The post during the first year of A Year In The Country where I wrote about The Advisory Circle’s And the Cuckoo Comes track from the Mind How You Go album is I think the first time I wrote a post that focused on the parallel world releases of Ghost Box Records.
it was one of my early reference points when the ideas that became A Year In The Country took shape and I also picked it as one of my song selections when I was on BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction after the release of the A Year In The Country: Wandering Through Spectral Fields book.
It’s a fine piece of work, accessible, unsettling and intriguing and (possibly) darkly humorous. To a quietly melodic and pulsing background atmosphere a voice describes the changing of the seasons in a world and time out of joint:
“In the summer, well, it’s usually cold and sometimes it snows.
The winds blow.
In the autumn the flowers are out and the sun shines.
In the winter, the leaves grow again on the trees.
And in the spring the winds blow and the leaves fall from the trees.
And the sun shines and the leaves grow again on the trees.
And sometimes it snows…
And the cuckoo comes.”
After a pause the final words are the above “And the cuckoo comes” before the music distorts and fades away into the distance.
Even after listening to the track a fair few times over the years it’s an ending that’s still unsettling and filled with dread. As with much of the work released by Ghost Box Records it conjures a sense of an idyllic or gently bucolic world where something has gone wrong just out of sight, at the edges of things, on the edge of consciousness…
The original post published during the first year of A Year In The Country:
