psychedelic album or performance piece, let alone something aimed at schools.

Or…

“An empress with an endless train walks the broad valley, she holds no sceptre, wears no crown, moving so proudly. White swans and modest little boats follow her slowly, thus the royal cortege goes down to the indifferent sea. Her way is lonely.”

Her way is lonely? Why is her way lonely? These things can prey on a young mind.

(A touch of movement and mime; a photograph on the cover of the album).

I think I would probably file it alongside the likes of the TV series of Alan Garner’s The Owl Service as things which are possibly a little to otherly for their intended young audience (though that’s in large part why they have gained cult appeal over the years): “I am the wolf in every mind”? Blimey.

The albums songs (and I use that word fairly loosely) are divided into twelve months and four seaons but I only ever seem to properly listen to July and October on the album. I’m not quite sure why but I will find myself humming the beep like refrains to those two songs as I wander along and it’s always those that I return to.

The original version of the album, if you should be able to find one, is likely to cost you a fair few pennies. Fortunately it has been re-released by Jonny Trunk. Here’s him on the album:

“This album is a “cult” classic in many ways. Always a little devil to find, I first posted it up on the Recommendations pages in 2003. This was one of three copies I’d found with Martin Green at a Tonbridge Wells record fayre in the late 1990s. Several people in my small circle of peculiar musical chums also came across it, and by the mid naughties it was coming across as a major influence on retro futurism and the new fangled scene they named hauntology. This comes as no surprise as the album has several layers and levels to it; it is weird, spooky. unsettling, very British, has an unusual whiff of childhood to some, it comes scattered with pregnant language and is full of unexpected metaphors, pagan oddness, folk cadences and insane noises. Does it get any better? Considering this was an LP made for children’s education and improvised dance, I think not.”

Peruse the album and read an interview with David Cain by Julian House of Ghost Box Records/Focus Group at Trunk Records here.

Listen to July here and October here.

In a way it could be seen as part of mini-genre of school music related oddness. That would probably take in a couple of other Trunk Records releases (the Classroom Projects compilation and Carl Orff & Gunild Keetman’s Music For Children/Schulwerk) and probably the granddaddy of all such things The Langley Schools Music Project Innocence & Despair (a sixty strong group of Canadian schoolchildren reinterpret David Bowie, The Carpenters, Brian Wilson and more).

(As an aside, whenever I hear the version of Space Oddity from The Langley Schools Music Project I’m always transported back to the English seaside, in particular a studio flat I shared, lived and worked in for a brief year or so: it was on a compilation that somebody had done for the gal I was living with… the flat was all corridor, long, thin and tall and it would drift up from the decades out of the room where she worked.)

In many ways such school albums/the music contained in them could be seen to genuinely be folk music, in the sense of being music from the people, by the people, generally unmediated by outside concerns (or if they were, they seem to have sidestepped them to leave precious unfettered musical snapshots).

 

*Adding to that sense is the aforementioned interview between Julian House and David Cain, that the sleeve notes for the re-release were written by sometimes Ghost Box traveller Jon Brooks (The Advisory Circle). Or indeed the post on the album’s re-release at the Belbury Parish magazine, where Jim Jupp says:

“Its an album that’s very much part of the DNA of Ghost Box; the perfect example of the spooked educational media we reverence and reference so often.”

View more here.

 

File under: Trails and Influences: Touchstones. Case #19/52.

I think I’ve possibly been putting off writing about this album as, well, it’s such a precious thing to me and I’m just not quite sure what I’m going to write about it. So, here goes…

I’ve just put the album on and it’s like saying hello once more to a very welcome old friend. It’s the very definition of bucolic and is an album which summates England’s pastoral, edenic dreams…

I first listened to music from this album late one hot, hazy, balmy summer night and I was just transfixed and transported. Appropriately I think one of the first songs I listened to was It’s Too Hot To Sleep, which is a gentle lullaby of a song, all lilting and the soft hoots of owls; which in a way could describe much of the album.

The title says so much about being English, some of our needs and wants, the small spot of greenery which accompanies our domestic castles in which, well, we can hopefully feel secure.

I think I came across the album via Rob Young’s Electric Eden book (well, I’ve not mentioned it for a while, so it’s probably due for one). It features in probably one of my favourite sections of the book: The final Poly Albion gathering of writing, in the chapter Towards The Unknown Region, wherein he considers more the outerlying areas of the music and culture which has sprung forth from secret gardens, the more hauntological side of things, the spectres of the land in cathode ray transmissions, Ghost Box Records and the like.

In this section when describing the music in the album he begins by saying that it “doesn’t go anywhere”, in I think an attempt to show the albums ambient, non formal song structure. It’s an interesting choice of phrase as it also suggests how as a nation we sometimes hanker after these unchanged, unending idylls where we can lock the gates, rest, slumber and dream, with the rambunctious march of progress safely held at bay even if just for a moment.

Although the album largely a suite of music which invokes such an Albionic Arcadia, conjuring up lives spent in timeless English villages, it’s not merely a chocolate box or twee reverie; there’s a sense that there is a hidden reverse to that dream, that the nightmare may well intrude on that eden… and that comes to pass as The Summer Of Our Dreams gives way to When The Fields Were On Fire, which is a darkly ambient piece of quietly unsettling pastoralism, which though the album was originally released in 1983 wouldn’t be a surprise to find on a more contemporary Ghost Box Records release or maybe nestling away in an outtake from Coil’s Horse Rotorvator.

It possibly wanders some of the same fields as the outer regions of an alternative albion which could be found in say The Wickerman or some psych/acid folk music but here while the sense of an idyllic rural eden has a otherly quality it’s not overt; more a kind of wistful nostalgia or reverie, even where it is most present on say When The Fields Were On Fire.

The music? How to describe it? It’s an ambient mostly instrumental work but very melodic, the main instruments seem to be piano and a touch of woodwind instruments but the sense is largely one of music which has been painted and layered rather than played and made; rurally collected field recordings of the English countryside being a large part of the pigments and paint it uses.

Ms Astley, all I can say is I salute you for this piece of work.

The album is out of print. It can be found second-hand, although you may well pay a pretty penny for a CD copy.

Listen to It’s Too Hot To Sleep here and When The Fields Were On Fire here.

Visit Virginia Astley in the electronic ether here. Have a trawl for the album in physical form here.

And once again: Rob Young’s Electric Eden here.

As a final note, below is the text from Electric Eden on From Gardens Where We Feel Secure; “Furtive music hiding in the shrubbery” is a good concise way of describing the albums subtle pastoral otherlyness.

 

File under:
Trails and Influences: Touchstones.
Case #18/52.

When I was connecting the dots between all things more leftfield folk music, one particularly informative book was Jeanette Leach’s Seasons They Change, a book which to quote the back cover “tells the story of the birth, death, and resurrection of acid and psychedelic folk.”

…which it does indeed do, dropping a trail of breadcrumbs largely chronologically through that particular story.

There are only really a tiny handful of books on such or interconnected things (the A Year In The Country friendly ones would probably be Seasons They Change, Rob Young’s Electric Eden, Shindig magazines Witches Hats and Painted Chariots and the 1970s The Electric Muse: The Story Of Folk Into Rock). Although a wander through the digital ether can help to inform and make connections, there’s something about a well put together book that codifies and coheres a story…

From what I remember I made a particular trip to buy it from an actual bookshop (a rarity nowadays in the land) and with the sun shining down sat next to a pond to begin quite a journey… which I seem to recall ended with an almost palpitatory experience of sitting with headphones scan-listening to just about every band, record and song that was mentioned as I came across it in the book.

…and it was something of a fine education which did indeed help me to connect up the aforementioned dots between everything from 1960s psychedelic folk to the 2000s arrival of freak folk via Current 93 and…

…well, the world of privately pressed folk music.

In these days when it’s a relatively easy task to record and then put out into the world creative work via everything from music hosting sites to print on demand everything, it’s almost hard to imagine the dedication and commitment that was once required to do such things; the expense, expertise and access to equipment which was required to privately press vinyl records provided a heavy-handed filtering system…

But some made it through and a handful of the results have become rarefied, treasured artifacts, totems and tokens of semi-hidden and once almost lost culture.

In Seasons They Change the chapter Sanctuary Stone is dedicated to such things. Some of those featured I first stumbled across via one of the early touchstones of A Year In The Country: the compilation Early Morning Hush (Notes From The Folk Underground 1969-76) but at the time I never got to read the sleevenotes and I didn’t look up any information on the songs or those who recorded them, possibly I was just enjoying letting my wander amongst this world of a folk music that was a far sweeter and stranger set of concoctions than anything that I had come across under the label of folk before…

So, who are we talking about? Well, on the Early Morning Hush album it would be Midwinter, the connected Stone Angel and Shide And Acorn. Further afield I would probably look to Oberon and Caedmon (whose Sea Song I didn’t consciously know that I had listened to it before but when I first heard it on vinyl it was like discovering a long-lost friend that I thought I never knew).

Most of those mentioned in the paragraph above are covered in Seasons They Change, alongside their privately pressed counterparts from over the seas…

…and some of the songs which were put out into the world through personal endeavour now sound like folk which should have bothered the pop charts at the time, in particular the epic folk-pop of The Sea, Midwinter’s The Skater, Shide And Acorn’s Eleanor’s Song and Oberon’s Nottanum Town.

So, if you should want to wander down the pathways of the undergrowths of folk music and map the crisscrossing strands that you come across, well, look no further than Seasons They Change. Ms Leech, a tip of the hat to you.

Early Morning Hush compiled by author/St Etienne-r/musical archiver Bob Stanley can be perused here. Jeanette Leech can be found ornithologically here, archivally here, Seasons They Change here and a year of book wandering here. The story of Stone Angel here.

Read more about Early Morning Hush and it’s travelling companion from earlier days of A Year In The Country here.

 

PS Due to their scarcity and rarity, most of the original vinyl versions of the records mentioned above are well beyond the humble purse strings of A Year In The Country… so, this English Garden reissue of Caedmon’s album is the closest to such things that is likely to be visited around these parts.

 

 

 

File under:
Trails and Influences: Touchstones.
Case #18/52.

Now, I know little about Sproatly Smith. It’s another case where I don’t really want or need to, the music they create exists in a land unto itself for me and reading all kinds of interviews and the like may well just disturb such things… sometimes you need to tread gently.

I think looking back when I came across some of their songs I started to realise that I was on the right track towards… well, towards something that would become A Year In The Country.

If I had to describe the music they create I would probably say, well, something along the lines of “spiralling pastoral acid folklore tinged music” (is this a new genre name?) and they have been described by fRoots magazine as “The mystery flagship band of the new wave of weirdlore”…

For a while there didn’t seem to be any photos of them at all wandering around the ether. Now there are a few. I still don’t know all that much about them but I don’t really mind…

(It’s curious how things have gone from a time in my youth where I could wait and hope for months or longer to see one photograph of a band/artist etc or a tiny article in the print media, maybe never seeing any at all to a time when I sometimes enjoy and hanker scarcity, obscurity and knowing little about such things in amongst the easy deluge of information which abounds in modern times… be careful what you wish for and all that…).

In terms of how their music has wandering out into the world… Some of their albums have been put out in hand finished/sewn limited editions by Reverb Worship. Some by the now sadly departed Folk Police Recordings. The most recent has been put out by themselves via good old ferrous tape and its digital accompaniment…

…and there was a split 7″ with The Woodbine & Ivy band on Static Caravan where they both covered Gently Johnny in a particularly fine manner (something I’ve briefly mentioned before and may do again).

On the Minstrels Grave album, I seem to have often revisited two songs in particular: Blackthorn Winter which seems to manage to be shimmeringly stark, dark and beautiful all at once. I’m a-listening to it as I type and my hair is stood on end… and The Blue Flame, which is gentler but still… well, I don’t know if I have come across the music of any other group of musicians while on my journey towards and through A Year In The Country which quietly builds into a vision of pastoral otherlyness to such a degree.

Or to quote myself quoting The Gaping Silence their songs can be “like something from the Wicker Man, if the Wicker Man had been a 1960s children’s TV series about time travel” (see Day #85/365: Weirdlore: Notes From The Folk Underground and legendary lost focal points…).

Some of Sproatly Smith’s homes in the ether: here, here and here. At Folk Police Recordings here. On vinyl platters at Static Caravan here. Reverb Worship here.  

 

PS As a final point, I’ve just noticed that one of the songs on the album is a version of O Willow Waly, as heard in the film The Innocents. It’s strange how you can listen to/look at something so many times before your mind makes connections. Now, that is a song which I no doubt shall be considering at some point in the future around about these parts…

 

File under:
Trails and Influences:
Touchstones. Case #17/52.

Now, I don’t know all that much about Novemthree and it’s one of those times where I’m not sure I want to as for me this song seems to be something of a pinnacle of all things gently pastoral and yet quietly unsettling in folk music and I seem to want to leave it  undisturbed*.

The song was released as part of a hand assembled split album with Arrowwood: You can listen to/purchase the song here or via Little Somebody here. The song was also featured on the John Barleycorn Reborn: Rebirth compilation release by Cold Spring.

 

*As an aside, If you wander along the pathways that lead from novemthree you will soon wander into the meadows and territories of what could be called pagan folk, heathen folk, dark folk, wicca folk, doom folk, gloom folk and the like… tread gently…

File under:
Trails and Influences:
Touchstones. Case #16/52.

Once upon a time there was an event called Weirdlore, which could well in future years have come to be known and constantly referred to as a focal point for a new wave of what could be called acid, psych or underground folk… or possibly weirdlore.

Unfortunately said event was cancelled. Apparently there was an awful lot of enthusiasm for it but this hadn’t translated into the necessary parting with of lucre…

However, there was still to be a document of this now never happened event, which was the Weirdlore compilation released by Folk Police Recordings (who were responsible for one of my favourite corners of the electronic ether, which also sadly is nolonger with us).

The album has rather fine artwork by Owl Service compatriot/Straw Bear Band gent/Rif Mountain-er Dom Cooper, which reinterprets traditional folkloric imagery and iconography in a contemporary manner…

The album is a snapshot of things musically, well, Weirdloric and includes tracks by Telling The Bees, Emily Portman, Rapunzel & Sedayne, another sometime Owl Service-r Nancy Wallace, Pamela Wyn Shannon, Katie Rose, The False Beards, Foxpockets, Boxcar Aldous Huxley, the aforementioned Straw Bear Band, Starless And Black Bible, Alasdair Roberts, Corncrow, Ros Brady, The Witches With Kate Denny, Harp And A Monkey, Wyrdstone…

…and I think the standout track for me is Sproatly Smith’s version of Rosebud In June, which I think if I had to save my A Year In The Country Desert Island Discs from the waves, may well be scooped up for nights under the stars.

It is a song which has been described by The Gaping Silence as being “like something from the Wicker Man, if the Wicker Man had been a 1960s children’s TV series about time travel”… which as a quote has always stuck in my mind and I think sums it up really rather well and so I shall say no more.

The album is also well worth a peruse (and purchase?) for the accompanying text by Ian Anderson, of fRoots magazine, written with Weirdlore still a month away and still to be a future point in history. In it he rather presciently describes the album as “celebrating a day which has yet to happen and a genre that quite conceivably doesn’t exist.”

Within the album’s packaging there is also an extended piece by Jeanette Leech (author of Seasons They Change: The Story Of Acid and Psychedelic Folk) where she discusses the use of genre names, how such music as that which is featured in Weirdlore came to be and the brief shining of media spotlights on its and associated practitioners:

“When light is not on a garden, many plants will wither. But others won’t. They will grow in crazy, warped, hardy new strains. It’s time to feed from the soil instead of the sunlight.”

I think that last sentence is one of the ones which has haunted and lodged in my psyche the most when I’ve been working towards, on and thinking about A Year In The Country.

The electronic ether wisps of Weirdlore here. The electronic ether wisps of Folk Police Recordings here and an introduction to the album from them here. Dom Cooper here. Rif Mountain here. Seasons They Change by Jeanette Leech here.

The Wickerman soundtrack as a 1960s children’s TV series about time travel via Sproatly Smith here, here and listen to or even purchase the soundtrack itself here.

File under:
Trails and Influences: Touchstones. Case #15/52.

Well, as I seem to fairly often begin with; while we’re talking about industrial objects from other years in the English countryside (see Day #76/365: Josh Kemp Smith – Illuminating Forgotten Heritage)…

This was one of the first albums I bought when I was working towards A Year In The Country. It is undoubtedly an experimental piece of work but it’s one with a folk pop sensibility and the songs quietly nest in your mind…

It has been described as “dark gothic minimal folk” and Astrud Steehouder who created it lists her influences as “bewildering post nuclear landscapes, bleak fields, forests, thunderstorms and archaic industrial objects in the middle of nowhere”, which makes it sound like the album will be quite a heavy, dark thing but though it has elements of the night, it’s not just that…

I tend to think of it as having been recording in some semi-lost wooden cottage I don’t know quite where or when and the noises and creaks of it’s habitat seem to have seeped in and become part of the very fabric of the music.

As the songs begin it feels like opening the shutters to the sun in that lost home; shimmering and golden but also quietly fractured and unsettling, a view of a landscape and world all of it’s own…. there is a dreamlike, subtley surreal quality to the music and I have brought it out over and over again in the months and now years since it arrived in an attempt to capture something which isn’t quite captureable about it.

Quite simply, I think it’s a lovely, accomplished piece of work.

You can’t ask for more than that.

Paper Dollhouses aeries can be found here and here and in more experimental form with now fellow co-Paper Dollhouse companion Nina Bosnic via Folklore Tapes Here.

The album was release by Bird records, the offshoot of Finders Keepers Records. There’s a lovely evocative write-up about the album at Finders Keepers Records here.

The trailer to Paperhouse, the sometimes clunky but intriguing rurally set 1988 film of childhood dreams and nightmares, from which in part Paper Dollhouse take their name can be seen here. It’s 1972 but curiously anachronistically seeming still monochromatic earlier incarnation Escape Into Night can be found here.

 

File under:
Trails and Influences: Touchstones. Case #14/52.

The song Geography from Belbury Polys The Belbury Tales  album is one of the ones which has stuck in my mind the most when working towards/on A Year In The Country.

I think the night I first heard it was also the night when I originally wrote what was to become much of the text on the About page of A Year In The Country, so I think it helped inspire, spark and put textual form to something… so something of a touchstone/key record indeed.

The song (and as I’ve said before in previous posts, I use that phrase loosely here) starts with the phrase “The Geography of peace” and then wanders off into… well, how to describe it; as a piece of music it is a beautiful, haunting form of looped folk electronica.

I don’t know where the main vocals come from and I don’t think I want to as it has a lost treasure feel to it. I assume that they’re formed from a sample found and reused but whatever and wherever they’re from they’re quite lovely.

The album is rather nicely put together/packaged: there’s a swirling, disorienting loop of fiction by Electric Eden author Rob Young and appropriately swirling, disorienting artwork by Julian House (see Day #59/365 at A Year In The Country).

Also, there are little touches to the album that make all the difference, such as the way different paper stocks are used in the sleeve cover and interior pages, with the inner pages have a flecked, texture feel to them.

As is often the way with Ghost Box, there is a whole otherly world presented and created here; in this case it’s the re-imagined pastoral but quietly discomforting bucolic village pleasures of a parallel plot of England from who knows quite where and when. There is something not quite so in this parish but whatever it is that’s occurring is happening just out of sight, flickering away in the corners of your eyes.

Or as the poster for the album says:

“Belbury Poly spin some tall tales across a concept album in the tradition of English prog rock. Along the way they take in medievalism, the supernatural, childhood, the re-invention of the past, initiation and pilgrimage (both spiritual and physical).”

Or indeed a review at the time:

“Jim Jupp’s past-haunted electronic eccentrics is a beautiful, eerie thing – a piped gateway to false memories of a time when the benevolent nation state commissioned young men to re-score English folk songs with government issue analogue synthesisers.” (from Mojo Magazine).

(Jim Jupp is Ghost Box Records head co-coordinator/co-conspirator.)

Listen to Geography here. Purchase and peruse it here.

File under:
Trails and Influences: Touchstones. Case #13/52.

Right, in the interests of textual restraint and because this is a film that I think tells it’s story itself, I’m just going to write one sentence about this film; suffice to say my mind has referred back to Two Years At Sea repeatedly while planning A Year In The Country and along with General Orders No. 9 and Sleep Furiously it has been one of the main celluloid flickerings which has caught my eye and imagination…

Ben Rivers. Soda Films. Trailer. Little White Lies. General Orders No. 9. Sleep Furiously.

 

File under:
Trails and Influences: Touchstones. Case #14/52.

Now, if you’re a regular reader of A Year In The Country (if there is indeed such a thing), you may have noticed the work of David Chatton Barker popping up and cropping up here and there, generally when mentioning Folklore Tapes (of which he could be said to be the curator).

(As a brief precis: Folklore Tapes is a form of research project which encompasses amongst other things audio releases on the reels of ferrous cassettes which are housed in reimagined hardback books. As a project it explores the hidden recesses, nooks and crannies of Britain, it’s landscape and folkloric arcana. Alongside it’s audio releases, Folklore Tapes also encompasses field trip work and live events – I wouldn’t say gigs as they’re generally something much more than that and can encompass live physically invented projections and improvised soundtracks; see more at Day #32/365 and Day #7/365 of A Year In The Country).

As well as putting together Folklore Tapes, Mr Barker has also created a rather fine selection of graphic artwork, often for various offshoots/interconnected fellow travellers with Folklore Tapes and or unearthers of rare sonic delights Finders Keepers Records…

I think one of the reasons I’m drawn to his visual/design work is the way it delves in amongst layers and signifiers of culture from other eras, overlooked esoteric corners and artifacts, retains their spirit but reinterprets them to create thoroughly modern work. Tip of the hat to you Mr Barker. It’s lovely stuff.

So, on this page is a baker’s (barkers?) dozen of my favourite pieces of his visual work, the ones that have lodged themselves in my mind and/or that I have returned to peruse over the months… some are selected because of the work itself, some for what it represents/features, often because of both those reasons…

A few trails and pathways:
David Chatton Barker, Folklore Tapes, folk tale songstress hailing from the black and white birds nest Magpahi and supernatural Lancashire séance co-director Samandtheplants/Sam McLoughlin, Mr Barker’s other sound transmissions identity David Orphan, the pastoral wanderings of Caught By The River, cosmic aquatic folklorist and Czech New Wave film channeler and reimaginer Jane Weaver (and at Day #6/365 of a Year In The Country), audiotronic delvers Finders Keepers Records and their occasional flickering celluloid events Hocus Focus, Ms Peake and former monarchs with extended appendager Adrian Flanagan’s The Eccentronic Research Council, old records made to feel young again via Andy Votel, aqueous researcher Rob St John, Iona Magnetic via Sam Khan-Mcintyre and “new band of the day No. 1,169” (which is perusable as an idea online) and fellow Bird Records/Finders Keepers Records travellers Paper Dollhouse.

 

File under:
Trails and Influences: Touchstones. Case #13/52.

The Advisory Circle’s And The Cuckoo Comes was probably the first song (and I use that word loosely here) that I heard that had sprung forth from Ghost Box Records and travelling companions and is probably one of the ones that I have listened to the most in relation to A Year In The Country.

It uses a sample of a nature talk, I don’t know for definite where from although in my mind it conjures up the audio-recorded dust of the seventies of my youth and I expect it may have been borrowed/plucked from a Public Information Film of the time…

A brief half-listen of the words imply that it should be all pastoral delight as it describes the changes of the seasons. However,  it is anything but an idyllic journeying through such things.

“In the summer, well, it’s usually cold and sometimes it snows.
The winds blow.
In the autumn the flowers are out and the sun shines.
In the winter, the leaves grow again on the trees.
And in the spring the winds blow and the leaves fall from the trees.
And the sun shines and the leaves grow again on the trees.
And sometimes it snows…
And the cuckoo comes.”

There’s a real sense of playful dread to the song. How can “And the cuckoo comes” be such a shocking, worrying thing? And how can that “Well…” be so full of languid worry inducement?

It’s an unsettling song, there’s a sense of dislocation to it, which I had put down largely to the multi-layered, swirling, repetition of the song. But writing the lyrics down just now I realised how much semi-consciously that dislocation was also due to the words themselves; time, the seasons and nature are out of joint and at odds while waiting for the singing songbird.

Listen to it here.

Something of an ornithological theme in Mr Brooks work… above is his Applied Music Vol. 1: Science & Nature released via his own café kaput label, to the left is the Owl Service-leaning cover to his As The Crow Files album and below are some images from his night time drifting Shapwick album.

Shapwick was released by Clay Pipe Music and wandered off into the world post-haste and to continue the aviarist theme is now rather as rare as domestic fowl molars. Nice artwork/packaging/accompanying Shapwick owl print by Clay Pipe orchestrator Frances Castle…

The Advisory Circle is but one of the labels under which Mr Jon Brooks sends his work out into to the world. You can see more about him at his blog Café Kaput.

And I’ve mentioned it before but I think it’s worth a mention again: Jonny Trunk’s OST radio show on Resonance FM – Jon Brooks guests on an episode and it’s worth an auditory visit even if it’s just for the image of his wife putting down her knitting and accompanying him to do the actions to a Coal Board Safety Song by Max Bygraves.

I realise that last sentence probably sounds a bit surreal but if you happen to listen to the show all shall become clearer.

If you should like a listen to OST’s intrigueries (and sometimes glorious shambolism) you can do so at Resonance FM’s Podcast archive.

Purchase/peruse the Revised Edition of Mind how you go (from whence The Cuckoo Comes comes) at Ghost Box Records.

Visit the pleasantly bucolic world of Clay Pipe Music here and Frances Castle’s illustration site here.

As a final point, it’s interesting how very limited, very independently released and niche records sent out into the world in editions of 200 copies or so are now reviewed by the mainstream weekend press (see review above).

Ah, in my day you were lucky to have 2 column inches in one of the music inkly-weeklies. How the cultural landscape has changed… Nice write-up mind, captures the spirit of things rather well.

File under:
Trails and Influences: Touchstones. Case #12/52.

And while we’re talking about astonishing things (see Lutine at Day #50), this is a quite astonishing film by Robert Persons.

I watched it again just recently and I just sat there entranced with my hair stood on end for much of the film.

What is it? Well, it’s hard to quite describe as I’m not sure I’ve seen another film like it: it’s an experimental film in some ways but eminently watchable and beautifully shot – many of the sequences are nearer to celluloid takes on fine art photography which linger over the stillness of the subjects in the frame. I think poetic could be a good adjective. Haunting would be another

As a very brief precis, the film takes the viewer on a journey through the transformation of a section of mid-Southern American America (Alabama, Missisipi and Georgia) from a wilderness into it’s modern state.

It does this via the use of original film footage, maps, vintage photographs, found objects and views of natural and manmade landscapes.

Adding to the texture and layers of the journey the film takes is an accompanying narrative by a voice which could well be announcing the end of days (it reminds me of God Speed You Black Emperors Dead Flag Blues, which in some ways could almost be a companion piece to General Orders No. 9, with its sense of lyrically beautiful apocalyptic dread).

In many ways it could be thought of as a film which explores the hauntology of the Southern states; the land is seen to be littered with the remnants and spectres of mankind’s industrial and technological endeavours – old factory installations, derelict mobile phone masts, rooms filled with detritus and hundreds of scattered old books.

But despite a sense of a brutalising of the landscape via progress and the relentless march of freeways there is a beauty to the film and much of what it portrays.

(I don’t want to post too many stills from the film as I think if you should want to explore more it would be good to appreciate the imagery of General Orders No. 9 first time as part of the film.)

And the narration? Phew, well, I could be here all day quoting it but here are but a few snippets:

“Why is the sign of the thing preferred to the thing itself?
We’re lost without a map…
The lord loves a broken soul, let us hope we are well broken…
The city has none of the signs of the place and all of the machine…
You are not a witness to the ruin, you are a ruin, you are to be witnessed…
The only response is to refuse, to go to the ruins and sit amongst them…”

Alongside the film, there are some quite lovely accompanying prints by Bill Mayer, which represent elements of the films symbology (the one in the left below is referred to on the General Orders No. 9 site as “derelict microwave overlord”… I feel that needs no comment).

 

 

 

 

 

There are also two accompanying books: Notes For A New Map, a collection of historical sources and icons and The Black Book which contains the text of the narration:

As an almost final note, I sat watching it and my mind thought “When I pass, if I’ve done anything worthy of a memorial, I’d like this film played on a loop for twenty hours as part of it”.

Possibly an odd thing to think and I don’t know quite why my mind thought it but I think it’s just because it touched something in me…

And as a final note, at some date I’m hoping that the soundtrack by Chris Hoke, Stars Of The Lid, Grace Braun and John Taverner wlll be released as in a superlative film it is another rather fine superlative.