A Year In The Country: Wandering Through Spectral Fields – Book Released

The A Year In The Country books are now sold out at our Shop and Bandcamp page but they are available at Amazon UK, Amazon US, Amazon Australia and their other worldwide sites and also from Lulu.

The books may also available to order from other bookshops etc, please direct any queries regarding that directly to them.

Journeys in Otherly Pastoralism, the Further Reaches of Folk and the Parallel Worlds of Hauntology

“The first book of it’s kind to catalogue all these disparate strands, many of which cross over time and space to influence one another.” DJ Food

Released today 10th April 2018.

Paperback: £15.95. Ebook £6.95
338 pages. Author: Stephen Prince

“An essential field guide to a distinct aesthetic that remains loosely defined, like a fluttering night moth that would die if pinned down.” Ben Graham, Shindig!

A Year In The Country: Wandering Through Spectral Fields is an exploration of the undercurrents and flipside of bucolic dreams and where they meet and intertwine with the parallel worlds of hauntology; it connects layered and, at times, semi-hidden cultural pathways and signposts, journeying from acid folk to edgelands via electronic music innovators, folkloric film and photography, dreams of lost futures and misremembered televisual tales and transmissions.

In keeping with the number of weeks in a year, the book is split into 52 chapters and includes considerations of the work of writers including Rob Young, John Wyndham, Richard Mabey and Mark Fisher, musicians and groups The Owl Service, Jane Weaver, Shirley Collins, Broadcast, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Virginia Astley and Kate Bush, the artists Edward Chell, Jeremy Deller and Barbara Jones and the record labels Trunk, Folk Police, Ghost Box and Finders Keepers.

Also explored are television and film including Quatermass, The Moon and the Sledgehammer, Phase IV, Beyond the Black Rainbow, The Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water, Bagpuss, Travelling for a Living, The Duke of Burgundy, Sapphire & Steel, General Orders No. 9, Gone to Earth, The Changes, Children of the Stones, Sleep Furiously and The Wicker Man.

The book draws together revised writings alongside new journeyings from the A Year In The Country project, which has undertaken a set of year-long journeys through spectral fields; cyclical explorations of an otherly pastoralism, the outer reaches of folk culture and the spectres of hauntology. It is a wandering amongst subculture that draws from the undergrowth of the land.

As a project, it has included a website featuring writing, artwork and music which stems from that otherly pastoral/spectral hauntological intertwining, alongside a growing catalogue of album releases.

Download two sample chapters at this web page: Contents list and sample chapters
“Author Prince has pulled together a mass of material culled not only from the website and its associated albums, but also a great deal more that was written specifically for the book. And the result is spellbinding.” Dave Thompson, Goldmine

“This incredibly well-researched book, which is obviously written by a man with an enormous passion for this subject, is probably as comprehensive as it is possible to be.

“Stephen Prince’s densely packed tome covers everything from folkloric film and literature to electronic music to acid folk to folk horror to the dystopian fiction of John Wyndham and the classic unearthings of Nigel Kneale to the formation of under-the-furrows record labels like Trunk, Ghost Box and Finders Keepers.

“If you’re already interested in folk culture and want to be astonished by how deeply its roots run, you’ll treasure A Year in the Country enormously.

“Almost every one of the 52 chapters sideswiped me with a revelation that is already making me look at a genre I love with new, more appreciative eyes.

“Books this culturally valuable don’t grow on hedgerows, so make sure you harvest it immediately.” Ian White, Starburst

The book has been designed/typeset by Ian Lowey of Bopcap Book Services and edited by Suzy Prince, who are the co-authors of The Graphic Art of The Underground-A Counter-Cultural History .

“An excellent compendium of Prince’s musings and meditations on all things wyrdly bucolic, uncanny, and elegiac, spanning a spectral spectrum from Richard Mabey to Zardoz, Virginia Astley to Sapphire & Steel.” Simon Reynolds, author of Retromania and Energy Flash

An online “cut out and keep” set of visual accompaniments to the chapters of the book can be visited here and text extracts from the book can be visited here, both of which will build throughout 2018 to include all 52 chapters.

Book Chapter List:

1. Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music: Folk Vs Pop, Less Harvested Cultural Landscapes and Acts of  Enclosure, Old and New

2. Gather in the Mushrooms: Early Signposts and Underground Acid Folk Explorations

3. Hauntology: Places Where Society Goes to Dream, the Defining and Deletion of Spectres and the Making of an Ungenre

4. Cuckoos in the Same Nest: Hauntological and Otherly Folk Confluences and Intertwinings

5. Ghost Box Records: Parallel Worlds, Conjuring Spectral Memories, Magic Old and New and Slipstream Trips to the  Panda Pops Disco

6. Folk Horror Roots: From But a Few Seedlings Did a Great Forest Grow

7. 1973: A Time of Schism and a Dybbuk’s Dozen of Fractures

8. Broadcast: Recalibration, Constellation and Exploratory Pop

9. Tales From The Black Meadow, The Book of the Lost and The Equestrian Vortex: The Imagined Spaces of Imaginary Soundtracks

10. The Wicker Man: Notes on a Cultural Behemoth

11. Robin Redbreast, The Ash Tree, Sky, The Changes, Penda’s Fen Red Shift and The Owl Service: Wanderings Through Spectral Television Landscapes

12. A Bear’s Ghosts: Soviet Dreams and Lost Futures

13. From “Two Tribes” to War Games: The Ascendancy of Apocalyptic Popular Culture

14. Christopher Priest’s A Dream of Wessex: Twentieth Century Slipstream Echoes

15. Sapphire & Steel and Ghosts in the Machine: Nowhere, Forever and Lost Spaces within Cultural Circuitry

16. Kill List, Puffball, In the Dark Half and Butter on the Latch: Folk Horror Descendants by Way of the Kitchen Sink

17. The Quietened Bunker, Waiting For The End of the World, Subterranea Britannica, Bunker Archaeology and The Delaware Road: Ghosts, Havens and Curious Repurposings Beneath Our Feet

18. From The Unofficial Countryside to Soft Estate: Edgeland Documents, Memories and Explorations

19. The Ballad of Shirley Collins and Pastoral Noir: Tales and Intertwinings from Hidden Furrows

20. “Savage Party” and Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased): Glimpses of Albion in the Overgrowth

21. Uncommonly British Days Out and the Following of Ghosts: File under Psychogeographic/Hauntological Stocking Fillers

22. Gone to Earth: Earlier Traces of an Otherly Albion

23. Queens of Evil, Tam Lin and The Touchables: High Fashion Transitional Psych Folk Horror, Pastoral Fantasy and Dreamlike Isolation

24. Luke Haines: Our Most Non-Hauntological Hauntologist

25. Tim Hart, Maddy Prior and “The Dalesman’s Litany”: A Yearning for Imaginative Idylls and a Counterpart to Tales of Hellish Mills

26. Katalina Varga, Berberian Sound Studio and The Duke of Burgundy : Arthouse Evolution and Crossing the Thresholds of the Hinterland Worlds of Peter Strickland

27. General Orders No. 9 and By Our Selves: Cinematic Pastoral Experimentalism

28. No Blade of Grass and Z.P.G.: A Curious Dystopian Mini-Genre

29. The Midwich Cuckoos and The Day of the Triffids: John Wyndham, Dystopian Tales, Celluloid Cuckoos and the Village as Anything But Idyll

30. Folk Archive and Unsophisticated Arts: Documenting the Overlooked and Unregulated

31. Folkloric Photography: A Lineage of Wanderings, Documentings and Imaginings

32. Poles and Pylons and The Telegraph Appreciation Society: A Continuum of Accidental Art

33. Symptoms and Images: Hauntological Begetters, the Uneasy Landscape and Gothic Bucolia

34. The Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water: Public Information Films and Lost Municipal Paternalisms

35. Magpahi, Paper Dollhouse and The Eccentronic Research Council: Finders Keepers/Bird Records Nestings and Considerations of Modern Day Magic

36. Vashti Bunyan: From Here to Before: Whispering Fairy Stories until They are Real

37. The Owl Service, Anne Briggs, The Watersons, Lutine and Audrey Copard: Folk Revisiters, Revivalists and Reinterpreters

38. The Seasons, Jonny Trunk, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and Howlround: A Yearning for Library Music, Experiments in Educational Music and Tape Loop Tributes

39. An Old Soul Returns: The Worlds and Interweavings of Kate Bush

40. The Stone Tape, Quatermass, The Road and The Twilight Language of Nigel Kneale: Unearthing Tales from Buried Ancient Pasts

41 Folklore Tapes and the Wyrd Britannia Festival: Journeying to Hidden Corners of the Land/the Ferrous Reels and Explorations of an Arcane Research Project

42. Skeletons: Pastoral Preternatural Fiction and a World, Time and Place of its Own Imagining

43. Field Trip-England: Jean Ritchie, George Pickow and Recordings from the End of an Era

44. Noah’s Castle: A Slightly Overlooked Artifact and Teatime Dystopias

45. Jane Weaver Septième Soeur and The Fallen by Watch Bird: Non-Populist Pop and Cosmic Aquatic Folklore

46. Detectorists, Bagpuss, The Wombles and The Good Life: Views from a Gentler Landscape

47. Weirdlore, Folk Police Recordings, Sproatly Smith and Seasons They Change: Notes From the Folk Underground, Legendary Lost Focal Points and Privately Pressed Folk