Released today 28th July 2021.
The novella is also available at Amazon UK, Amazon US and their other worldwide sites and at Lulu.
The book may also available to order from other bookshops etc, please direct any queries regarding that directly to them.
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.
Written and recorded by Stephen Prince the novella and album are set among the cultural hinterlands of wyrd, otherly pastoral, folk, psychedelic and hauntological culture, and follow the journey of a song through time: one that appears to bring disarray to all who hear it. Is this coincidence or something more?
1799: A young woman who lives at the Shildam Hall country mansion writes a lament for a lover she can never be with, and locks it away forever.
1840: The song is discovered by one of her relatives and begins a journey through time. It entrances those who hear it, but does it also lead to their potential demise?
1969: A film set among the decadent milieu of late 1960s counterculture commences production at Shildam Hall, before collapsing amidst potential scandal after the song is rediscovered.
2004: A recording of the song is stumbled upon but all who listen to it seem to disappear…
The novella and album are further explorations of an imaginary abandoned film that first began on an album called The Shildam Hall Tapes released in 2018, which featured music by Gavino Morretti, Sproatly Smith, Field Lines Cartographer, Vic Mars, Circle/Temple, A Year In The Country, The Heartwood Instititute, David Colohan, Listening Center and Pulselovers.
The Shildam Hall Tapes: The Falling Reverse album is both a soundtrack to accompany the novella and also a standalone piece of work set amongst the fragmentary memories and dreamscapes of The Shildam Hall Tapes.
All of the above albums and novella can be listened to and read as standalone pieces of work. They also interconnect with the story and world of the near-mythical imaginary lost folkloric fever dream film The Corn Mother, which was explored in the 2020 novella The Corn Motherand album The Corn Mother: Night Wraiths, both of which were written and recorded by Stephen Prince; and also the 2018 album The Corn Mother, which again featured music by a variety of performers, including a number of those mentioned above, alongside Depatterning, United Bible Studies and Widow’s Weeds (see below for the full list of contributors).
As with the A Year In The Country project as a whole, which they are released as part of, the novellas’ and albums’ structures are inspired by the cycle of the year. Following the number of seasons, the novellas are each split into four sections; they have 52 chapters (which could also be considered scenes or episodes), the same number as there are weeks in the year; relating to the number of days in a non-leap year, each chapter’s text contains no more than 365 words; and as there are days in a week, the albums each have seven tracks.
The Shildam Hall Tapes: The Falling Reverse – Dawn Light Edition. Limited to 208 copies.
Hand-finished white/black CD album in speckled recycled fold-out sleeve with fold-out insert, sticker and badge.
Further album packaging details:
1. Custom printed using archival giclée pigment ink.
2. Metal badge, secured with removable glue on string bound tag.
3. Sticker printed on vinyl style material.
4. Folded sheet of accompanying notes, printed on textured laid paper, hand numbered and signed on back.
The Shildam Hall Tapes: The Falling Reverse tracklisting:
1. On The Moors (1799)
2. Day 12, Scene 2, Take 28 – Hoffman’s Fall (1970)
3. Blown Away Like Dust (1971)
4. An Ancient Find (1977)
5. Nobody Ever Really Knew What Happened (2004)
6. False Starts And Naysayers (2017)
7. Tumbling Through Time (1799-2020)
The titles of the album tracks contain a particular year or set of years, which refer to sections in both the novella and the timeline of The Shildam Hall Tapes’ world and story as a whole.
The Shildam Hall Tapes novella
78 pages. Softback.
The 2018 released The Shildam Hall Tapes album featured work by Gavino Morretti, Sproatly Smith, Field Lines Cartographer, Vic Mars, Circle/Temple, A Year In The Country (aka Stephen Prince), The Heartwood Institute, David Colohan, Listening Centre and Pulselovers.
Further details are at: www.ayearinthecountry.co.uk/the-shildam-hall-tapes-album-released
“The sounds venture into reinterpretation of folk culture and music, early electronic music experimentation, high fashion, psychedelia and the crossing over of the worlds of the aristocracy with pop/counter culture and elements of the underworld… Just as film is the visceral, visual experience needed to startle and stimulate the eyes, The Shildam Hall Tapes is the appropriate aural experience needed to caress and connect the ears to everything they are listening to.” Eoghan Lyng, We Are Cult
“An engaging collection of dark, ethereal and psychedelic experimental sounds.” Kim Harten, Bliss Aquamarine
“Every track unsettles and enthralls in equal measure.” Ben Graham, Shindig!
The Corn Mother novella and The Corn Mother: Night Wraiths album released in 2020 were both created by Stephen Prince.
“A ghostly record, where fact and fiction merge with unsettling noises, found sounds and atmospherics, all adding up to another immersive listen.” Terrascope
“Eerie, elegant and ever so evocative.” Thomas Patterson, Shindig!
“A fascinating and truly inventive novella… This is an original and significant piece of work, not only in its novel, singular and successful approach to folk horror and ‘imaginary’ films but in the creation of its own self referencing folklore.” Grey Malkin, Folk Horror Revival
Further details are at: www.ayearinthecountry.co.uk/the-corn-mother-novella-and-the-corn-mother-night-wraiths-album-released
The Corn Mother album released in 2018 includes music by Gavino Morretti, Pulselovers, The Heartwood Institute, United Bible Studies (David Colohan, Dominic Cooper of The Owl Service, Alison O’Donnell of Mellow Candle), A Year In The Country, Widow’s Weeds (featuring former members of/collaborators with The Hare And The Moon), Depatterning, Sproatly Smith and Field Lines Cartographer.
“You want to see the film as described in the liner notes, and as conjured in the songs on the album, and that’s an incredible trick to pull off… This is hauntology – the genre, rather than the philosophical dystopic – in its finest form, where buried memories of film, TV, music, and life come to the surface, often unverifiable because the hard copy has been lost or was never properly recorded in the first instance.” Alan Boon, Starburst
Further details are at: www.ayearinthecountry.co.uk/the-corn-mother-album-released
Thanks to everybody who contributed, wrote about etc the above albums and books, including Suzy Prince and Ian Lowey of Bop Cap Books for the editing and design work. A tip of the hat to you all!
