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Audiological Transmission #37​/​​​52​​: No More Unto The Dance – Plaintive Resonations

no-more-unto-the-dance-image-2-week-37-a-year-in-the-country

Audiological exploration by A Year In The Country from the album No More Unto The Dance.

no-more-unto-the-dance-image-2-week-37-a-year-in-the-country-bc“…the world in which this recording was made does still come alive at night but it is more likely to be the nocturnal foraging and wanderings of wildlife rather than in a low-ceilinged basement lit by a strobe light…”

Available to pre-order on 19th September 2016 at our Artifacts Shop and our Bandcamp Ether Victrola. Release date 3rd October 2016.

 

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Week #36/52: Gone To Earth – “What A Queen Of Fools You Be”, Something Of A Return Wandering And A Landscape Set Free

Gone To Earth-1950-Powell and Pressburger-Jennifer Jones-poster-costume-A Year In The Country
File Under: Trails And Influences / Year 2 wanderings

Hmmm. Gone To Earth.

In some ways it is a caddish melodrama, with the untamed rural main female character marrying the local priest (the “good man”) but being lead astray by the almost moustache-curling-baddie wants and takings of the local squire.

However, it is much more than that and as you watch it you can feel it straining at its period restrictions re sexuality, desire, faithfulness and respectability.

(Sin, acceptance, redemption, retribution and repression may well also be appropriate words round about now.)

It is a non-populist / exploratory work presented in a populist framework – often something of a favourite way of presenting things around these parts – and there is just something, well, odd about it that is hard to quite put your finger on.

And it has a genuinely shocking, I expect particularly non-focus-grouped (!), non-populist ending that just left me, well, shocked.

(Also, if memory serves correctly, that shock was heightened by the film being very quickly over in terms of run time after the ending: in contrast to modern films where 5-10 minutes of credits rolling up the screen is not uncommon, here there are very few credits and therefore time at its tail end to reflect and take things in.)

Jennifer Jones-Gone to Earth-1950-Powell and Pressburger-A Year In The Country-2

And talking of that not quite being able to put your finger on such things, it made me think of the gentle but not necessarily gentling “other” view of the landscape to be found In The Dark Half, of which I said back when:

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.

In Gone To Earth, that otherlyness is less overtly dark and the possible poverty is presented more as a deeply rooted bucolic way of of life but…

Gone To Earth-1950-Powell and Pressburger-Jennifer Jones-A Year In The Country-3b

…within its world (and it is most definitely its own world) the British landscape is also not presented in a realist manner, rather here it has a Wizard Of Oz-esque, Hollywood sheen of beauty, glamour and quiet surreality, which in part it is given by the vibrant colours of the Technicolor film process but it is something more than just that, something not quite so on the surface, that runs more deeply in the furroughs of the things…

And talking of most definitely their own worlds…

In some ways the air of not-quite-real-ness makes it seem like the forerunner to the more fairy tale side of the Czech New Wave (in particular Valerie And Her Week Of Wonders and possibly Malá Morská Víla / The Little Mermaid) and also to the style, character and imagery of a younger Kate Bush, of a free spirit cast on, upon and amongst the moors.

And talking of deeply in the furroughs of things…

I’ve seen it said about Kate Bush that in her work she could be seen as channelling something ancient, which is something that seems to also apply to the Powel and Pressburger film Gone To Earth, it seems to somehow delve and dig deeply amongst the land and related archetypes; this is a tail where faiths old and new are part of and/or mingle amongst folkloric beliefs and practises.

Jennifer Jones-Gone to Earth-1950-Powell and Pressburger-A Year In The Country-4

Hmmm. Writing about it all makes me want to wander back, watch and appreciate it once again.

Most definitely a film that would appreciate a good old considerate, respectful, modern day Bluray brush and scrub up (I may well be looking hopefully in the general direction of Criterion here).

Other pathways and wanderings around these parts:

“Other” visions of the landscape:
Day #21/365: In The Dark Half

Interrelated Powel and Pressburger intertwinings and a very particular Lionheart-ess:
Day #108/365: Let me grab your soul away – Kate Bush and darkly cinematic flickerings through the meadows, moors and mazes…

Forerunnings to be:
Day #247/365: Folk Is Not A Four Letter Word and voyages through other playful fancies from behind the once ferrous drapes…

Further forerunners, signpostings, (Electric) Edenic wanderings and other non-populist sylvan-Sylvian-ic pop:
Day #326/365: Harp In Heaven, curious exoticisms, pathways and flickerings back through the days and years…

 

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Audiological Transmission #36​/​​​52​​: No More Unto The Dance – Dark Days

No More Unto The Dance-Night Edition landscape sticker 4-A Year In The Country

Audiological exploration by A Year In The Country from the album No More Unto The Dance.

bc-no-more-unto-the-dance-bandcamp-track-1“No More Unto The Dance is a reflection of nightlife memories and the search for the perfect transportative electronic beat, a collection of reverberations that have fragmented with the passing of time; a mixtape that envisions echoes of times lost in the once seemingly endless dreams of a club…”

 
Available to pre-order on 19th September 2016 at our Artifacts Shop and our Bandcamp Ether Victrola. Release date 3rd October 2016.

Also will be available from Norman Records.

More details here.

 

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A Year In The Country – No More Unto The Dance pre-order and release dates

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.

Dawn Edition £12.00. Night Edition £25.00.
No More Unto The Dance-both editions-A Year In The Country
Audiological Transmissions Artifact #5

Available to pre-order on 19th September 2016 at our Artifacts Shop and our Bandcamp Ether Victrola. Release date 3rd October 2016.

Two limited editions: Dawn fold-out and Night boxset.

No More Unto The Dance-Night Edition all items-A Year In The CountryNo More Unto The Dance-Dawn Edition opened-A Year In The Country

 

Notes and Scribings:
No More Unto The Dance is a reflection of nightlife memories and the search for the perfect transportative electronic beat; a collection of reverberations that have fragmented with the passing of time.

It is a document of life once lived in the very heart of metropolises, immersed in their subcultures: a time that was predicated in part by a passion for club culture, dancing, dressing up and related explorations carried out with the obsession, enjoyment and energy of youth.

No More Unto The Dance-Night Edition landscape sticker 4-A Year In The Country

Much of that gradually (or sometimes not so gradually) faded away or took other pathways.

The world in which this recording was made does still come alive at night but it is more likely to be the nocturnal foraging and wanderings of wildlife rather than in a low-ceilinged basement lit by a strobe light.

The music presented here is the soundtrack to those basements, filtered through the looking glass of a life far removed from the bright lights and big city, the dressing up and dancing but a memory – a world far, far apart, almost that seems to belong only to the worn and aged pages of a faded, forgotten magazine.

No More Unto The Dance-Night Edition landscape sticker 1-A Year In The Country

The journey it takes envisions a mixtape of memories and echoes of those pages, of 12”s bought because of the primal rush their electronics would bring on when listened to in a record shop, the lucky dip of unknown records bought hopefully from the racks of bargain basements, the more abstract/triphop beats to be found in intriguingly designed/obscure sleeves and to times lost in the seemingly endless dreams of a club; a time when the future burned with the brightness, optimism and idealism of youth.

No More Unto The Dance-Night Edition landscape sticker 3-A Year In The Country

Memories and Echoes:
1) Dark days
2) Fractures
3) Plaintive Resonations
4) Future Dissolvation
5) Airborne At Five Minutes To Midnight
6) In The Midnight Sun
7) A Moment Of Optimism
8) The Experiment Ends
9) After The Dream
10) When Did It All Break?
11) A Revisiting Of Familiar Tropes
12) A Fanfare And A Last Hurrah

 

Available to pre-order on 19th September 2016 at our Artifacts Shop and our Bandcamp Ether Victrola. Release date 3rd October 2016.

 

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Week #35/52: Belbury Poly’s New Ways Out and strutting your stuff at the Panda Pops disco

The Belbury Poly-New Ways Out-Ghost Box Records-Jim Jupp-A Year In The Country
File Under: Trails And Influences / Year 2 wanderings

I think the first thing I read about The Belbury Poly’s New Ways Out album was this quote from Electronic Sound:

…transporting you to those especially daft places only BP can – Tizer-fuelled 70s youth club discos with side-rooms for Ouija boards…

Well, that caught the old attention somewhat and made me chuckle indeed.

One of the aspects of that quote that caught my eye was that it made me anticipate a sense of fun or playfulness from the album.

And indeed The New Ways Out has that via a set of rather catchy pop hooks, with that playfulness being quietly filtered through a Belbury Poly / Ghost Box view.

In another cultural landscape, maybe one where (to semi-quote Mr Mark Fisher) “…the circuit between the avant-garde and the mainstream isn’t broken…“, on a Thursday evening I would expect to hear the words “And now, on Top Of The Pops, The Belbury Poly with The New Harmony…”

…and 7″s of Playground Gateway would be piled up in Woolworths.

(I find myself thinking The New Harmony should be on its own 12″ single release, in a time before such things became rarities and pretty much as expensive to buy as an LP. The songs length and epic-ness would seem to lend itself to such a format).

In part, for me, the album seems to conjure up / refer to an imagined, indefinable golden age of synthesized exploration, one where such things were intertwined with the pop / mainstream music world and charts.

The Belbury Poly-New Ways Out-Ghost Box Records-Jim Jupp-poster etc-A Year In The Country-3

This is experimental / explorative music but it’s such things not as a moody teenager in its bedroom with the curtains drawn, more one that has got itself down that Panda Pops disco and is having “a bit of a boogie”.

(As an aside, I tend to think of youth club discos from back when as being more Panda Pops rather Tizer fuelled – perhaps different geographic fizzy pop distribution areas in the days before universal brand ubiquity and organisation of such things.)

In my minds eye, on that just mentioned episode of Top Of The Pops, The New Harmony would have shared a set of stages on a show that featured Kraftwerk, Donna Summer at her Moroder peak, Lieutenant Pigeon, a band playing a Chin and Chapman classic, The Wombles (said without any irony, I like The Wombles) and possibly a folk band having their pop moment in the charts inbetween moonlighting for The Bagpuss soundtrack…

…or maybe, if it was a particularly good week and just to show that the avant-garde / mainstream circuit was alive and functioning well, some early-ish work by Ms Kate Bush.

Ah, we can but dream.

A particular highlight of the album is The New Harmony – which seems to channel the aforementioned Kraftwerk, Donna Summers at her Moroder Peak and… well, who knows quite what?

Which is one of the things with this album – often it reminds you of something but you don’t know quite what that something is, it’s just on the edge of memory. There is a sense of reference points and lines drawn from the past but without it being overly or overtly retro – it is more that it exists in a separate slipstream of its own.

The Belbury Poly-New Ways Out-Ghost Box Records-Jim Jupp-stacks gs-A Year In The Country

Anyway, back to The New Harmony.

When I first heard this particular song, after a while I felt like I needed to look up to check that somehow it wasn’t playing on a seamless loop. It has a sort of endless, almost Kafka-esque quality (well, in a warm, synthesized Ghost Box manner), a sense of never leaving and it seems to make time lose traction.

Playground Gateway ends the album and in that other slipstream world it begins as though it would be the second single off the album, starting with a knockabout schoolyard glam chant air before it wanders off to soundtrack science fiction explorations featuring gleaming golden crystal, floating cities that our hero approaches via a winged white horse.

Yes indeed.

Meanwhile, Starhazy is the slightly more challenging third single that was played on late night radio, the devoted fans loved it (I can see the headlines now “Police called to break up pitched battle between Polyites and Numanoids”) and the audience on Top Of The Tops did their “not quite sure if I like this / if I should dance to this” that they often did for such things.

It wouldn’t necessarily have been quite as big in the charts but would still have had gents at EMI etc popping champagne corks to a backdrop of one those upward travelling sticky taped sales charts.

This particular vocal led song made me think of the likes of post-industrial bands such as Coil but without the sometimes portentous gloom and manner that can sometimes be found around those cultural parts.

Hey Now Here He Comes is the album’s other glam-stomp (with a mild pastoral air) that the record company wanted as an A-side in the UK, but which due to scheduling and contractual problems only came out as a small quantity of 7″s in Belgium and many years later was rediscovered and featured on the second volume of the Velvet Tinmine.

As always with the releases sent forth into the world from Ghost Box, the packaging and design adds an extra layer of  complimentary, constellatory elements to consider and peruse.

The Belbury Poly-New Ways Out-Ghost Box Records-Jim Jupp-inner-A Year In The Country

In this instance, the cover design of a cathode-ray trailed title / logo is lovingly crafted by Mr Julian House, as is often the traditional way with their releases but also inside is a fine piece of pen-smithery / illustration by Jim Jupp, the chap behind all things Belbury Poly.

This has a gentle bucolic air while also somehow managing to convey just a slight atmosphere of off-centre-ness, for some reason that I can’t quite put my finger on and it seems to be both contemporary but also to have tumbled from a never-was but is out-there-somewhere children’s television show from back when.

To begin to sum things up and coming back to that air of playfulness and the earlier moody teenager analogies, this is experimental, avant-garde, layered and culturally underpinned music that’s had a Babycham or two, learnt to kick it’s feet up, had a birrova laugh and maybe even scuffed a knee or elbow or two at morning break.

Something of a breath of fresh air. Thankyou to Mr Jim Jupp and all concerned.

Listen to and peruse New Ways Out here, in slightly newer, more fangled manner at one of Ghost Box’s ether victrolas here and amongst the notifications of The Belbury Parish Magazine here.

A few other related pathways and wanderings around these parts:

Day #52/365: The Advisory Circle and ornithological intrigueries…
Day #59/365: Signals and signposts from and via Mr Julian House
Day #64/365: Belbury Polys Geography Of Peace
Day #65/365: Mr Jim Jupp’s parish circular
Day #205/365: The interfaces between the old ways/cathode rays; twelve spinnings from an (Electric Edenic) Invisible Ghost (Juke)Box
Day #297/365: The Department of Psychological Navigation and fragments of fragments of a conversation…
Week #8/52: The Untold Story Of The British Space Programme and explorations by / courtesy of Misters Jupp, Hollings, Seatman and Mrs Oram…

(Which would be more than a few it seems…)

 

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Audiological Transmission #35/​​52​​: Howlround – Torridon Gate (excerpt)

Howlround-Torridon Gate-Robin The Fog-Chris Weaver-Resonance FM-A Year In The Country-2Revisitation #6.

We thought it would be nice to wander back to Howlround’s Torridon Gate which was produced in the following manner:

All of the music on this album was created from a single recording of a front garden gate on Torridon Road in Hither Green, London. These sounds were captured using a contact microphone and processed, looped and edited on three reel-to-reel tape machines with all electronic effects or artificial reverb strictly forbidden…

Transmissions sent, received, transmitted…

Back when there was a fair amount of considering and scribing about the album. Below is a selection of just a few of such things:

“…the missing link between Ekoplekz and On Land, or  Stahlmusik gaseously expanded into Kosmische Musik…
Simon Reynolds at Blissblog.

Howlround-Torridon Gate-Robin The Fog-Chris Weaver-Resonance FM-A Year In The Country-tape cutting loop spool

Torridon Gate is a different beast, essentially a manipulated field recording of a garden gate. But what a gate!… The Torridon Gate is a sonic symbol of a time and place, preserved by Howlround as a reminder not only of durable things, but of durable memories.  Few would recognize this as a field recording; it comes across as an experimental electronic piece, haunted by echo and hum.  The expected creaks are present, yet in these recordings, one can also hear ghosts… If one’s gate sounded like this, would one venture outside to close it?  Perhaps not.  But one’s gate does sound like this; we’re simply unable to hear it.  This is the whole point of A Year In The Country’s Artifact Shop –  to uncover what is veiled, even if it remains beyond our comprehension.
Richard Allen at A Closer Listen.

Torridon Gate will transport you – from Jupiter’s Moons to the Mines Of Moria. You might be led to believe that the Gate is an extraterrestrial artifact to fold space and time, but in fact, it’s just an ordinary garden gate.”
Forest Punk

Howlround-Torridon Gate-Robin The Fog-Chris Weaver-A Year In The Country-Day Edition-reel with transparent text page on top

Beautifully different, utterly chillingly and curiously affecting. …There is something… at play here; a desire to manipulate sound, twist it into shapes that emote, that frighten, entrance and ultimately affect the listener on a deep, instinctive, physical and emotional level…”
Grey Malkin at The Active Listener

The gate’s squeaks become sounding mountains, and clouds of melodic atmospheres float through the piece. It’s an ordinary object made hauntingly strange.
Louise Gray at Music Works.

Howlround’s recording succeeds by obfuscating the source, rendering the ‘real’ unreal and transforming the ordinary into an other-worldly phenomenon…
Robin Tomens at Include Me Out.

Howlround-Torridon Gate-Robin The Fog-Chris Weaver-A Year In The Country-Day Edition-front of booklet

This third album from London’s finest manipulators of magnetic tape, Howlround, is a slow burning, deeply atmospheric corker.  Produced entirely from recordings made from the gate referenced in the title, the duo of Robin (the Fog) and Chris (Weaver) have coaxed a dizzying array of unsettling and even sorrowful sounds from this most functional of objects and have layered them to astonishing effect.
Ian Holloway at The Quiet World.

 

Howlround related wanderings around these parts:
Day #142/365: Fog Signals/Ghost signals from lost transmission centres

Day #296/365: Howlround’s ether handbill… and a hop, skip and jump to curious links between mirror world reflections of our times, the work of previous audiological explorers, certain English gents and printed/bound spectral considerations…

Day #356/365: Audiological Reflections and Pathways #6; fading vessellings

 

Howlround can be found in the ether here. Erstwhile Howlround-ers Robin The Fog and Christopher Weaver can be found here and here.

The album can be found at our Artifacts Shop and our Bandcamp Ether Victrola.

 

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Week #34/52: Restricted Areas – Further Wanderings Amongst A Bear’s Ghosts

Danila tkachenko-Restricted Areas-Dewi Lewis Publishing-A Year In The Country-2
File Under: Trails And Influences / Year 2 wanderings

Not so long ago I came across Danila Tkachenko’s Restricted Areas work and it somewhat haunted me.

There is limited space on the shelves of A Year In The Country’s archival storage but this is a particular book which has been found a home there and I am rather glad it has as each time it catches my eye and mind, it causes me to briefly stop and wander.

The photographs are of abandoned hardware, secret cities and installations from the Soviet Union during the Cold War period.

Danila tkachenko-Restricted Areas-Dewi Lewis Publishing-A Year In The Country

They include experimental laser systems, former party headquarters, antenna built for interplanetary connection with bases on other planets which were planned for once upon a time, a city where rocket engines were produced which was closed to outsiders until 1992, the world’s largest diesel submarine becalmed and landlocked, a former mining town which has now become a bombing trial field, a particularly striking amphibuous vertical take-off aeroplane built in a very limited edition of but two, space capsules left sadly alone and so forth.

In many ways, the spirit of the photographs seem like a different time and places hauntology, a differing but also partly parallel strand to that which has come about in the UK / the West and its sense of an observation / mourning / yearning for a more utopian future which never came about.

Danila Tkachenko says of the places, structures, equipment, vehicles and mechanisms he has photographed:

Those places lost their significance together with the utopian ideology which is now obsolete. The perfect technocratic future that never came.

Interestingly, every photograph is of a snow covered / bound scene but this is not referred to anywhere in the text.

This lends a stark, isolated and also kind of naturally cleansed and beautiful, minimal aesthetic to these photographs of stilled monuments to a past and future that is no more.

Danila tkachenko-Restricted Areas-Dewi Lewis Publishing-collage gs-A Year In The Country-4

Looking at the images again now, there is a certain iconographic nature to them, their shapes, silhouettes and geometries seem inherently imbued with, to capture and distill a certain progressive, utopian, striving Soviet philosophy.

Danila tkachenko-Restricted Areas-Dewi Lewis Publishing-A Year In The Country-3

Published by Dewi Lewis Publishing (something of a returning point of interest around these parts I tend to find), it is a particularly handsomely produced book; initially opening in an unusual tri-fold manner which reveals a map of the areas of this former empire, before progressing to accompanying text / imagery and which for some reason makes it feel like / me think of some lost cartographers document.

I think one of the things that appeals is that there is a certain calmness to the book, which is I expect in no small part due to there actually being quite a small number of images contained therein, as opposed to an almost overwhelming, possibly jading deluge that is difficult to take in during one viewing / journeying through, as may sometimes be the case in larger volumes.

Although the work / book stands on its own as something of a unique document, it could also be seen to be part of a small but quietly growing library of Soviet ghosts, some of which I have visited around these parts before.

These would include  Jan Kempenaers Spomenik, which documents memorials from behind the once iron curtain, Christopher Herwig’s recording of the accidental utilitarian art of Soviet Bus Stops and the literally betitled Soviet Ghosts by Rebecca Litchfield, which is a Westerner’s view and wandering of often stately, still elegant Soviet Era abandoned buildings and infrastructure.

I could well also add Stephen Coate’s X-Ray Audio, which is a book which researches bootleg LPs that were produced in that previous era and utilised x-ray plates rather than vinyl / shellac.

Visit Restricted Areas at Danila Tkachenko home in the ether here and at Dewi Lewis Publishing here.

Find the other just mentioned bear’s ghosts elsewhere in the ether here, here, here and here.

 

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Audiological Transmission #34/​​52​​: She Rocola – Burn The Witch

She Rocola-Burn The Witch-Molly Leigh Of The Mother Town-Day Edition-front of booklet-A Year In The CountryRevisitation #5.

Now, we have something of a soft spot for this here track and its companion.

In amongst the A Year In The Country releases it may well be a turning down more overtly folk horror (or should that be folk noir, more of which in a moment?) pathways, accompanied by the phantasmagorical remembering of childhood rhymes to be found in Molly Leigh, which is inspired by Ms Rocola’s…

“…personal folklore and that of her home town; childhood experiences of chasing her playmates around Molly Leigh’s grave and the rhymes which accompanied such games. It is an audiological conjuring of hazy, sleepy small-hours memories and dreams from those times.

Transmissions sent, received, transmitted: the single garnered some rather fine considerations and scribing, a pairing of which are below:

She Rocola conjures one the most bewitching releases of the last few months… Burn The Witch” begins with urgent stabs and wails of violin and an immediate sense of foreboding. Rocola intones the witches’ fate, vocal harmonies layering ghostlike amidst the baroque setting, her voice endlessly repeating “make her leave my mind”… a subtle but powerful spell. Inspired by “childhood memories and by formative viewings of late-night folk-horror films from in front of and behind the sofa” this is a hallucinatory and haunting piece of folk noir.

“Second track “Molly Leigh Of The Mother Town” is a music box filled shimmer of dread, acoustic guitars casting spectral shadows under the repeated nursery rhyme mantra of the verse. The voice of the witch speaks, intertwining with the sounds of the children’s twisted game. It is both utterly unique and completely hypnotic; this is gothic folk like you have never heard before.

By Grey Malkin (of The Hare And The Moon) at The Active Listener.

She Rocola-Burn The Witch-revisiting-artwork-A Year In The Country

… few 45s of the last couple of years can catch up with this one… Molly Leigh Of The Mother Town” is the kind of nursery rhyme you never learned at your mother’s knee, but which buried itself in your memory regardless, to peer out of the soil whhile you’re hopscotching past, and wrap bony fingers round your ankle; “Burn the Witch” is freakish fiddles (by Andrea Fiorito) that scratch behind She’s icy vocal and spectral harmonies, a Hammer film condensed to two minutes of sound and effects.

By Dave Thompson (author of many a tome or two or hundred or so) at Goldmine.

 

Burn The Witch wanderings around these parts:She Rocola-Burn The Witch-Ellen Terry beetlewing dress-Zoe Lloyd-Mrs Nettleship-A Year In The Country
Day #39/365: Burn The Witch by Ms She Rocola, a stately repose amongst the corn rigs and Victorian light catching

The Victorian light catching in question is the photograph of Ms Rocola that accompanied the release, by Zoe Lloyd:

a stately repose amongst the rural landscape and corn rigs, a folkloric meandering through the textures of Sarah Moon and Deborah Turbeville (this particular entrancing of the soul was created using light catching techniques from previous eras – traditional wet plate to be more precise)...

She Rocola-Burn The Witch-all versions-revisiting-A Year In The Country
Night, Day, Arising, Owl Light and Dawn encasements:

Day #273/365: Artifact #39/52; She Rocola Burn The Witch / Molly Leigh Of The Mother town CD released – Night / Day Editions

Day #280/365: Artifact #40/52; She Rocola Burn The Witch / Molly Leigh Of The Mother Town; The Arising Edition – archival print and 3″ CD released

Day #304/365: Artifact #43/52; She Rocola Burn The Witch / Molly Leigh Of The Mother Town CDs released – Owl Light / Dawn Editions

 

Burn The Witch (2014):
Words; She Rocola. Music: Andrea Fiorito. Vocals: She Rocola. Violin: Andrea Fiorito.

Recorded and produced by Joe Whitney and Andrea Fiorito.

Elsewhere in the ether: She Rocola. Mr Whitney.

 

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Week #33/52: Bunker Archives #4; Paul Virilio’s Bunker Archaeology and accidental utilitarian art

Paul Virilio-Bunker Archaeology-Princeton Architectural Press-A Year In The Country-2b
File Under: Trails And Influences / Year 2 wanderings

I relatively recently came across Paul Virilio’s Bunker Archaeology work/book, which collects his photography and writing on the abandoned German bunkers and related installations that lie along the coast of France.

These could well be filed as a form of brutalist architecture, they share more than a few similarities in terms of the materials used and their aesthetics – although if this is a form modernism it is the one you don’t want to come around for tea, thankyou very much.

Strangely though, considering their once aggressive/defensive intentions, there seems to be a beauty or even poetry to these structures – some kind of unifying flow or even philosophy behind them.

Paul Virilio-Bunker Archaeology-Princeton Architectural Press-A Year In The Country-1

(Which I suppose, unfortunately, in a way there was – although I was more referring to a cultural/artistic aspect than their political underpinning. However I suppose such things were more than a little intertwined.)

Now, I am wary of making light of such things, considering their history but they seem to almost be a form of accidental utilitarian art, something they share with say the likes of similarly appreciated pragmatic constructions such as telegraph poles, pylons, Soviet era bus stops or even library music…

Although they were created with a very practical intent, looking at them now they seem nearer to monuments or tributes and remind me of the Cold War era Spomenik memorials that Jan Kempenaers photographed.

With both sets of structures, whatever their original intents, viewing them today they could be artifacts from an almost science fiction-esque future that never was, a form of hauntology possibly.

Paul Virilio-Bunker Archaeology-Princeton Architectural Press-A Year In The Country-3b

That science fiction-esque quality seems particularly present in some of the structures that have been partly covered by/sunk into the sand – there is something about them that makes me think of sentient or anthropomorphic crashed spaceships, alongside their actuality as bunkers and defensive outposts.

(The original Planet Of The Apes film comes to mind with its mingling of crashed future/past visitors and part buried monuments to mans’ folly.)

Paul Virilio-Bunker Archaeology-Princeton Architectural Press-A Year In The Country-4b

As a final point, the photograph I find the most chilling is the one that shows an observation tower which was disguised as a church.

As mentioned recently around these parts, John Coulthart described The Cold War Bunker as “a source of contemporary horror that doesn’t require any supernatural component to chill the blood.

In an interconnected, antecedent manner, this particular structure does that and has a sense of belonging to almost folk-horror-like tropes and imagery.

 

The reissue of the book can be found here and here.

A few intertwined pathways around these parts:

Day #229/365: A Bear’s Ghosts…

Day #279/365: The Telegraph Pole Appreciation Society

Day #282/365: Further appreciations of accidental art; Poles and Pylons

Week #9/52: Christopher Herwig’s Soviet Bus Stops, echoes of reaching for the cosmos, folkloric breakfast adornment and other artfully pragmatic curio collectings, encasings and bindings…

 

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Audiological Transmission #33​/​​​​​​52​​: The Quietened Bunker – Waiting For The Blazing Skies

The Quietened Bunker-David Colohan-A Year In The Country-1400-2

Audiological exploration by David Colohan from the album The Quietened Bunker.

The album is available via our Artifacts Shop, at our Bandcamp Ether Victrola and at Norman Records.

The Quietened Bunker-David Colohan-A Year In The Country-BCTransmission sent, received, transmitted: intertwined cultural considerations and wanderings by John Coulthart at Feuilleton:

…The Cold War bunker is more than another empty space… a source of contemporary horror that doesn’t require any supernatural component to chill the blood.

 

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The Quietened Bunker – Night and Dawn editions released

The Quietened Bunker-Night and Dawn Editions-release date-A Year In The Country-2

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.

Audiological Transmissions Artifact #4
The Quietened Bunker is an exploration of the abandoned and/or decommissioned Cold War installations which lie under the land and that would have acted as selectively populated refuges/control centres if the button was ever pushed; a study and reflection on these chimeric bulwarks and the faded but still present memory of associated Cold War dread, of which they are stalwart, mouldering symbols.

Audiological contents created by Keith Seatman, Grey Frequency, A Year In The Country, Panabrite, Polypores, Listening Center, Time Attendant, Unknown Heretic and David Colohan.

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

Available via our Artifacts Shop, our Bandcamp Ether Victrola and at Norman Records.
Released today, 15th August 2016.

 

 

Night Edition. Limited to 52 copies. £25.00.
Hand-finished box-set contains: album on 1 x all black CDr, 12 page string bound booklet, 4 x badge pack, 4 x sticker pack & landscape format sticker.
The Quietened Bunker-Night Edition-front-A Year In The CountryThe Quietened Bunker-Night Edition-all items-A Year In The CountryThe Quietened Bunker-Night Edition-opened-A Year In The Country

The Quietened Bunker-Night Edition-inside of booklet-A Year In The CountryThe Quietened Bunker-all-black-cdr-A-Year-In-The-Country
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) 4 x vinyl style sticker pack, contained in a see-through polythene bag with a folded card header.
7) 1 x vinyl style landscape format sticker.

 

Dawn Edition. Limited to 104 copies. £12.00.
Hand-finished 1 x white/black CDr album in textured recycled fold out sleeve with inserts and badge.
The Quietened Bunker-Dawn Edition-front-A Year In The CountryThe-Quietened-Bunker-Dawn-Edition-opened-A-Year-In-The-Country-1

The Quietened Bunker-Dawn Edition-back-A Year In The CountryThe Quietened Bunker-white-and-black-CDr-A-Year-In-The-Country
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.

 

Notes and Scribings:
The Quietened Bunker is an exploration of the abandoned and/or decommissioned Cold War installations which lie under the land and that would have acted as selectively populated refuges/control centres if the button was ever pushed.

The Quietened Bunker-Panabrite-A Year In The Country

They could be seen as once modern fortresses – reinforced concrete and blast doors replacing moats and stone battlements.

However, these subterranean fortresses would likely also have been places of entombment – somewhere that those who once ran the infrastructure and defence of the nation would watch the days pass as supplies dwindled and the inevitable time came when the air filters would give out, all long before the world would become habitable again.

Accompanying the main bunkers in the UK were a network of hundreds of small underground monitoring posts which would report on the size of an attack and the resulting fallout. Manned by volunteers, they were to be operational for just three weeks.

The intention was that these would form part of a network of civil defence and management, accompanied by government issued Protect and Survive leaflets/broadcasts that would have offered advice on how to protect home and hearth via little more than whitewashing windows as blast protection and forming a shelter by leaning mattresses against an inner wall of your house.

Time Attendant-Crafty Mechanics-The Quietened Bunker-A Year In The Country-with stroke

Looking back, such preparations can seem a reflection of some kind of madness or delusion in the collective consciousness and the halls of power – a tilting at windmills that was necessary to protect national psyches from the reality and aftermath of the sudden use and descending of mechanisms with almost indescribable destructive power.

Now it can all seem like a dream from another world, one where for a number of decades populations lived under the day-to-day threat of total annihilation and where millions was spent on this network of shelters and defences; preparations to allow fiddling once all had burned, such bunkers possibly being nearer to utilitarian national follies than fortresses.

Indeed, today they are as likely to be signposted tourist attractions as operative defences.

The Quietened Bunker reflects on these chimeric bulwarks and the faded but still present memory of associated Cold War dread, of which they are stalwart, mouldering symbols.

 

The Quietened Bunker-Dawn and Night editions-opened-release date-A Year In The CountryFurther Audiological Contents Details:
1) Lower Level Clock Room – Keith Seatman
2) Drakelow Tunnels – Grey Frequency
3) The Filter’s Gone / The Last Man Plays The Last Piano – A Year In The Country
4) Aggregates II – Panabrite
5) Bunker 4: Decommissioned – Polypores
6) Comms: Seen Through The Grey – Listening Center
7) Crafty Mechanics – Time Attendant
8) Crush Depth – Unknown Heretic
9) Waiting For The Blazing Skies – David Colohan

Artwork / packaging design and fabrication by AYITC Ocular Signals Department

Audiological Transmission Artifact #4
Library Reference Numbers: ATA004N / ATA004D

 

“…a conceptual compilation of excellently eerie electronic music…” Simon Reynolds, author of Retromania and Energy Flash

 

Available via our Artifacts Shop, our Bandcamp Ether Victrola and at Norman Records.
Released today, 15th August 2016.

 

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Week #32/52: Bunker Archives #3: Wargames, Hollywood phantoms and phantasms and the only winning move is not to play

Wargames-1983 film-A Year In The Country
File Under: Trails And Influences / Year 2 wanderings

Continuing on from a theme of Cold War / apocalypse dread gone pop (see here), I recently sat down and rewatched Wargames, a 1983 mainstream Hollywood film, which alongside a tendency in the early to mid-eighties for pop music that was themed around such things to do well commercially, this film was placed fifth in that years highest grossing films in the US.

It is a film that I guess was largely aimed at a young adult / teenage audience and it shares some aspects / tropes / archetypes with classic John Hughes teen comedies from around that time but, well, this isn’t so much about being just a geek and an outsider and maybe getting the girl, this is about being a geek and an outsider and getting the girl but to a background of computer hacking and apocalyptic mutually assured destruction superpower conflict.

Ferris Bueller-John Hughes-War Games-1983-A Year In The Country-2
(Spot the mildly parent worrying, goof-about doppleganger…)

Actually, it doesn’t just share some aspects / tropes with those comedies –  it shares a main actor in Matthew Broderick, who was also the loveable goof-about seize-the-day-er Ferris Bueller.

Both share the same resourceful grown-ups system manipulation skills with computers (one changes his number of absent days on the school computer, the other his grades and almost instigates worldwide destruction and conflict. Comme ci comme ça and more of such things in but a moment).

Is this a game or is it real?

Wargames is based around a defence computer which is in charge of launching a US attack playing a, well, wargame after the film’s main character hacks into it when looking for a new range of more harmless computer games and asks to play a game with it. The computer can’t distinguish between games or reality and thinks that to win it must literally carry out an attack.

One period curio aspect of the film is the seeming omnipotence of the young hacker, his ability to do more or less anything, to break into anywhere; which ties in with a back then media obsession with such things and the hacker as another example of youthful possible folk devil.

There seems to be an ongoing theme of young adult fiction / films dealing with dystopian and/or apocalyptic scenarios – in contemporary times The Hunger Games does just that, Nicholas Fisk’s books/series such as The Tripods did similar back when.

What is different with Wargames is that this isn’t set against some harmless future fantasy despotism or alien invasion brought down by resourceful teenagers but rather the threat here was very real and present in the world and popular consciousness.

Wargames-film 1983-posters-A Year In The Country-3
(A certain internationalism…)

What you see on those screens up there is a fantasy, a computer enhanced hallucination. Those blips are not real missiles. They’re phantoms.

In line with those other fictions, Wargames also seems to have as its core a sort of wish fulfilment or empowerment of the teenager as the one who will save the day, who will beat the evil power or who has the right-headed way of looking at things rather than the pigheaded (or sometimes more or less absent) adults.

I’ve seen Wargames described as “popcorn friviolity”, which would seem to imply that it’s just escapist, throwaway fun that sat alongside other such escapist, throwaway fun.

While this is undoubtably a thoroughly enjoyable and yes, fun, film, even now it’s also rather underlyingly tense, in part due to its presentation and plotting but in large part because of the just mentoned reality of the threat it deals with.

Even now, that is the case but back in 1983 when the Cold War was at one of its peaks?

(As an aside, fun and seriousness don’t have to preclude one another. Entertainment and message/debate are not necessarily mutually exclusive states. Such ways of seeing things are probably part of a cultural reviewing and consideration whereby it can be hard to admit to “worthy” work as also being the f(un) word.)

Wargames-1983 film-A Year In The Country-2

Talking of games… One thing I thought when watching the film is that it is strange to think that many of the instruments, mechanisms and associated infrastructure from the Cold War are still out there.

Or rather that should probably be under there as they are often placed below ground for protective / stealth purposes (as indeed is much of the technology / equipment of War Games – several of its big set pieces and locations are in underground bunkers and control centres).

It is as though the game has been put to one side of the collective consciousness but the pieces haven’t been cleared from the chess board, more the whole thing has been swept under a literal and figurative subterranean covering. Semi-forgotten but not gone.

 

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Audiological Transmission #32/​​​​​52​​: The Quietened Bunker – Crafty Mechanics

Time Attendant-Crafty Mechanics-The Quietened Bunker-A Year In The Country-with stroke

Audiological exploration by Time Attendant from the album The Quietened Bunker.

The album is available via our Artifacts Shop, at our Bandcamp Ether Victrola and at Norman Records.

BC-Time Attendant-Crafty Mechanics-The Quietened Bunker-A Year In The Country-with stroke 2Transmission sent, received, transmitted: Considerations of The Quietened Bunker at A Closer Listen:

Time Attendant’s “Crafty Mechanics” contains the elements of a club track, but is not for dancing; it’s what a club might sound like if all the machines wound down. 

 

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

Frankie Goes To Hollywood-Two Tribes-OMD-Two Tribes-Jona Lewie-Stop The Cavalry-Trailblazers-Sky Arts-A Year In The Country
File Under: Trails And Influences / Year 2 wanderings

Now, I’m wary of sounding like an old curmudgeon, waving my stick around and saying “It was all once fields around these parts and you could tell what they were singing about and that about wasn’t just always boys, girls and going out” but casting my mind back there seems to be a very particular corner of pop music that once dealt quite specifically with Cold War apocalypse / dread.

This wasn’t niche music – these were records that would reach at least the top twenty of the UK pop charts, maybe even become the toppermost of the poppermost and be the number one selling records of their time (generally around 1980-ish to the mid-eighties).

Also, this was at a time when doing so meant they were a large part of the national conversation / consciousness and may well mean selling hundreds of thousands or more of physical singles.

There are more but to mention just a few:

Nena’s 99 Red Balloons, The Pirahnas Tom Hark and spoiler alert for if you think it’s a nice, slightly melancholic pop song (as did I until I found out differently relatively recently) – Strawberry Switchblade’s Since Yesterday.

Then there’s Ultravox’s Dancing With Tears In My Eyes (essentially a song based on a book about deciding how you will live through the end via wind carried fallout in a country that has avoided the main attack), OMD’s Enola Gay and something of a surprise for a pop poppet – Nik Kershaw’s I Won’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me.

I could well also include Jona Lewie’s Stop The Cavalry – which while it is more a general anti-war song, also seems to imply some kind of time schism in its mixing of references to early twentieth century and Cold War conflicts…

Kate Bush-Breathing-Never For Ever-Nik Kershaw-I Wont Let The Sun Go Down On Me-Trailblazers-Sky Arts-A Year In The Country

…and possibly even Blondie’s Atomic, which although its lyrics are minimal and almost abstract, with its sense of dramatic dread (and glamour) and the accompanying post-apocalyptic-disco video / mushroom cloud single cover, I think it may well belong amongst this corner of pop music.

And possibly the chart success daddy of them all (in the UK at least) Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s Two Tribes.

Now, as I say these were hardly niche pop songs. Here are a few UK peak chart positions:

99 Red Ballons – No.1. Tom Hark – No.6. Since Yesterday – No.5. Dancing With Tears In My Eyes – No.3. Enola Gay – No.8. I Won’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me – No.2. Stop The Cavalry – No.3. Atomic – No. 1. Two Tribes – No.1 (for nine weeks indeed).

Even something like Kate Bush’s Breathing, which I think of as a hit but it didn’t reach the then all important Top 40, peaking at No. 48, seems to linger in pop memory and the album it was on went to number 1.

The background to all this was one of the heightened points of the Cold War and international defence policy that seemed to “subscribe to the point of view that the more dangerous we make the world, the safer we are“.

That quote is from a fascinating documentary which is part of a series called Trailblazers:

Narrated by Noddy Holder, this eye-opening series examines the key moments that have shaped musical history, starting with a look at the origins of disco music.”

Blondie-Atomic-The Smiths-Ask-Nena-99 Red Balloons-Trailblazers-Sky Arts-A Year In The Country

There is one episode that focuses on the above loose gathering of chart topping protest pop, something of a surprising cuckoo in the nest amongst the more obvious looks at say disco, funk, punk and goth (the last worth watching in part to hear Mr Noddy Holder say in his inimitable manner “Goth, not me guv” and describing Madchester related bands when signalling the end of mainstream goth popularity as “Baggy panted vampire hunters”).

Although the description of the episode talks about the evolution of such protest songs “from western swing and country to gospel, jazz and rockabilly“, actually it largely focuses on the early to mid-eighties of chart pop.

One of the most fascinating sections is where Frankie Goes To Hollywood producer Trevor Horn talks about the Protect And Survive public defence instruction voiceover parts on that just mentioned daddy of them all, Two Tribes.

Apparently it went something like this:

Paul Morley – sort of the philosophiser/organiser/provocateur behind ZTT, who were FGTH’s label, which was co-owned by Trevor Horn –  had a bootleg of Protect And Survive information films, which at the time were classified (before they were, you know, freely available on popular commercial internet video channels or to buy on DVD).

Rather than steal / sample the voiceovers from them, they hired Patrick Allen who had done them for the actual government broadcasts (at the time his was a nationally known, possibly intended to be reassuring voice, as he also did well known television commercials such as for Barratt Homes).

It cost them about £1000 (which seems cheap now) but when they showed him what he was to read, he said “I don’t think I can do this. Where have you got this from? You know I had to sign the Official Secrets Act before I did this?

And then apparently he went “F*** it, I’m going to do it. You know you missed a few bits out. There was one bit that particularly upset me…

(That bit, if you should wish to know, concerned disposals. I shall say no more.)

The Pirahnas-Tom Hark-Dancing With Tears In My Eyes-Ultravox-Strawberry Switchblade-Since Yesterday-Trailblazers-Sky Arts-A Year In The Country

It’s strange to think and write about all this as it seems such a million miles away from popular music entertainment and its concerns today and although in a way all such things could really say was…

When two tribes go to war, a point is all you can score“…

…well, at least it was being said – and was part of a wider sense of the then alive and well functioning of the “circuit between the experimental, the avant-garde and the popular” (to quote myself quoting Mr Mark Fisher).

I think I shall leave the last word to program participant Billy Bragg: he says about when in recent times he was listening to The Smiths Ask single (more a large scale cult rock band release but it still peaked at No.14) in the car with his teenage son and when the lyric went “Because if it’s not love, then it’s the bomb, the bomb, the bomb, the bomb, the bomb, the bomb, the bomb that will bring us together“, his teenage son asked “What bomb?“.

Mr Braggs response was he thought “plus ça change“.

More information on the episode of Trailblazers here. Peruse “The Official Charts” (I feel that should be in bold with stars) here. The more now-an-archiving-than-chart-topping home of ZTT in the ether here. A considerable number of other such related popsongs and not-so-popsongs can be found here.

 

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Audiological Transmission #31/​​​​52​​: The Quietened Bunker – Aggregates II

The Quietened Bunker-Panabrite-A Year In The Country

Audiological exploration by Panabrite from the album The Quietened Bunker.

The album is available via our Artifacts Shop, at our Bandcamp Ether Victrola and at Norman Records.

BC-The Quietened Bunker-Panabrite-A Year In The CountryTransmission sent, received, transmitted (or should that be scribed?): there’s a rather fine and lovely handwritten consideration of The Quietened Bunker at Was Ist Das?

Tip of the hat to Ned indeed.

Was Ist Das?-The Quietened Bunker review extract-A Year In The Country

 

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The Quietened Bunker. Night and Dawn Editions preorder.

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.

Dawn Edition £12.00. Night Edition £25.00.
The Quietened Bunker-Night and Dawn Editions-front-A Year In The CountryAudiological Transmissions Artifact #4
The Quietened Bunker is an exploration of the abandoned and/or decommissioned Cold War installations which lie under the land and that would have acted as selectively populated refuges/control centres if the button was ever pushed; a study and reflection on these chimeric bulwarks and the faded but still present memory of associated Cold War dread, of which they are stalwart, mouldering symbols.

Audiological contents created by Keith Seatman, Grey Frequency, A Year In The Country, Panabrite, Polypores, Listening Center, Time Attendant, Unknown Heretic and David Colohan.

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

Available via our Artifacts Shop, our Bandcamp Ether Victrola and at Norman Records.
Release date 15th August 2016. 

 

Night Edition. Limited to 52 copies. £25.00.
Hand-finished box-set contains: album on all black CDr, 12 page string bound booklet, 4 x badge pack, 4 x sticker pack & landscape format sticker.
The Quietened Bunker-Night Edition-front-A Year In The CountryThe Quietened Bunker-Night Edition-all items-A Year In The CountryThe Quietened Bunker-Night Edition-opened-A Year In The CountryThe Quietened Bunker-Night Edition-inside of booklet-A Year In The CountryThe Quietened Bunker-all-black-cdr-A-Year-In-The-Country
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) 4 x vinyl style sticker pack, contained in a see-through polythene bag with a folded card header.
7) 1 x vinyl style landscape format sticker.

 

Dawn Edition. Limited to 104 copies. £12.00.
Hand-finished white/black CDr album in textured recycled fold out sleeve with inserts and badge.
The Quietened Bunker-Dawn Edition-front-A Year In The CountryThe-Quietened-Bunker-Dawn-Edition-opened-A-Year-In-The-Country-1The Quietened Bunker-Dawn Edition-back-A Year In The CountryThe Quietened Bunker-white-and-black-CDr-A-Year-In-The-Country
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.

 

Notes and Scribings:
The Quietened Bunker is an exploration of the abandoned and/or decommissioned Cold War installations which lie under the land and that would have acted as selectively populated refuges/control centres if the button was ever pushed.

The Quietened Bunker-Night Editions-landscape sticker artwork-A Year In The Country

They could be seen as once modern fortresses – reinforced concrete and blast doors replacing moats and stone battlements.

However, these subterranean fortresses would likely also have been places of entombment – somewhere that those who once ran the infrastructure and defence of the nation would watch the days pass as supplies dwindled and the inevitable time came when the air filters would give out, all long before the world would become habitable again.

Accompanying the main bunkers in the UK were a network of hundreds of small underground monitoring posts which would report on the size of an attack and the resulting fallout. Manned by volunteers, they were to be operational for just three weeks.

The intention was that these would form part of a network of civil defence and management, accompanied by government issued Protect and Survive leaflets/broadcasts that would have offered advice on how to protect home and hearth via little more than whitewashing windows as blast protection and forming a shelter by leaning mattresses against an inner wall of your house.

The Quietened Bunker-landscape artwork 3-A Year In The Country

Looking back, such preparations can seem a reflection of some kind of madness or delusion in the collective consciousness and the halls of power – a tilting at windmills that was necessary to protect national psyches from the reality and aftermath of the sudden use and descending of mechanisms with almost indescribable destructive power.

Now it can all seem like a dream from another world, one where for a number of decades populations lived under the day-to-day threat of total annihilation and where millions was spent on this network of shelters and defences; preparations to allow fiddling once all had burned, such bunkers possibly being nearer to utilitarian national follies than fortresses.

Indeed, today they are as likely to be signposted tourist attractions as operative defences.

The Quietened Bunker reflects on these chimeric bulwarks and the faded but still present memory of associated Cold War dread, of which they are stalwart, mouldering symbols.

 

Further Audiological Contents Details:
1) Lower Level Clock Room – Keith Seatman
2) Drakelow Tunnels – Grey Frequency
3) The Filter’s Gone / The Last Man Plays The Last Piano – A Year In The Country
4) Aggregates II – Panabrite
5) Bunker 4: Decommissioned – Polypores
6) Comms: Seen Through The Grey – Listening Center
7) Crafty Mechanics – Time Attendant
8) Crush Depth – Unknown Heretic
9) Waiting For The Blazing Skies – David Colohan

Artwork / packaging design and fabrication by AYITC Ocular Signals Department

Audiological Transmission Artifact #4
Library Reference Numbers: ATA004N / ATA004D

 

 

Available via our Artifacts Shop, our Bandcamp Ether Victrola and at Norman Records.
Release date 15th August 2016. 

 

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Week #30/52: The Quietened Bunker Archives #1; A Lovely Day Out / Not Your Average Des Res

The Quietened Bunker-secret bunker tourist road signs-A Year In The Country
File Under: Trails And Influences / Year 2 wanderings

Talking of decommissioned bunkers that “…are as likely to be signposted tourist attractions as operative defences” (see here)…

Sometimes you see something and your mind literally stops in its tracks trying to process it.

The first time I saw a photograph of a road sign for a decommissioned “secret” bunker was just one of those.

(It was actually in B*llocks To Alton Towers – Uncommonly British Days Out.)

I know that these signposts are for tourist attractions that are trading on the once confidential nature of these installations but still…

The Quietened Bunker-secret bunker tourist road signs-A Year In The Country-2

…I just find that I have some kind of disconnect when I see them – a sort of mixture of disbelief, humour, relief that we are nolonger living in a political situation where they are considered necessary and maybe a touch of sadness/anger/grief for us having once done so.

In part I think that disconnect is due to the terribly, terribly Britishness of names like Chipping Ongar and Chigwell, their often positioning in amongst day-to-day normal housing or the gentle grey-green of the land but juxtaposed with these signposts to once-end-of-days refuges.

Should I laugh or shake a fist? I’m not quite sure.

The Quietened Bunker-secret bunker tourist road signs-A Year In The Country-3 copy

(As an aside, for some reason the signpost above is one of my favourites – if that is an appropriate word to use at this point. I don’t think that it’s an official roadside sign, more probably one that’s been privately errected but there’s something about its quiet neglect, the hand done repair / change.

In one photograph I have seen of it, nature is encroaching and the sign is covered with a layering of green algae and somehow there’s some kind of poignancy, beauty and a touch of melancholy to it.)

The Quietened Bunker-For Sale-A Year In The Country

Accompanying and interconnected with such road signs are the estate agent signs for when one such place is up for sale.

Now I first heard of such a thing on the radio a while ago but it never occurred to me that there would be literal, actual hoardings advertising them.

I find it hard to not stop at this point and start making up sketches for a sitcom called Whoops Apocalypse – except that’s already been done.

When I saw this particular sign, once my mind had stopped being stopped in its tracks, I kind of jokily but seriously started to wander about the practicalities of such things.

Is it a buyer or a sellers market? There is scarcity value to the property but I expect only a very limited number of potential buyers and allowable uses (data storage seems to be one such usage that is mentioned on these boards – so no A3 planning permission for a spacious and yet still bijou and intimate diner then?).

Are such things listed on general property / commercial property sites, so that your search results would bring up say a warehouse for rent, listed as having plenty of onsite parking and then a former secret bunker listed as razor wire and  catastrophic occurrence / emergency air filtration system included?

My already more than slightly confused and bemused mind boggles.

Well, I feel I should end this post on a further note of I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

 

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Audiological Transmission #30​/​​​​​52​​: The Quietened Bunker – Drakelow Tunnels

The Quietened Bunker-Grey Frequency-Drakelow Tunnels-A Year In The Country

Audiological exploration by Grey Frequency from the album The Quietened Bunker.

Pre-order 1st August 2016. Release date 15th August 2016.

The album will be available via our Artifacts Shop, at our Bandcamp Ether Victrola and at Norman Records.

The Quietened Bunker-Grey Frequency-Drakelow Tunnels-A Year In The Country-700The Quietened Bunker is an exploration of the abandoned and/or decomissioned Cold War installations which lie under the land and that would have acted as selectively populated refuges/control centres if the button was ever pushed; a study and reflection on these chimeric bulwarks and the faded but still present memory of associated Cold War dread, of which they are stalwart, mouldering symbols.

Looking back, such preparations can seem a reflection of some kind of madness or delusion in the collective consciousness and the halls of power – a tilting at windmills that was necessary to protect national psyches from the reality and aftermath of the sudden use and descending of mechanisms with almost indescribable destructive power.

“Now it can all seem like a dream from another world, one where for a number of decades populations lived under the day-to-day threat of total annihilation and where millions was spent on this network of shelters and defences; preparations to allow fiddling once all had burned, such bunkers possibly being nearer to utilitarian national follies than fortresses.

Indeed, today they are as likely to be signposted tourist attractions as operative defences.
(From the notes that accompany The Quietened Bunker.)

Audiological contents for the album created by Keith Seatman, Grey Frequency, A Year In The Country, Panabrite, Polypores, Listening Center, Time Attendant, Unknown Heretic and David Colohan.

Further details of The Quietened Bunker can also be found amongst the reaping and ingatherings of Heathen Harvest.

 

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Fractures – ether wanderings and a gathering of transmissions

Fractures-digital distribution and gathering-2-with stroke

Alongside its corporeal encasements at our Artifacts Shop and amongst the zeros and ones of our Bandcamp Ether Victrola, the Fractures album has gone a-wandering and winding its way through the ether and is now available at various new(ish) fangled places to peruse and contemplate, including:

Amazon / iTunes / Spotify / CD Baby / Deezer … to name but a few of the myriad of such places…

 

Fractures can also be found amongst transmissions, scribings and considerations via…

Electronic Sound-Christopher Dawes-Push-Fractures-A Year In The Country

The rather fine paper and/or zeroes and ones pages of Electronic Sound (nestled amongst the work, innovations and discoveries of Mr Bob Moog and other audiological modulation explorers)…

The transmissions, considerations and curating of Mr Ed Pinsent at The Sound Projector

In an “at home setting” at Include Me Out

Golden Apples Of The Sun Radio Show-Claude Mono-RTRFM-A Year In The Country-Fractures

And also at Claude Mono’s ongoingly intriguing transmissions at The Golden Apples Of The Sun here and here (which can also be found amongst traditional airwaves transmissions and their archiving at RTRFM here).

Keith Seatman-Test Transmission Archive Reel 26-The Hare And The Moon-Fractures-A Year In The Country

And finally, as something of a late inclusion and in an interwoven / interweaving manner, work from Fractures can also be found at Keith Seatman’s Test Transmission Archive Reel 26.

Much appreciated and tip of the hat to all concerned.

Further details on Fractures and the work created for it by Circle/Temple, Sproatly Smith, Keith Seatman, Listening Center, The British Space Group, The Hare And The Moon ft Alaska / Michael Begg, Time Attendant, The Rowan Amber Mill, Polypores, David Colohan and our good selves can be found here.