Released today 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.
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 and Vic Mars.
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.
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.
Dawn Light Edition. Limited to 208 copies.
White/black CD album in textured recycled fold-out sleeve with fold-out insert and badge.
Further packaging details:
1) Hand-finished and custom printed by A Year In The Country using archival giclée pigment ink.
2) Includes metal badge, secured with removable glue on string bound tag.
3) 1 x folded sheet of accompanying notes, printed on textured laid paper, hand numbered on back.
Tracklisting:
1. Grey Frequency – ABC 123
2. Field Lines Cartographer – Faded Flicker
3. Keith Seatman – Saturday Matinee
4. Pulselovers – The Gaumont Frieze
5. Sproatly Smith – 1 And 3 On The Front
6. The Howling – Scala KX 82
7. Folclore Impressionista – Three Steps In The Dark
8. Listening Center – Meet You Outside The New Metropole
9. The Séance – Minors Club
10. Widow’s Weeds – Celluloid Ghosts
11. Handspan – A World In My Pocket
12. The Heartwood Institute – Carbon Arc
13. A Year In The Country – Memoirs Of A Magic Lantern
14. Vic Mars – Only The Clock Remains
“A set of tracks rooted in real world experience, but which still manage to reach out and touch the unreal and the ethereal…” Stuart Douglas, We Are Cult
