A Year In The Country

Posted on 7 th November 201722 nd July 2022 by — Leave a comment

All The Merry Year Round – Pre-order: Artifact Report #45/52a

The CDs are now sold out but the album is available to download at our Bandcamp page, Amazon, The Tidal Store, 7digital etc and can be streamed on Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer, YouTube etc.

Pre-order available today 7th November 2017. Release date 28th November 2017.

Artifact #6a

Featuring United Bible Studies, Circle/Temple (Dom Cooper of The Owl Service/Bare Bones/Rif Mountain), Magpahi, Cosmic Neighbourhood, Field Lines Cartographer, Polypores, A Year In The Country, Sproatly Smith, Pulselovers, The Hare And The Moon & Jo Lepine (The Owl Service), Time Attendant and The Séance (Pete Wiggs of Saint Etienne and James Papademetrie).

All The Merry Year Round is an exploration of an alternative or otherly calendar that considers how traditional folklore and its tales now sit alongside and sometimes intertwine with cultural or media based folklore; stories we discover, treasure, are informed and inspired by but which are found, transmitted and passed down via television, film and technology rather than through local history and the ritual celebrations of the more longstanding folkloric calendar.

However, just as with their forebears there is a ritualistic nature to these modern-day reveries whereby communal or solitary seances are undertaken when stepping into such tales via flickering darkened rooms lit by screens, although their enclosed nature is in contrast to more public traditional folklore rituals.

Accompanying which with the passing of time some televisual and cinematic stories continue or begin to resonate as they gain new layers of meaning and myth; cultural folklore that has come to express and explore an otherly Albion, becoming a flipside to traditional folklore tales and sharing with them a rootwork that is deeply embedded in the land.

In amongst All The Merry Year Round can be found wanderings down such interwoven pathways, travelling alongside straw bear and cathode ray summonings alike.

Available via our Artifacts Shop, our Bandcamp Ether Victrola and at Norman Records.
Dawn Edition £11.95. Night Edition £24.95.

Both editions hand-finished and custom printed using archival giclée pigment ink by
A Year In The Country.

Tracks also previewable at Soundcloud.

Dawn Edition. Limited to 104 copies. £11.95.
Hand-finished white/black CDr album in textured recycled fold out sleeve with inserts and badge.

Top of CD. Bottom of CD.

Further encasement details:
1) Custom printed using archival giclée pigment ink.
2) Includes 25mm/1″ badge, secured with removable glue on string bound tag.
3) Back of one insert hand numbered.

Night Edition. Limited to 104 copies. £24.95.
Hand-finished box-set contains: album on all black CDr, 12 page string bound booklet, 4 x badge pack, 4 x stickers, 1 x large badge.

Top of CD. Bottom of CD.

Further encasement details:
1) Booklet/cover art custom printed using archival giclée pigment ink.
2) Contained in a matchbox style sliding two-part rigid matt card box with cover print.
3) Fully black CDr (black on top, black on playable side).
4) Black string bound booklet: 12 pages (6 sides printed);
Printed on textured fine art cotton rag paper, heavy card and semi-transparent vellum.
Hand numbered on the reverse.
5) 4 x badge set, contained in a see-through polythene bag with a folded card header.
6) 1 x large badge.
7) 2 x square and 2 x round vinyl style stickers.

Tracklisting:

1) Towards The Black Sun – United Bible Studies
2) Rigel Over Flag Fen – Circle/Temple
3) She Became Ashes and Left With the Wind – Magphai
4) Winter Light – Cosmic Neighbourhood
5) Azimuth Alignment Ritual – Field Lines Cartographer
6) Meridian – Polypores
7) Tradition and Modernity – A Year In The Country
8) Moons (Part 1) – Sproatly Smith
9) Tales Of Jack – Pulselovers
10) I’ll Bid My Heart Be Still – The Hare And The Moon & Jo Lepine
11) In a Strange Stillness – Time Attendant
12) Chetwynd Haze – The Séance

Artwork/encasment design and fabrication by AYITC Ocular Signals Department

Artifact #6a / Library Reference Numbers: A011ATMYRD / A011ATMYRN

Posted on 6 th November 201710 th April 2018 by — Leave a comment

Further Accidental Folk-Art: Ether Signposts #45/52a

In terms of accidental folk-art, I think these British Rail leaflets from 1970 should be filed alongside the Cornflakes packet that is featured in the Own Label: Sainsburys Design Studio: 1962 – 1977 book by Jonny Trunk.

(Although strictly speaking I might say to file the British Rail leaflets nearby to the Sainsbury’s Corn Flakes, say under Accidental Folk-Art/Hauntological Precedents.)

(File post under: Other Pathway Pointers And Markers)

Directions and Destinations:
Jonny Trunk on Own Label
Peruse a few more images from the book
Own Label at Fuel

Local Places Of Interest:
Day #213/365: Artifacts of a curious mini-genre (and misc.)

Posted on 3 rd November 201724 th January 2017 by — Leave a comment

Ocular Signals #44/52a: Image R/2a

File under: A Year In The Country Ocular Explorations

Posted on 2 nd November 201710 th April 2018 by — Leave a comment

Recording The Layers Upon And Under The Land: Wanderings #44/52a

Over the year I’ve wandered several times to photography that takes an aerial or birds eye view of the land, that highlights the sometimes almost abstract art-like, natural calligraphy of the coasts, trees, natural features etc.

Along which lines, aerial archeology.

Apparently tiny differences in ground conditions caused by buried features can be emphasised by a number of factors and then viewed from the air:

Slight differences in ground levels will cast shadows when the sun is low and these can be seen best from an aeroplane. These are referred to as shadow marks.

Buried ditches will hold more water and buried walls will hold less water than undisturbed ground, this phenomenon, amongst others, causes crops to grow better or worse, taller or shorter, over each kind of ground and therefore define buried features which are apparent as tonal or colour differences. Such effects are called cropmarks.

Frost can also appear in winter on ploughed fields where water has naturally accumulated along the lines of buried features. These are known as frostmarks.

Slight differences in soil colour between natural deposits and archaeological ones can also often show in ploughed fields as soilmarks.

Differences in levels and buried features will also affect the way surface water behaves across a site and can produce a striking effect after heavy rain.

I find related photographs interesting in part because they literally record the marks upon and under the land, they are quite literally a documenting of the layers of history that without aviation would be more or less impossible to view.

There have been a number of books published on the subject and having something of a weakspot for cultural artifacts from around 1973, Flights Into Yesterday by Leo Deuel caught my eye.

File under: Trails and Influences / Year 3 Wanderings

Intertwined wanderings around these parts:
Wanderings #15/52a: Other Views / The Patterns Beneath The Plough, The Pylons And Amongst The Edgelands #1

Wanderings #31/52a: The Shadow Of Heaven Above

Wanderings #40/52a: Further Natural Calligraphy / Carving The Land

Posted on 1 st November 201710 th April 2018 by — Leave a comment

Meg Baird’s Don’t Weigh Down The Light: Audio Visual Transmission Guide #44/52a

Well, Meg Baird’s Don’t Weigh Down The Light…

A fair while ago I wrote about the Espers II album and how I seemed to rarely get beyond the first track Dead Queen…

Not because of any failing in the rest of the album but, well because:

“…it’s a song that swoops, sparkles, gently tilts you back into somewhere else. It’s epic and grand in scale but never verbose; a song full of glistening beauty, gentle and lilting but also one which subtly loops and returns throughout to something that touches on night dreams.

And I seem to find it hard to travel beyond it on the album; where do you go after something like this? It’s such a complete, swirling world of a song.

When I hear it I think of semi-lost privately pressed psychedelic/acid folk records from somewhere in the 1970s… but this is no straight replucking or homage; in many ways it shines a beacon as how to look to and draw from earlier source material but to bring it into today and your own vision.”

And now, here I find myself with a similar, not unpleasant conundrum regarding an album by sometime Esper-er Meg Baird.

I don’t know how many times I’ve listened to the first track, Counterfeiters, on Don’t Weigh Down The Light, fully with the intention of listening to the whole album but it just stops me dead in my tracks…

…for many of the same reasons as above, the same thing occurs here. Although I wouldn’t necessarily use the phrase epic, Counterfeiters is a very intimate song that draws you in and creates its own world.

This is a rather classy take on the source material of folk that carefully draws a line back to such things but which also wanders quite somewhere else. Entrancing indeed. Gentle, bucolic and also containing a subtle edge of melancholia, a glimpse of a world far removed…

Which is something I could well also say about the Until You Find Your Green album by The Baird Sisters, particularly its first track On And On.

As I have a tendency to say around here, lovely stuff.

(File Post Under: Cathode Ray & Cinematic Explorations, Radiowave Resonations & Audiological Investigations)

Audio Visual Transmission Guide #1:
Meg Baird’s Counterfeiters

Local Broadcasts:
Day #93/365: Seasons They Change and the sweetly strange concoctions of private pressings…
Day #132/365: Espers, coruscation and the demise of monarchs…

Posted on 31 st October 201710 th April 2018 by — Leave a comment

Estelle Hanania’s Glacial Jubile And Further Folkloric Escapees, Strands And Intertwinings: Ether Signposts #44/52a

Earlier this year at A Year In The Country I talked about the similarities between the yetis/abominable snowmen from vintage Doctor Who and the folkloric costumes in Charles Fréger’s Wilder Mann book.

At the time I said:

“…many of the costumes in Wilder Mann could well be escapees (prototypes?) for the 1970s British BBC costume and creature effect department.”

And then I came across the photographs of folkloric costume in Estelle Hanania’s Glacial Jubilé book, which seems to take those similarities and… well, it looks the escapees have arrived…

After advancing across the land, as was often the way with those vintage Doctor Who invaders, these creatures are wandering down the high street and through the city centres…

And alongside the photographs of of the folkloric costumes in Estelle Hanania’s Glacial Jubilé, there are intriguing location photographs of caves and strangely shingled and shuttered houses, that make me think of battening down the hatches against the creatures…

For myself there seem to be two quite separate but interlinked strands of folkloric costume and rituals books:

The more documentary like ones that focus on British folklore that can be found in books such as Once A Year by Homer Sykes, Sarah Hannant’s Mummers, Maypoles and Milkmaids, Henry Bourne’s Arcadia Britannica: A Modern British Folklore Portrait, Merry Brownfield’s Merry England and the archival collection of Benjamin Stone’s work, A Record Of England.

Alongside these are the photography books/projects which focus more on European folklore such as the just mentioned Charles Fréger’s Wilder Mann and Yokainoshima – Island Of Monsters, Axel Hoedt’s Once A Year and Dusk and Estelle Hanania’s Glacial Jubilé.

Although I suppose that both sets of books are essentially photographic portraits of folkloric costume but just in different locations, however the exoticness that is leant to the European focused ones by me not being as familiar with their costumes, rituals and aesthetics seems to separate them for me.

Also, the European focused books seem in part to be more a reflection of fine art like take on photography, to be partly an expression of the photographer’s own creative intent and stories as well as being documentary in nature

That seems to be particularly so with Axel Hoedt’s and Estelle Hanania’s work.

Along which lines, at the Shelter Press website, who published Glacial Jubilé, Estelle Hanania’s work is described as being:

“Unlike the anthropologist or pure documentarist, she doesn’t try neither to understand nor to decode the mystery of those rites, letting them pass trough her camera… A procession of giants in a field, a magician in a parking lot, a wild cave… The shadows of a singular identity are standing in a non-exotic setting yet revealing themselves as an hallucination.”

(File post under: Other Pathway Pointers And Markers)

Directions and Destinations:
Estelle Hanania’s Glacial Jubilé at Shelter Press
Estelle Hanania’s website

Local Places Of Interest:
Day #19/365: Once a Year – Homer Sykes
Day #66/365: Sarah Hannants wander through the English ritual year
Day #69/365: Charles Frégers Wilder Mann and rituals away from the shores of albion
Day #272/365: Axel Hoedt’s folkloric club kid rogues gallery and symbolic expulsions…
Wanderings #2/52a: Merry Brownfield’s Merry England / The Eccentricity Of English Attire
Ether Signposts #5/52a: Homer Sykes Once A Year And A Lineage Of Folk Custom Wanderings
Ether Signposts #32/52a: Charles Frégers Yokainoshima – Island Of Monsters
Ether Signposts #43/52a: Axel Hoedt’s Dusk And Final Celebrations

Posted on 30 th October 201729 th November 2018 by — Leave a comment

A Year In The Country at The Golden Apples of the Sun: Artifact Report #44/52a

The Golden Apples of the Sun radio show and site is one of my favourite places online to visit… on the shows you will find a vast range of music nestled next to one another and may well hear Brian Eno, Shirley and Dolly Collins, Broadcast, Tangerine Dream, The Focus Group, Keith Seatman, CAN, Leyland Kirby, Link Wray, Air, Devandra Banhart, Andrew Weatherall, Emerald Web, Kraftwerk, DJ Shadow, The Assisant, The KLF, Jon Brooks, The Hardy Tree and Jane Weaver to name but a few.

The shows are organised and curated by Claude Mono, often with guest hosts and throughout its eclectic music wanderings there are themes or strands that loosely often connect the shows, which are in part explorations of when the flipside or undercurrents of pastoralism meets the spectres and imagined parallel worlds of hauntology.

Or to quote the show itself:

“The Golden Apples collective is a small informed and passionate group of music-lovers who each Sunday afternoon (and via re-stream) curate a musical odyssey through psych-tinged realms such as pastoral folk, glitch, lo-fi electronica, hauntology and hypnagogic pop. Through blissful reverie and sun-dappled hallucinogenic soundscapes, find yourself transported to a world beyond time, where both past and future intermingle, and where sound rules supreme.”

The blog/site is also well worth a wander around and I will often find a number of semi-hidden cultural curios that have me planning to squirrel away some time to explore them (recently that has included links to the rare 2006 documentary The Eternal Children directed by David Kleijwegt that focused on what was known as weird or freak folk in the earlier 2000s and fellow companions – work by the likes of Antony & The Johnsons, Coco Rosie and the aforementioned Devandra Banhart).

Over the years the show has included a fair few tracks from the A Year In The Country releases and on the 10th September 2017 there was a show where “Claude visits A Year In The Country”, which featured something of a gathering of selections from the A Year In The Country releases, including David Colohan, The Rowan Amber Mill, Sproatly Smith, A Year In The Country, She Rocola, Circle/Temple and Sproatly Smith.

The show then wandered off into music by sometimes A Year In The Country contributor Vic Mars, alongside the also aforementioned Broadcast, Emerald Web, Jon Brooks, Jane Weaver and Kraftwerk.

I particularly liked the above semi-scientific graph representation of the elements of the show.

Anyways, I thought about now would be a good time to post a number of links to some of the previous episodes of The Golden Apples of the Sun that featured A Year In The Country releases.

Originally broadcast on RTR FM, the playlists and streams are archived at the links below:

Episode 337: Claude visits A Year In The Country: featuring Fractures, Burn The Witch/Molly Leigh Of The Mother Town, The Quietened Village, In Every Mind, The Forest / The Wald, Airwaves: Songs From The Sentinels & From The Furthest Signals

Episode 200: featuring Burn The Witch/Molly Leigh Of The Mother Town & Torridon Gate (She Rocola & Howlround)

Episode 266: featuring In Every Mind (A Year In The Country):
“This sound journey is a true audio bell curve commencing with the vinyl crackle of dust from the nettles style original British acid folk, some US Espers-esque psych folk and prairie modern from Meg Baird and Speck Mountain…the show then meanders through the hazy electronica of Noveller, Lutine and Haelos heading towards a single epic extended high through 20 minutes of a most (in)famous Nurse With Wound and Stereolab collaboration. Over the bell curve and new West Coast meets East Coast from Heron Oblivion and finally some crystalline lo-fi timeless moments from the Golden Apples archives of 2010, 2011 and 2012.”

Episode 295 & Episode 314: both featuring The Forest / The Wald (The Rowan Amber Mill, Magpahi & The Hare And The Moon):
“Claude musically meanders through private press folk, funk and psych, some spiritual jazz and lo-fi electronic gospel, Balearic beats, baroque pop and electronica.”

Episode 315: featuring Airwaves: Songs From The Sentinels (A Year In The Country):
“…Claude returns and weeks of field study, archaeological digging, explorations of secret rural Holloways, learning the Rites of Mu and Hypnagogia all come together…its a strange beautiful musical trip….”

Episode 336: featuring The Quietened Village (Listening Center)

Episode 273, Episode 274 & Episode 335: all featuring Fractures (Circle/Temple, The Hare And The Moon & Polypores)

Episode 219: featuring In Every Mind (A Year In The Country)

Episode 307: featuring Airwaves: Songs From The Sentinels & The Dark Chamber EP
“This edition of the Golden Apples is hosted by Claude Mono. It commences with a soundscape from Under The Skin the unsettling sci-fi film that creates a strange brooding dystopian landscape within contemporary Glasgow and its surrounds. More soundscapes from A Year In The Country, Broadcast, Pram, The Dandelion Set, Stereolab and space-psych from Our Solar System…immersive listening…”

Episode 335: featuring The Quietened Cosmologists (Unit One and Field Lines Cartographer)

You can also visit The Golden Apples of the Sun at RTR FM’s website here.

Tip of the hat to all involved. Much appreciated.

Posted on 27 th October 201726 th October 2017 by — Leave a comment

Ocular Signals #43/52a: Image Q/2a

File under: A Year In The Country Ocular Explorations

Posted on 26 th October 201710 th April 2018 by — Leave a comment

The Solitude Of Ravens and Images from an Unknowable Story: Wanderings #43/52a

When I first came across Masahisa Fukase’s photography book The Solitude of Ravens it was out of print and as seems to often be the way with what is sometimes known as fine art photography, earlier editions of the book have become particularly collectible and copies could easily fetch in the hundreds of pounds…

…and it was a struggle not to think to myself “Hmmm, what day-to-day necessities could I forgo so that I would be able to afford a copy?”.

There’s an entrancing beauty to the images I’ve seen, with sometimes the birds being shown only as abstract grain filled silhouettes or their clawprints in the snow forming what are at first unidentifiable patterns.

However, at points they also give me the absolute heebie jeebies and despite the photographs in part capturing elements of what essentially are day-to-day natural world occurrences, there is at times something almost claustrophobically, indefinably unsettling about them.

While the birds are a recurring motif throughout the book, these are interspersed with enigmatic and unexplained other photographs including an intimate night time scene, silhouettes of people on the coast with their hair flying in the wind, flowers and other items possibly exploding or caught in some kind of extreme turbulence, weather that has become cosmic ambient streaks of light and a man sat on the ground, seemingly drinking alone in what may be a litter strewn park.

Taken as a whole the book appears to tell some unknown or unknowable story – to almost be an essay, the subject of which is just out of reach.

I’d say lovely stuff about now but I don’t think that’s quite appropriate here.

Beguiling, beautiful, disturbing, unsettled, unsettling, lovely stuff might be heading in the right direction.

As a postscript, since I started to write about the book, it has been reissued by the publisher Mack in what looks like a rather fine slipcase edition, with one of the iconic images from the book silkscreen printed in a subtle, almost hidden manner on the cover.

File under: Trails and Influences / Year 3 Wanderings

Elsewhere in the ether:
View a selection of images from the book here, here, and here. The Mack edition can be visited here.

Posted on 25 th October 201710 th April 2018 by — Leave a comment

Images and the Uneasy Landscape: Audio Visual Transmission Guide #43/52a

Images is a Robert Altman film from 1974…

…and it is a strange, unsettling viewing experience.

The plot involves a children’s author Cathryn, played by Susannah York, who receives a series of disturbing phone calls at her home in London, which leave her in a state of confused disarray. When her husband comes home they decide to take a vacation at their isolated country cottage in Ireland, hoping that it will ease and calm her.

Once there Cathryn’s mental state deteriorates, she begins to witness hallucinations or apparitions of people who aren’t there – past lovers, dopplegangers of herself and reality seems to crumble.

As a viewer it becomes difficult to decide and decipher what is real and what is not, with all such things seamlessly linking into one another and being presented in a largely realist manner rather than possible hallucinations being signposted by overt visual effects.

It put me in mind of José Ramón Larraz’s long lost and relatively recently restored 1974 film Symptoms in that it is a study of the fracturing of a mind in an isolated rural setting, amongst a landscape that should contain bucolic ease, escape and rest but that subtly seems to represent and capture a 1970s psychic malaise.

In part that may be because despite the the rural setting, both films have an understated murky, subdued colour palette that seems to have been prevalent around the time of their making.

Within both films the interior scenes of the country houses are claustrophobic, confined, dark spaces, seemingly worlds unto themselves, decorated in what seems to be a kind of gothic, bohemian, Hammer Horror mansion bric-a-brac style.

Symptoms is possibly more overtly claustrophobic, with its exterior scenes seeming to consist largely of overhung, sunblocking trees and vegetation, whereas in Images there are views of rolling moors and open hillsides but still within such shots there is little sense of ease and these landscapes and skies seem to contain a foreboding, brooding sense of menace.

Both films also seem to straddle some kind of line between arthouse, enquiring cinema and exploitational shock and violence; unsettling, possibly a little distasteful in parts but intriguing nonetheless.

Neither are films for a quiet, relaxing Sunday afternoon. Nor are they films that send you off to a calm nights sleep…

(File Post Under: Cathode Ray & Cinematic Explorations, Radiowave Resonations & Audiological Investigations)

Audio Visual Transmission Guide #1:
Images at Filmbar70

Local Broadcasts:
Week #28/52: Symptoms and gothic bucolia

Posted on 24 th October 201711 th April 2018 by — Leave a comment

All The Merry Year Round – Preview Clips Online: Artifact Report #43/52a

All The Merry Year Round album preview clips are online.

Visit them at Soundcloud.

Album pre-order available 7th November 2017 at our Artifacts Shop and at Bandcamp.
Released 28th November 2017.

The album features United Bible Studies, Circle/Temple (Dom Cooper of The Owl Service/The Straw Bear Band/Rif Mountain), Magpahi, Cosmic Neighbourhood, Field Lines Cartographer, Polypores, A Year In The Country, Sproatly Smith, Pulselovers, The Hare And The Moon & Jo Lepine (The Owl Service), Time Attendant and The Séance (Pete Wiggs of Saint Etienne and James Papademetrie).

Further details on the album can be found here.

(File Post Under: Encasements / Artifacts – Artifact #6a)

Posted on 23 rd October 201710 th April 2018 by — Leave a comment

Axel Hoedt’s Dusk And Final Celebrations: Ether Signposts #43/52a

In the first year of A Year In The Country I posted about Axel Hoedt’s Once A Year book, which featured folkloric costumes from the Fasnacht carnival in southwestern Germany.

Back then I said of his photographs:

“There’s a sense of being in amongst the denizens of a land far from the twee fields of folklore with this particular slice of carnivalesque dressing up… The creatures his photographs capture… seem like the darker urban cousins of Charles Frégers Wilder Mann, which in themselves are not all cuddly and light… but Axel Hoedt’s once a year capturees are voyagers from further flung outlands and less well-lit crevices of imagination.”

In his next book Dusk he seems to wander amongst further more shadowed corners of folkloric rituals, again from southwestern Germany but also venturing to Austria and Switzerland.

The images in Dusk seem to blend documentary portraits of those in folkloric costume, fine art and contemporary fashion explorations and related imagery.

They conjure a particularly unsettling atmosphere, not one of carnivalesque revelries but rather one which seems to possibly unearth the far reaching, less civilised tales and times from which these carnivals and folkloric rituals may have once sprung.

Along which lines, the information on the book at his publishers Steidl Books states the following:

“Hoedt reminds us of what carnival once used to be: a final celebration before the dawning of hard times.”

Brrr.

(File post under: Other Pathway Pointers And Markers)

Directions and Destinations:
Dusk at Steidl Books

Local Places Of Interest:
Day #272/365: Axel Hoedt’s folkloric club kid rogues gallery and symbolic expulsions…
Day #69/365: Charles Frégers Wilder Mann and rituals away from the shores of albion
Ether Signposts #32/52a: Charles Frégers Yokainoshima – Island Of Monsters

Posted on 20 th October 201724 th January 2017 by — Leave a comment

Ocular Signals #42/52a: Image P/2a

File under: A Year In The Country Ocular Explorations

Posted on 19 th October 201710 th April 2018 by — Leave a comment

The Unexpected Arrival Of Spectral Containment Systems #2: Wanderings #42/52a

Well, I was reading a copy of Sight & Sound magazine from a while ago when I came across a feature on Ghost Box Records.

Nowt too odd in that you may well think.

No, except this is the British Film Institute’s monthly film magazine, not the British Film Institute’s film and occasionally music monthly magazine.

Although it’s not really that odd, considering the role soundtracks and sound design play in film and particularly considering the film/television points of interest that feed into the Ghost Box world (or parallel worlds), it was just unexpected I guess.

The article in question is a concise revisiting and gathering by Daniel Barrow of the influences, strands of interest, hauntological/spectral world or mythology the Ghost Box label/project has created around the time of their In A Moment retrospective ten year compilation that was released in 2015.

However the article ends with “…perhaps now the ghosts are all fled in the blinding light of commerce”.

This is in reference to the way in which areas of culture that fed into Ghost Box which were once more a cult reserve (for example odd 1970s British children’s television, folk horror films such as The Wicker Man, Quatermass, Public Information Films, Radiophonic-esque electronica etc) have now become just another part of the general media, cultural and related commercial landscape and that using and weaving with such source material has possibly therefore to a degree run its course.

I think it’s an interesting point that has merit and is worth consideration but at the same time it makes me think “Well, maybe the thing to do at such times of possible widespread over harvesting and visiting, is just to keep doing what you do/are interested in”; along with if needs be/the will takes you that way, being careful of not becoming too caught purely in your own furroughs without ever straying to new fields or looking for new seedlings.

These things go in cycles, sometimes the media and cultural/commercial spotlight will shine on a particular area of culture, that area can then become over mined or familiar and then the spotlight moves on.

To once again quote Jeanette Leech, author of Seasons They Change, when discussing such things in relation to the brief more overground interest in what was known as freak folk, underground folk and other descendants of acid/psych folk in the early 2000s:

“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.”

Hmmm. Food for thought.

File under: Trails and Influences / Year 3 Wanderings

Intertwined wanderings around these parts:
Day #52/365: The Advisory Circle and ornithological intrigueries…

Day #65/365: Mr Jim Jupp’s parish circular

Day #72/365: Arthur magazine and the brief flickering of freak folk

Day #85/365: Weirdlore: Notes From The Folk Underground and legendary lost focal points…

Day #93/365: Seasons They Change and the sweetly strange concoctions of private pressings…

Week #29/52: Hauntology and the genre that dare not speak its name

Wanderings #15/52a: The Unexpected Arrival Of Spectral Containment Systems #1

Elsewhere in the ether:
Peruse the issue of Sight & Sound in question here. Mr Barrow. In A Moment considerations and light catchery. The aforementioned spectral containment systems home in the ether.

Posted on 18 th October 201710 th April 2018 by — Leave a comment

Somewhat Out Of Kilter Harvest Songs: Audio Visual Transmission Guide #42/52a

Now, I was watching the television one night when an advert came on for bagged salad and the accompanying music made me smile and shake my head just a touch.

The premise of the advert is that the company responsible for the lettuce always seeks out the “very best sunlight” to grow their lettuce.

In the advert we are shown a subtly cartoon-like picture perfect, I assume continental farm and a CGI anthropomorphic tractor sets off to cross the fields of lettuce (not quite sure what it’s doing as the fields don’t need ploughing as the crops are already growing) and is admonished by the farmer to not block the sunlight with its shadow.

The soundtrack to the advert is Nik Kershaw’s single “I Won’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me”, reached number 2 in the UK singles chart in 1984 and the tractor happily sings the song as it goes about its undefined work.

The word denuded comes to mind about now, as in a song being denuded of its meaning.

Only the chorus of the song (“I won’t let the sun go down on me, I won’t let the sun go down”) is heard in the advert but in actuality the song is a satirical take and reflection on Cold War conflict, dread and potential annihilation.

Always something to choose when you want to imply that you grow happy and healthy lettuces I find.

Below are some of the other lyrics to the song:

“Forty winks in the lobby, make mine a G&T
Then to our favorite hobby, searching for an enemy
Here in our paper houses
Stretching for miles and miles
Old men in stripy trousers rule the world with plastic smiles

Mother nature isn’t in it
Three hundred million years
Goodbye in just a minute,
Gone forever, no more tears
Pinball man, power glutton, vacuum inside his head
Forefinger on the button, is he blue or is he red”

I know that it’s quite likely that at the time people didn’t always necessarily realise what the song was about, it was just another catchy pop song that filled the airwaves, the Thursday night Top Of The Pops slot and the pages of the likes of Smash Hits magazine but hearing it used in this context still made me quietly shake my head in a “The modern world hey?” manner.

The song was part of a loose gathering of successful UK chart singles around the mid-1980s that I wrote about in the second year of A Year In The Country, under the tag of “apocalyptic pop” – the link for which you can find below.

(File Post Under: Cathode Ray & Cinematic Explorations, Radiowave Resonations & Audiological Investigations)

Audio Visual Transmission Guide #1:
Out Of Kilter Harvest Songs

Local Broadcasts:
Week #31/52: The Quietened Bunker Archives #2; Songs For The Bunker – The Once Was Ascendance Of Apocalyptic Pop

Posted on 17 th October 201722 nd July 2022 by — Leave a comment

All The Merry Year Round – Pre-order and Release Dates: Artifact Report #42/52a

The CDs are now sold out but the album is available to download at our Bandcamp page, Amazon, The Tidal Store, 7digital etc and can be streamed on Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer, YouTube etc.

Artifact #6a

Pre-order 7th November 2017. Release date 28th November 2017.

In amongst All The Merry Year Round can be found wanderings down such interwoven pathways, travelling alongside straw bear and cathode ray summonings alike.

Featuring:
United Bible Studies
Circle/Temple (Dom Cooper of Bare Bones and Rif Mountain)
Magpahi
Cosmic Neighbourhood
Field Lines Cartographer
Polypores
A Year In The Country
Sproatly Smith
Pulselovers
The Hare And The Moon & Jo Lepine (The Owl Service)
Time Attendant
The Séance (Pete Wiggs of Saint Etienne and James Papademetrie).

Will be available via our Artifacts Shop and Bandcamp.

(File Post Under: Encasements / Artifacts – Artifact #6a)

Posted on 16 th October 201710 th April 2018 by — Leave a comment

Matthew Lyons and a Populuxe Mid-Century Modern Parallel World: Ether Signposts #42/52a

I recently(ish) came across Matthew Lyons illustrations…

They put me in mind of if Boards Of Canada existed in a mid-century modern populuxe parallel world, of intriguing widescreen science fiction epics from a future past that never was and seem to seamlessly blend a sense of being contemporary and retro futurism.

While the above image makes me think of a still from a parallel world mid-century modern version of the film Phase IV.

Lovely stuff…

(File post under: Other Pathway Pointers And Markers)

Directions and Destinations:
Matthew Lyons website

Local Places Of Interest:
Day #209/365: Signal and signposts from and via Mr Julian House (#2); the worlds created by an otherly geometry
Wanderings #13/52a: Boards Of Canada – Tomorrows Harvest; Stuck At The Starting Post / Tumbled From A Future Phase IV?

Posted on 13 th October 201724 th January 2017 by — Leave a comment

Ocular Signals #41/52a: Image O/2a

File under: A Year In The Country Ocular Explorations

Posted on 12 th October 201710 th April 2018 by — Leave a comment

(Revisiting) Travelling For A Living: Audio Visual Transmission Guide #41/52a

Back in the first year of A Year In The Country I wrote about Travelling For A Living, Derrick Knight’s 1966 documentary about folk singers The Watersons.

At the time it was quite a hard film to track down – it had been available on video tape once upon a time, it could be found in an out of print boxset and I think it was available at the BFI’s Mediatheques (there were a handful of these around the UK in cinemas, libraries etc, which had a number of screens and headphones where you could watch archived films, television etc).

Anyways, with the advent of the online BFIPlayer in more recent times, you can now watch Travelling For A Living relatively easily online, so I thought I would revisit it.

The film follows The Watersons throughout their life on the road, playing at folk clubs, recording in studios, at home in Hull as friends and other performers visit (including a fleeting rare glance of folk singer Anne Briggs).

Although it was released in 1966, it seems to belong to an earlier much more kitchen sink, almost post-war period.

Often representations of British life and social history from that time focus on a swirling, colourful, pop-mod-about-to-be-psych Swinging London metropolitan view of things.

Travelling For A Living presents a more gritty Northern contrast to that (although no less vital), an almost alternative history view of culture at that time which seems to have been semi-written out of popular cultural history.

However, quite possibly, the locations and music shown in Travelling For A Living was nearer to the day-to-day life of more of the nation than that of Swinging London; more backroom of a local pub than Kings Road high life, club and boutique orientated.

“I think one of the reasons I’m drawn to the film is that it provides a glimpse or two of a culture which, though it existed in what is now looked back upon as a time of swinging Britannia and heading towards the psychedelia of the late 1960s summer of love, appears to be very separate from the more often considered views and aesthetics of the time.

This is a much more grassroots, kitchen sink, gritty culture/counter-culture and to my eye makes me think more of the 1950s than the 1960s; all monochrome steaming breath and black wearing beat style.

In a way it reminds me of images of the 1980s Medway garage punk scene, such as those taken by Eugene Doyen; it shares that sense of a culture that is occurring separate to the mainstream stories and histories of the time and shares a similar kitchen sink, no frills and fripperies aesthetic.”

(From the first year post on Travelling For A Living.)

Folk music is often associated with rural areas and tradition but in Travelling For A Living it is generally shown in amongst a much more Northern town setting – the film featuring extensive evocative terraced house street views and is connected to the harsh realities of the local fishing industry from which some of the traditional songs The Watersons sing originated.

At one point their musical producer talks about how all the other music that they’ve heard – Ella Fitzgerald, more contemporary work by the likes of The Rolling Stones, music hall, jazz etc – edges into their music.

(I could add pub singing to that as their take on folk singing seems in part to have developed from and could be connected to the oral, communal tradition of pub singing, which developed in the local area after the war and the demolishing of the music hall, with the associated music moving into pubs: at one point Norma Waterson say of pub singing “This is our tradition, it’s what we were brought up on.“)

Him saying that got me wandering as to how much The Watersons were replicating the past and how much they were creating their own take on traditional music.

“This music doesn’t exist today as a living form but only in odd corners of memory; selected, hidden in the early recordings, notes and jottings treasured in the collections of Cecil Sharpe House. From these still warm ashes The Waterstones created music which is then seen to be very much alive.” (From the narration to the film.)

There were relatively few recordings of traditional folk available at the time, it being more an oral tradition and often existing outside or before the widespread recording of music or only have been recorded in written form by the likes of folk music researchers and revivers such as Cecil Sharpe in the early 20th century.

(As a connected aside, in the film The Watersons are shown visiting and listening to the archives of Cecil Sharpe House.)

Therefore reference points and memories of this earlier music may well have been fragmentary in nature and not have leant themselves to exact replication; possibly meaning that music created by The Watersons back then was in part an almost hauntological, hazy remembering of folk music – one that is both a homage to earlier traditional folk and which has also to a degree over the years come to represent what traditional folk music sounds like.

(File Post Under: Cathode Ray & Cinematic Explorations, Radiowave Resonations & Audiological Investigations)

Audio Visual Transmission Guide #1:
Travelling For A Living

Local Broadcasts:
Day #11/365: Lal Waterson – Teach Me To Be A Summers Morning
Day #242/365: The return of old souls; fleeting glances of Anne Briggs
Day #243/365: Travelling For A Living; tea served in the interval at nine o’clock and a return to populous stories and wald tales

Posted on 11 th October 201710 th April 2018 by — Leave a comment

Research and Investigations of the Spectral Landscape: Wanderings #41/52a

Within academic work there has grown an increasing space for, research and interest in a vast variety of often quite fringe or leftfield cultural work.

Once upon a time, not actually all that long ago (although in the decades), you could count the number of say media studies courses available at UK universities on less than the digits of one hand.

Now, well, if you should wander through a university’s library, peruse their prospectuses and/or areas of expertise and research interests of their staff you are almost as likely to come across mentions of say niche cinema as for example more traditional philosophical thought.

Along which lines…

There has been a small but growing gathering of interest in things otherly folkloric, the spectral landscape and related/intertwined hauntological work in academia, part of which has lead to a number of related events and conferences, including:

A Fiend In The Furrows was a 2014 conference on “Perspectives on Folk Horror in Literature, Film and Music”, which was held at Queen’s University in Belfast.

Hauntology: 20 Years On, a one-day academic symposium at the National Media Museum organised by the Communication Culture and Media Research Group which is part of the University of Bradford and which focused on the legacy of philosopher Jacques Derrida, who coined the phrase/concept hauntology.

While in 2003 there was a three day academic conference on The Wicker Man called The Wicker Man: Readings Rituals and Reactions at the University of Glasgow, which lead to the production of a book which collected essays based on the papers presented at the conference called Constructing The Wicker Man published in 2005, which in turn lead to a further academic collection of essays, The Quest for the Wicker Man: Historical, Folklore and Pagan Perspectives, which featured an intertwined set of writers and editors.

More recently in Glasgow in 2017 as part of the Merchant City Festival there was an event called Deconstructing The Wicker Man, which involved a screening of the film and also featured discussions by Dr Jonny Murray who was involved in the above University of Glasgow event/Wicker Man book and Dr Lizanne Henderson of the University of Glasgow.

Travelling along interconnected cultural pathways, The Alchemical Landscape at the University of Cambridge is a research group which has hosted a number of ongoing events and discussions and focuses in part on “occultural” representations of rural, landscape and spectral work.

Alongside discussions of The Wicker Man at such events there have been considerations of the pastoral noir aspects of Shirley Collins’ music, folk music traditions in relation to hauntology, numerous folk horror/hauntology related presentations and screenings including the likes of Witchfinder General, The Ash Tree, The Stone Tape and other work by Nigel Kneale and so forth.

The events have also included performances, talks etc by the likes of author Chris Lambert, who has contributed to the Tales From The Black Meadow project which creates a multi-faceted fictitious otherly folkloric/hauntological world, Mark Fisher who was the author of hauntology related book Ghosts of My Life and Robin The Fog of Radiophonic-esque tape loop manipulators Howlround.

They have also included a talk by Drew Mulholland whose album The Séance at Hobs Lane, released under the name Mount Vernon Arts Lab, was inspired in part by Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass work alongside “Victorian skullduggery, outlaws, secret societies and subterranean experiences” and which was re-released by Ghost Box Records.

(As an aside Drew Mulholland has worked both as an independently released musician and as Glasgow University’s geography and astrophysics department’s composer-in-residence. His work in the later 1990s and turn of the century such as the albums The Séance at Hobs Lane and One Minute Blasts Rising To Three And Then Diminishing, which was recorded 100 feet below ground in an abandoned nuclear bunker, can be seen as forebears to hauntological work.)

Related events have also included Andy Sharp of English Heretic / Eighth Climate, who work within the flipside, undercurrents, occult and hidden reverse of culture, history and the landscape:

“It is our task at English Heretic, ostensibly, to maintain, nurture and care for the psychohistorical environment of England.”

And also Sharron Kraus, whose work seems imbued with a sense of very personal research that takes in layered tales of the land, folk music and folklore.

To a degree and in part, what such events and academic research seem to focus on and reflect is the earlier mentioned interwining of otherly or flipside of folk and rural culture and the more spectral concerns of hauntology, something which is reflected in The Alchemical Landscape’s About page which includes the following text, saying it has two intersecting points of focus, which are:

“The artistic representation of the British landscape as an uncanny if not haunted space, and the use of comparable ‘spectral’ language to speak about matters of environment, property and value. From economic ghost towns to geomantic visitations, the interest of the Alchemical Landscape project lies with the way these tropes describe the ‘natural’ landscape of contemporary Britain and its geographic, architectural and symbolic histories.”

File under: Trails and Influences / Year 3 Wanderings

Intertwined wanderings around these parts:

Day #23/365: Nigel Kneale’s The Stone Tape – a study of future haunted media

Day #58/365: Lullabies for the land and a pastoral magicbox by Ms Sharron Kraus

Day #142/365: Fog Signals/Ghost signals from lost transmission centres

Day #163/365: Mark Fisher’s Ghosts Of My Life and a very particular mourning and melancholia for a future’s past…

Day #167/365: Wandering back through the darkening fields and flickerings to imaginary soundtracks…

Day #188/365: The Ash Tree; Sacred Disobedience, an unorthodox guidance and further fields In England