Preorder 3rd November 2020. Released 17th November 2020.
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.
The Quietened Dream Palace is an exploration of closed down cinemas, including those which have been abandoned, become derelict, reopened as something new or demolished and there is little or no trace of any more.
In part it explores the way that peoples’ experiences and memories of such cinemas, the stories told in them and the buildings themselves have now become merely the ghostly spectres of history and memory. Alongside this the album reflects on the opulent historic design lineage of cinemas and the way that closed, abandoned etc cinemas and recollections of them can become faded snapshots of previous eras’ and places’ design and character.
It is also an interconnected exploration of how closed down cinemas once summoned the stories of their phantom dream worlds via the conjuring/seancing of celluloid film and its flickering light projections, and how this medium and related analogue projection equipment is largely no longer used, with both them and the accompanying skills of analogue projectionists, along with an associated way of life, increasingly becoming lost to time.
The music and accompanying text draws from and intertwines personal and wider cultural and historic memories as it wanders amongst “quietened dream palaces” and the times when they still cast their spell over audiences.
Features music and accompanying text on the tracks by:
Grey Frequency
Field Lines Cartographer
Keith Seatman
Pulselovers
Sproatly Smith
The Howling (Robin The Fog of Howlround and Ken Hollings)
Folclore Impressionista
Listening Center
The Séance
Widow’s Weeds
Handspan
The Heartwood Institute
A Year In The Country
Vic Mars
The Quietened Dream Palace was planned and a considerable proportion of the related artwork, text and music was created prior to the global events of 2020.
Its central themes relating to abandoned etc cinemas were never intended to refer to or interconnect with the need for cinemas to stay closed during 2020 but we understand that the album will potentially, in part, have a different resonance in the new and changed landscape.
We wish the UK and overseas cinemas all the best in these challenging times. Here’s to many more years of them transporting audiences via the stories projected and told in them.
