Category: Trails and Influences: Touchstones

File under:
Trails and Influences: Touchstones. Case #11/52.

Well, I’m kind of nervous to write about this… not sure why but in part I think it’s because it’s probably the album I’ve listened to the most in regards to A Year In The Country.

So, where to start?

Well, with the packaging, as in this case you can judge a book by it’s cover; the album is presented in a lovely and lovingly put together sleeve (artwork by Mr Dom Cooper of the Straw Bear Band and who also sings on this album, link below) which makes it feel like a precious artifact…

The music? Well, I guess it could be categorised as folk but it has it’s own take or edge to it… many of these songs are folk music mainstays and both musically and visually it uses what could be considered standard tropes of folk music, folklore and culture…

…but this is anything but a mainstream folk album. Why? Well, I can’t quite put my finger on it but there are other layers and intelligence to it all, a pattern beneath the plough as it were. As an album it feels subtley experimental but still maintains it’s listenability.

The songs wander from the Archie Fisher-esque take on Polly On The Shore, through to the quite pretty-but-if-you-listen-to-the-lyrics you realise that this is actually quite an odd story of Willie O’Winsbury (and a reprise by way of The Wickerman’s Procession as if played by a New Orleans marching band), through to the ghostly indeed The Lover’s Ghost (featuring vocals by former Mellow Candle member Alison O’Donnell) and the album also draws on the talents of amongst others Nancy Wallace and then to…

Well then to Cruel Mother which is probably one of the most brutal, disturbing songs I’ve ever heard. I won’t go into too many details but I find this song physically hard to listen to. Not because it is musically disonnant, it’s actually wrapped up ina rather lovely musical package but because the story is so unsettling.

The album end with the line from that song “‘Tis we for heaven and you for hell” and as Steven Collins says in the sleeve notes, what could come after that. In the context of this song/album, it’s true as it’s such a devastating line.

The band were formed by Steven Collins, drawing it’s name from Alan Garner’s The Owl Service novel…

According to an interview with him in Jeanette Leech’s Seasons They Change (her book on the story of acid and psychedelic folk) originally The Owl Service didn’t physically exist as a band but was more created by him as an imagined idea for his ideal folk band, one which drew it’s influences from a certain section of 1960s and 1970s British film and television and the sound of the English folk revival. Apparently people became interested in this at the start imaginary band (though they didn’t know of it’s insubstantialness) and began asking when they would be putting their songs out into the world… and from that the band became a real project… which I quite like as a way of something starting.

Also, I think I’m drawn to the album and indeed the work that Steven Collins makes/collaborates on because there is a sense of creating a world and an accompanying hands-on small scale cottage industry that supports and sends the music etc out into the wider world. Just getting on with it, from gig only CD-Rs via subscription 7″s to a limited edition package that contained every Owl Service song up to that point on one disc (see below and something I may return to later).

“She wants to be flowers but you make her owls. You must not complain then if she goes hunting.” What a quote (from Alan Garner’s The Owl Service). “I am the wolf in every mind” indeed.

Well worth a look-see-hear indeed.

Anyway, here are a few pathways of interest:

Steven Collins current activities via Stone Tape Recordings.

Dom Coopers work and influences here.

Nancy Wallace here.

Alison O’Donnell here.

Jeanette Leach Seasons They Change here.

File under:
Trails and Influences: Touchstones. Case #11/52.

I came to A Dream Of Wessex via a trail of cultural breadcrumbs dropped by Rob Young in his book Electric Eden (it’s featured towards the end of the book and connected to his visiting of a Ghost Box event which he describes as subterranean and an “exercise in consensual hallucination”… the connection between it and the book shall hopefully become clearer as you read down the page).

It’s curiously hauntological book in many ways (alithough it was written before the term had been created). Here’s a (slightly edited and reworked) collage of lines from the book:

“Deep inside her, a spectral memory flared like a match-flame in a darkened cellar
and a spectral version of herself recoiled in horror…
Time was deposited like layers of sedimentary rock and it could
be excavated with their imagination…
It was not a form of travel through time but a controlled, conscious extrapolation,
visualized and given shape by projection equipment…
Much has been heard about the ‘time-travelling’ ability the participants
developed when their minds were electronically pooled…
The tide was going out, and for a moment Harkman had an hallucinatory image of some bottomless drain far out at sea, into which the water was emptying, drawing back
from the shore and leaving the bay sodden and bare,
the muddy remains of the twentieth century scattered like shipwrecks across the land…
His memories before that date were his hold on reality: so long as they extended before then he knew that his identity was safe…
(It) had become an unconscious refuge for all the paticipants…
It was as if she had not been there, that she did not exist except as some palpable extension of his own imagination, which, like a childhood ghoul, had substance only as long as he concentrated on it…
They were all of the twentieth century.“

“The muddy remains of the twentieth century scattered like shipwrecks across the land” and “They were all of the twentieth century“? It sounds like part of a manifesto from or description of a release by the ultimate hauntological record label.

(A quick comment before I go on: I know that people often baulk at the labelling of their/others work but I think hauntological has come to represent a particular cultural aesthetic and spirit and it has become a good shorthand for that. I don’t really mind the labelling of genres as long as it doesn’t result in work becoming too narrow or slavish to a set idea and can make navigating record shops etc a little easier.)

To quite a degree part of the ending of the book reminded me of Rob Young’s fictional piece that was featured in the packaging for Belbury Polys Belbury Tales album. I wander if it was conscious or not?

The book is also curiously prescient of modern day escaping into a virtual digital/social media world: the plot involves a group of researchers in an underground (or subterranean) centre who join a group projection (a pre-runner of virtual reality) of a future Britain in order to try and learn about and provide solutions to modern day problems. (Spoiler siren noise) This virtual world eventually becomes more attractive than the real world, it’s participants not wishing to leave and it possibly becomes self-sufficient/creating.

(In this prescient sense of future behaviour and media, it reminds me of Nigel Kneale’s 1968 play Year Of The Sex Olympics, where a population is subdued by sexual performances on television and eventually harsh reality shows).

Essentially the book narrates a mass dream or hallucination, which thinking about it makes it’s inclusion in Rob Young’s book at the Ghost Box/hauntological juncture all the more fitting. As mentioned earlier he describes the Ghost Box event he attends as being “an experiment in consensual hallucinaton”… or indeed it could be connected to another of his concepts/phrases; that of imaginative time travel (used to describe voyagers in folk and other cultures when they interact with and attempt to visit or summon other times and ways of living through their work).

The phrase “Time was deposited like layers of sedimentary rock and it could be excavated with their imagination” also has particular hauntological connotations and in some ways reminds me of contemporary cultural behaviour wherein all of past culture is mined, reformed and given a different sheen/repurposing to it’s original intentions when it become part of new cultural artifacts (I could wander off down a path of discussing William Gibson’s comments about how culture has now become atemporal but maybe I shall leave that for another time… although I shall briefly mention that as a society we do not consider it odd that for the first time we can hear and see the voices and images of the dead through media recordings. Ghosts indeed).

And talking of ghosts…

This reforming can be seen in the work of the also aforementioned record label/reimagined world creators Ghost Box/designer Julian House who “conjure a world where TV station indents become occult messages and films for schools are exercises in mind control and collective hallucination” (from an ICA description of a Ghost Box event/film showing and a particularly good and concise summing up of the world they create and it’s intentions). In a way it’s a form of deliberate misremembering of the past, filtering it through your own personal vision, reimagining it in your own form, something which is mirrored in the researchers in Dreams of Wessex creating and shaping their own version of the future in their projection.

This is a book that I knew about and thought about for a long time before I bought and read it. It’s hardback cover in itself seemed to become quite a point of influence/reference for my A Year In The Country work and my attempt at an expression of an otherly countryside (hmmm, scratches beard in pseuds corner).

It’s actually quite a traditional painting of the countryside (by Paul Nash) but something about my knowledge of the plot of the book, it’s appearance in Electic Eden, my own state of mind and the paperback cover made it become something else… in part a reflection of my own version of reimagining.

PS I’m not normally bothered about such things but I quite like that my copy is signed by the author. Not sure why. Also that the dustjacket is clipped (do booksellers still do that today)… plus Christopher Priest looks like just how I think somebody who wrote left-of-centre intelligent science fiction in the 1970s should look. He looks a little like he should be writing science fiction that had somehow snuck into prime time TV but was a curiously off-kilter thing that lived somewhere between Blakes 7 and Sapphire and Steel but with more ooomph, oddness and cereberalness.

The condition could also be probably be described as “fine”. Again, I’m not too bothered about such things, being more of a reader than a collector but with this book it seems appropriate as it seems like quite a precious thing.

PPS To add to it’s hauntological credentials, how about the paperback cover (see left)? All lapels, country idylls and faceless other world couple.

Ghost Box At The ICA via The Belbury Parish Magazine.

Christopher Priest’s site.

File under:
Trails and Influences: Touchstones. Case #11/52.

Trails and Influences: Touchstones. Case #10/52.

Although part of the aim of A Year In The Country is to look at, work with and hopefully create a new take on nature/landscape photography (one which will hopefully make sense to my own and maybe other’s subcultural sensibility), I have looked at suprisingly little of the work of other landscape/nature photographers.

This has been reasonably deliberate: quite possibly I didn’t want to be influenced by what had gone before in this field and I have had a fairly extreme, almost allergic urge to look away from and put down books that contain the work of other such photographers*.

An exception to this was Paul Hill’s White Peak Dark Peak, published by Cornerhouse Publications in 1990 (and I expect photography publisher Dewi Lewis who later had his own imprint had a hand or two in it).

In the very early days of A Year In The Country gestating in the old brainbox I travelled to another city’s library in part largely to look at this book (mirroring how the youthful me used to travel to record shops when hunting down records – something I’ve referred to before I think). I was coming towards the end of one of the stages of a very people orientated photography project and wasn’t sure if non-people orientated photgraphic work could have the same resonance and connection for myself and others.

But when I looked at this book some part of my brain recognised that nature and landscape photography could do something interesting and (slowly, steadily) I was off…

The book itself has been described as a visual odyssey across a very particular part of the English landscape and in parts has a quite dark/unsettling edge in the way it documents the passing of time and nature’s processes (I haven’t included any of those more darkly hued photographs here for reasons which I may discuss later).

It’s been out of print for a fair while now and fetches probably £30-60 but it may well be worth the investment.

*Although strictly speaking I don’t consider myself a “photographer” (with a capital letter). It’s more just that photography is one of the things I’m using at the moment.

Dark Peak White Peak at Eleven Fine Art

Paul Hill’s site.

 

File under:
Trails and Influences: Touchstones. Case #9/52.

Well, what can I say? The Stone Tape. It was somewhat inevitable that it would be here.

I suspect that if you’re viewing this page then you already know about the film/program but if not here’s a four sentence precis (slight spoiler may follow):

A 1972 TV film/program written by Nigel Kneale which features a group of British scientists holed up in a country house/mansion while they attempt to create a new recording technique (and presciently to take on the Japanese at such things). They discover a possible form of recording which exists within the substance of the house and attempt to study, initiate and capture (?) it. It’s an unsettling number which lodges itself in your mind and is a fine example of television showing a somewhat intelligent and questioning side. Slightly curiously for such things it features future cake supremo Jane Asher.

First watched by my good self on a rather fuzzy digital copy, which I think actually quite suited the nature of the film (program) and seemed to heighten the cheap off-colour tape recording of the original.

I took photographs for A Year In The Country for a year. At the end of that year I returned to the small village where I had lived as a child and had found out about the possible end of the world via two brown bakelite boxes (see About for more information on such things) alongside first discovering apocalyptic/dystopian/post-disaster fiction and fact via the Doctor Who Weekly comic, odd speculative science fiction TV programs aimed at children that dealt with food shortages and so on…

…curiously, on that day The Stone Tape was showing at the pictures in a city that I could easily visit on my return journey. It wasn’t planned that that should happen but it’s funny how life sometimes tells and sends you things.

So I sat in the darkness with my fellow travellers and had my own Cathode Ray Seance courtesy of flickering celluloid.

Really I think I should own The Stone Tape on tape. That’s the first time I became aware of it’s existence; I saw it on VHS video cassette in an educational institution library; I never watched that copy but it would consistently jump out at me from the shelves for some reason. Having watched it, I have an inkling why.

It is possible that one day when the new(ish) digital technology of laser read discs will be the old technology they will become the things that people hold dearly to their hearts and may have gained a layer or two of nostalgia and preciousness to their present and future owners: they may well become their own haunted media and to a degree visually this post/page is a reference and nod to that (all the images are from the original BFI DVD release of The Stone Tape).

Two other Stone Tape pathways:
Both Steve Collins of The Owl Service and (psychogeographical?) author Iain Sinclair have used Mr Nigel Kneale’s masterpiece to title their own endeavours:

Stone Tape Recordings

Stone Tape Shuffle, at Boomkat and Test Centre who released it.

 

File under:
Trails and influences; Touchstones. Case #8/52.

The visuals of this film are sumptuous, it has supreme lenswork by Spanish cinematographer Neus Ollé. Director Alistair Siddons said that he thought the viewpoint of somebody from outside of England would bring something unusual to how the film was visually… and it does that indeed.

There is a subtle sense that you are looking in on a magical otherly world. There are folkloric elements to the film but it’s not so much those which give the sense of a world with it’s own rules and even magic. I can’t quite put my finger on what it is but there’s a certain lush, soft beauty to the rundown estate and it’s nearby countryside in the film (which is good to say as a contrast to the often standard British realist cinema take on such things)…

…but in that lush beauty there is a sense of something else, something unsettling.

Anyway, I shan’t talk too much about this film as I think it’s one to go away and appreciate in itself.

File under:
Trails and influences; Touchstones. Case #7/52.

Well, The Wicker Man was likely to appear in A Year In The Country somewhere along the line.

This is an album released by unearthers of rare sonic delights Finders Keepers Records and is one which aims to showcase the British Folk songs that inspired the soundtrack to The Wickerman.

It’s Highland Lament which is the standout, hair stood on end track for me. Another case where one song is worth the price of entry on it’s own.

I know little or nothing about the song or who performs it (it’s not credited to anybody) and in a way I like that: in these times of instant knowledge about most everything via a click or swoosh or two it’s quite nice to keep the slight mystery of some things.

As is often the way with the good folk at Finders Keepers, the album is nicely packaged, with some rather hauntingly ethereal photographs of folk dancers. I expect once upon a time they were just ordinary snapshots but as can be the way sometimes the passing of time adds layers and patinas of something else. Which leads me to…

A curious thing The Wickerman soundtrack (and indeed the film itself): an interesting case of where something authentic has been created from an inauthentic premise. The soundtrack has come to feel as though it features songs which have belonged to these isles for centuries when in fact they were created especially for the film. The story, folk setting and history of the making of the film have become and/or inspire a form of modern day of folklore.

This could be looked upon askance as not being historically authentic but such communal cultural tales all must have a beginning (and maybe in the past were conjured from the air and mind in a similar manner, differering only in their technological recording and dissemination).

However, in culturally mediated times, the stories contained within celluloid, vinyl, digital data etc could be seen to have become our communal culture, one which is passed from person to person in a similar way that oral culture once would have done the same.

Considering it’s cult appeal, this is an album which is curiously not so easy to find, particularly on vinyl. The CD is available here.

File under:
Trails and Influences: Touchstones.
Case #6/52.

Well, what can I say. A journey into the world of Nigel Kneale, his cathode ray seances and risograph printing…

Mr Kneale seems to have travelled with me a good while and reappeared in my life again relatively recently: previously it was mostly in printed form which I read as a child – I was mildly obsessed by the crumbling future Britain and science fiction leyline mystery of the final Quatermass chronicles. I seem to remember I  purchased fmy copy of the book from the bargain paperback section of my local newsagents, picked from in amongst the more mainstream pulp fair that was on offer (it seems slightly incongruous to include the cover of that below next to the fine design work of The Twilight Language)…

…and the Quality Comics / Hammer Halls of Horror adaptation of one of the Quatermass stories which I read has always mildly haunted and slightly worried me…

Curiously though I think it was only relatively recently that I started to explore the aforementioned cathode ray seances of Mr Kneale (The Stone Tape being of particular note in my journey through A Year In The Country but more of that in a later post).

Thinking about it, in a way this book has helped complete a circle from printed form to the siren call of the screen and back to the printed form (hmmm, scratches beard and ponders).

The Twilight Language Of Nigel Kneale was published to accompany a one day event in New York, which strikes me as a curious and intriguing place for this most English of scribes to have been taken to heart: possibly his work seems particularly exotic when viewed from afar?

A quick precis of the text of the book: it’s a set of essays, conversations etc produced in response to his work and features Sophia Al-Maria, Bilge Ebiri, Mark Fisher, William Fowler, Ken Hollings, Paolo Javier, Roger Luckhurst, China Miéville, Drew Mulholland, David Pike, Mark Pilkington, Joanna Ruocco, Sukhdev Sandhu, Dave Tompkins, Michael Vazquez and Evan Calder Williams…

…what has drawn me to it in particular though is that the book feels very precious, it’s something that I pick up gently and tenderly. There’s something very, um, real about it. I think in part this is because it was printed using the Risograph technique which gives it a very tactile and matt finish.

Risograph printing is essentially like a digital version of screenprinting rather than traditional lithograph printing; ink is pushed through plates and the effect is something that feels very human, less clinical and nearer to art than most printing mass reproduction technologies I have seen. I’d not consciously come across this process used in a tradtional book form before and as a sometimes screenprinter it quite fascinated me.

What adds to this is the design work by Rob Carmichael, which is just exquisite and I think perfectly captures and reflects the spirit of Nigel Kneales work in a contemporary graphic form. Quite, quite lovely. Tip of the hat to you Mr Carmichael.

But wait, that’s not all. The book also came with a cassette tape (yes, those again) featuring specially composed work by The Asterism, Emma Hammond, Hong Kong In The 60s, Listening Centre, The Real Tuesday Weld, sometime Jonny Trunk collaborator/Ghosts of Bush House creator (more of that in another post) Robin The Fog and Misinformation-ers Mordant Music (more of that I expect in a later post – I seem to be saying that quite a bit on this page)…

…the insert to the tape is Risograph printed as well. Attention to detail and all that.

But wait again… in the package, unexpectedly was a Risograph printed poster for the A Cathode Ray Séance: The Haunted Worlds of Nigel Kneale event that the book accompanied. Blimey. All this for £16.99 (and shipped from the US). A bargain indeed.

Unfortunately (or fortunately as it’s nice to know it’s wandered out into the world) it’s now sold out, although a standard edition may be released.

Read more about the book at Strange Attractor.

View Rob Carmichaels page of his design work at Seen Studio.

A quite extensive article on the event and Nigel Kneale at frieze.

 

File under:
Trails and Influences: Touchstones. Case #5/52.

Well, after the last post I feel like I need a good shower to wash and scrub away the grime of Englands past.

In lieu of that, thinking and pondering about this album/book will do.

Quite frankly it’s a beautiful object. Even though times were a little cash strapped in AYITC Towers when I first saw it, it was one of those things that I just had to have (and not spend ages thinking about whether to purchase it, adding it to electronic baskets and wish lists, stepping back, thinking about it some more etc as is often my wont).

Indeed, it’s a good example in these increasingly digital times of how the presentation of music in a physical form/package can still be an important and vital way of doing such things (says me, typing this into the electroic ether).

Anyway, it’s a finely and lovingly produced artifact, all bespoke attention and design (from the rounded corners to the extra thick cover, via the recess for the CD and a strap to hold it together which recalls the notebooks which it recalls inside)… it seems like a good way of presenting a tribute to the sadly departed Ms Waterson, curated by her daughter Marry Waterson

The book collects her handwritten lyrics, paintings, lyrics, notebooks etc…

…and is it just me or are the photographs of her notebooks just entrancing? I could stare at and lose myself in them all day.

You can have a look-see at a rather nice slideshow of the book  on the old internet goggle box here (uploaded by Topic Records, who published the book/album).

PS I don’t know if this trivial but I also like the sort of indie-mod-folk-beatnik styling of Lal Waterson herself on the cover. Cuts rather a dash I think.

File under:
Trails and Influences: Touchstones. Case #4/52.
Trails and Influences: Electronic Ether. Case # to be confirmed.

Now, if you want a lesson in how to create an intriguing, secret world unto itself then here would be a good place to start.

Originally monikered Devon Folklore Tapes, this could be called a record label but how it has been created and presented to the world it feels more akin to an arcane research project.

The mainstay of it’s releases are especially commissioned music projects/soundtracks (again I feel that research project would be more appropriate), generally presented on good old ferrous compact tapes which are housed in adapted, hollowed out hardback books which were very limited in quantity (ie 30 copies and once they were gone they were gone). Hens teeth is a phrase that comes to mind.

I think for a while that was the only way you could hear any of the resulting work. I liked the fact that in order to listen you would have to dig out a dusty old tape recorder and actually sit down and listen (initially I thought my copy of one of the tapes had been recorded in mono as I was listening to it on an almost end of the line dictaphone I’d bought in the mid 2000s and I didn’t realise that it would only play one channel of the tapes)…

Now, generally they also come with a download code and there are often simpler packaged copies of the tapes also available… but when they are released there is generally a feeding frenzy and whoosh they’re gone (something I often find out about just after the fact so that I can hear myself say “Darned, not again”).

The collaborators/creators of the series have included Rob St John, Children Of Alice (part of Broadcast), Anworth Kirk and David Orphan… though my favourite volume is number IV which features Finders Keepers cohorts Magpahi and Paper Dollhouse: the Magpahi side is all… well, I don’t know quite how you would put it but I think haunting folkloric vocals and quite an interesting pop sensibility while Paper Dollhouse wanders off into early morning free floating word association.

I think Boomkat put it quite well:

“Volume IV in this enchanted series surveys ‘Rituals And Practices’ connected to the folklore of Devon in the south west of England. Research was carried out by Magpahi and Paper Dollhouse into the myths, legends and strange phenomena of the old county, resulting in a creaking combination of wyrdly symbolic sonic energies and spirits that manifest as haunted ambient pop and folk song. At risk of breaking the spell, we won’t go any further, other than to tell you this is our favourite in the series so far and comes recommended to fans of Broadcast, Nico, stone circles and fine storytelling.”

…which I think is the first place I heard any of the music and it just stuck in my head and I seemed to have to own it (a fair few possibly nolonger wanted items were flung on the pyrrhic reselling market in order to purchase a copy if memory serves me right).

What else? Well, it’s not just the tape releases, there are field trips, events, photography, newsletters mailed to you in the traditional paper style and more. I particularly like head honcho David Chatton-Barker’s design work, well worth a look-see…

I shall leave the (almost last) word to Folklore Tapes themselves:

“Folklore Tapes is an ongoing cassette-based cult devoted to exploring the folkloric arcana of the farthest-flung recesses Great Britain, via divinatory research, abstracted musical reinterpretations and experimental visuals. Exploring mysteries, myths topography and strange phenomena of the old counties. This site will archive designs, research and production of each volume.”
Sites of interest:

Devon Folklore Tapes

Place where you can see that the tape you wanted is sold out.

Place where you can see if you can afford a previous volume.

Mr Chatton-Barker’s site and design work.

File under:
Trails and Influences; Touchstones. Case #3/52.

Well, what can I say, if there is a finer album of cosmic aquatic folklore out in the world I’ve not heard it.

That may sound a little facetious but this mult-faceted project by Jane Weaver has had something of a mighty hold on my imagination for a year or two or more now…

I’m not quite sure how I came across it but I think the first song I heard from it was Silver Chord, which is just haunting and is one of those songs that sends me into some almost trance like kind of state. Quite frankly sublime.

I’m sure an online search will let you know all about it but suffice to say that the first/main album features all kinds of   left-of-centre and almost lost folk/pop songstresses, from Weny & Bonnie to Susan Christie via Lisa Jen… and that’s before we get to the companion (spin-off? remix? reimagining?) album The Watchbird Alluminate which features reworkings of the songs by Demdike Stare, The Focus Group, Wendy Flower, Amworth Kirk Samandtheplants and a beautiful, haunting reinterpretation of My Soul Was Lost, My Soul Was Lost And No-One Saved Me by Magpahi (worth the price of admission on it’s own I feel, tip of the hat to all concerned).

I think one of the interesting things about Fallen By Watchbird is that though in many ways it is resolutely avant garde in concept and influences, it’s actually a really good pop record; it has tunes you can and would want to hum.

Those influences? Well, they’re quoted as including Eastern European children’s cinema, Germanic kunstmärchen (fairy tales or the electronic ether literally translates it as art fairy which I quite like), 70’s television music and early murmurs of 80’s synth pop. Which is enough to intrigue a chap like myself in itself…

…and those influences also lead me down a path to discover or rediscover an interesting strand of cinematic history: the Czech New Wave (or the Czechoslovak film miracle, which considering the otherworldly nature of some of the films seems quite appropriate). Often playful, surreal, fairy tale like and often a feast for the eyes. Daisies and Valerie And Her Week Of Wonders are two of the standouts for me… though Ms Weaver quotes an unsubtitled copy of Malá Morská Víla (The Little Mermaid but possibly something of a world away from it’s more well known filmic twin) as having been the starting point for this album and some of the stylings of have found their way into the packaging and accompanying video.

Right, I’m going on a bit here and I’ve not even got to the packaging yet… it was something of a trek to find a vinyl copy of Fallen By Watchbird but I’m glad I did… it’s a lovely package, from the gold gently corrugated sleeve, the tipped in cover image, obi strip etc: a real labour of love.

Oh and the illustrations… I’m not sure where they’re from but they’re quite magical and intriguing…

I may natter about this fine record and it’s cultural companions another time (there is also a book, a compilation CD, a tote bag, a poster etc and it is released on Bird / Finders Keepers, all of which could easily make this post twice the length if I was to start nattering now) but suffice to say this is a record which I wholeheartedly recommend.

I would recommend a viewing of the Fallen By Watchbird video.

The album can be purchased from: Finders Keepers Records

Jane Weaver’s site is here

PS There is also an accompanying rare as the proverbial domestic fowls molars promotional mix CD called Europium Alluminate. It  is described as “A 70 minute transmission of cosmic aquatic folklore, flickering luminescent lullabies & hand-plucked pop”, which is compiled and mixed by Jane Weaver and Andy Votel and which is a fine, illuminating and interesting musical journey (and I quite like that there’s no easily available tracklisting, so it leaves your mind wandering).

 

File under:
Trails and Influences: Touchstones Case #2/52.

Well, this has been something of an ongoing reference point in all things A Year In The Country-ish. It’s a rather fine, epic tome of a book. In simple terms it’s a journey through British folk music from it’s roots to the modern day but really it’s much more than that.

On it’s journey it wanders well away from the more beaten tracks surrounding such things and is all the better for it: lines are drawn between a lot of intriguing dots and points of reference; the trail and timeline/s it creates as it does so makes it worth the effort of fully investigating the books 672 pages.

It journeys from folk revivalist collectors such as Cecil Sharp, the social idealism of William Morris and Ewan MacColl, the folk-rock of the likes of Fairport Convention and Pentangle, the acid folk of Comus and Forest, The Wicker Man and occult folklore, contemporary esoterically interconnected practitioners such as the Ghost Box record label and even wanders of towards Kate Bush and Talk Talk… but as I said it also travels off the beaten track towards Bagpuss, 1970s pastoral science fiction and… well, have a read-see.

Now in such a book there will always be sections that interest some readers more than others: just personal taste but I would gladly swap the 30 or so pages on the Incredible String Band for the paragraph that covers The Owl Service (the band) and their like or the few pages on Ghost Box but hey ho… I’m glad somebody has written about such things full stop (and put it all together in a cohesive form).

Speaking of such things, I think the books section on Ghost Box is one of my favourite parts of any factual book; it captures a certain something. What? Well, probably a sense of the excitement and envelopment that stepping into a separate created world or reality via cultural forms/scenes/events can provide, even if only for a record or evening or two.

Or to quote Mr Young, how at such times the creators and participants engage in a form of consenual sensory hallucination.

Blimey, I love that phrase. It’s a rather succinct description of the sense of giving yourself up to otherworldly cultures and stories.

Actually, there are a few rather fine turns of phrase in the book to describe such cultural goings on: imaginative time travel is another.

If you’re going to get a copy, I’d recommend one of the earlier editions (the “plough and pylon” version); nicer printing, layout and to my mind a cover that says much more about the curious cultural collisions to be found within the book than the more obvious later band cover.

Something of a returning reference point in the old subconscious for A Year In The Country this cover I think… the “bad wires” indeed… More of that later.

As a final point, if I’m reading a book and there’s something I want to refer back to or find particularly interesting I tend to fold the page over at the corner. I think the photograph on the left of my copy of the book shows it has a fair degree of such things.

If you should wish to purchase it via Amazon: Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music

While wandering down the A Year In The Country path, there have been an awful lot of cultural reference points which have inspired, influenced and intrigued me (the three i’s as it were).

Part of A Year In The Country will be dropping a trail of breadcrumbs that start off with those three i’s and may well lead you good folk elsewhere.

This is the first of these here Trails and Influences…

File Under:
Trails and Influences: Touchstones. Case #1/52.

Where to start. Well, near the beginning is a good place…

A few years ago for a while I had quite a few of one of my friends records and CDs stored at my house.

In amongst his platters and shiny digital discs he had quite a few folk albums. Now, to be honest I think I had tended to write folk off as all being a bit fiddle-di-di, knit your own jumper, earnest kinds of things.

I was drawn to this album, gather in the mushrooms and I’m glad I was. I knew next to nothing about the music, hadn’t read the sleevenotes but for some reason it had ended up on my iPod.

The first time I can really remember it grabbing me was on a late night walk through the mostly deserted backstreets of a slightly industrial city. A curious place to discover an interest in oddball folk music maybe…

I think it was Forest’s Graveyard or maybe Trader Horne’s Morning Way that first grabbed my attention and made me realise that something other than my preconceptions about folk music was going on here. The first lines on Morning Way are “Dreaming strands of nightmare are sticking to my feet…”, followed close after by a somewhat angelic female voice in counterpart and well, I thought “This is odd, I like this…”

And so, in those darkened semi-industrial backstreets, some kind of journey started.

It’s a fine compilation by the way. It’s sub-titled The British Acid Folk Underground 1968-1974 and well, it does what it says on the can.

It was compiled and rather well curated by Bob Stanley of St Etienne, with sleeve notes by him (which once I eventually bought it and read them, I think I found slightly, hmmm, not quite as satisfying or comprehensive as they might have been… top compilation otherwise though Mr Stanley).

Highlights? Well, for me it’s one of those albums where there aren’t all the many low-lights. It’s all worth a listen but in particular I would recommend:

Magnet: Corn Riggs; an instrumental version from The Wicker Man soundtrack.

Sallyangie: Love In Ice Crystals; a rather young Mike Oldfield and his sister in a pre-Tubular Bells incarnation.

Pentangle: Lyke Wake Dirge; their haunting take on a traditional song.

Forest: Graveyard; ethereal gothic folk as a genre anybody? For a long time I thought the singer was female.

Trader Horne: Morning Way; the start is just superb, features Judy Dyble, originally a singer with Fairport Convention.

Comus: The Herald; well, this probably actually is gothic folk or maybe macabre folk. Epic and unsettling.

Well, it goes on and on really. There’s even a Sandy Denny track, Milk and Honey, that’s quite lovely (sorry, I know she’s greatly loved but I normally find her singing leaves me a little cold).

It was released in 2004, which I think looking back probably around the time that there was something of a revived interest in the odder reaches of folk, in part due to the popularity of folk such as Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom were popular and Vashti Bunyan was being rediscovered by a wider audience.

Anyway, unfortunately it’s out of print but can still generally be found for around £10-20 of your well earned pounds. If you wish to have a look-see, you could start here at the old Amazon: Gather In The Mushrooms or Discogs etc.

There was a follow up album released a year or few after: Early Morning Hush; Notes From The UK Folk Undeground 1968-1976. In parts it has a look-see at privately pressed folk albums from that time. For my ears it’s not quite as superlative as Gather In The Mushrooms but still well worth a listen. Maybe more about this album in a future Trails and Influences.

If you should wish to purchase it, you could start a-looking on Amazon… Early Morning Hush or Discogs etc.

File Under:
Trails and Influences: Touchstones. Case #1.