13.9.23

Livros sobre música que vale a pena ler - Cromo #101: Stephen Prince - "A Year In The Country - Straying From The Pathways"



autor: Stephen Prince
título: A Year In The Country - Straying From The Pathways
editora: A Year In The Country
nº de páginas: 244
isbn: 978-1-9160952-0-5
data: 2019
1ª Edição / 1st Edition





Stephen Prince

A Year In The Country

Straying From The Pathways

Hidden Histories, Echoes of the Future’s Past and the Unsettled Landscape

Published by: A Year In The Country, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-9160952-0-5

Copyright © Stephen Prince, 2019

Edited and typeset by Ian Lowey, Bobcap Book Services, Manchester.

Cover Image: A Year In The Country

 

Contents:

Introduction – 9

Notes on the Text – 13

Preface: A Loose Definition and the Recurring Themes of Hauntology and its Confluence and Intertwining with Otherly Folk

 

1. Explorations of an Eerie Landscape: - 19

Texte und Töne – The disruption, The Changes, The Edge is Where the Centre is: David Rudkin and Penda’s Fen: An Archaeology, The Twilight Language of Nigel Kneale, The Stink Still Here – the miner’s strike 1984-85 – Robert Macfarlane – Benjamin Myers’ Under the Rock: The Poetry of a Place.

2. Fractured Dream Transmissions and a Collapsing into Ghosts: - 40

John Carpenter – Prince of Darkness, Halloween III: Season of The Witch, Village of the Damned, Christine – Nigel Kneale – Martin Quatermass – John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos

3. Hinterland Tales of Hidden Histories and Unobserved Edgeland Transgressions: - 62

Adrian McKinty’s In The Morning I’ll Be Gone – Clare Carson’s Orkney Twilight – David Peace’s GB84 – Tony White’s The Fountain in the Forest.

4. Countercultural Archives and Experiments in Temporary Autonomous Zones: - 72

Jeremy Sandford and Ron Reid’s Tomorrow’s People – Richard Barnes’ The Sun in the East: Norfolk & Suffolk Fairs – Sam Knee’s Memory of a Free Festival: The Golden Era of the British Underground Festival Scene – Gavin Watson’s Raving ’89 – Molly Macindoe’s Out of Order: The Underground Rave Scene 1997-2006.

5. The Village and Seaside Idyll Gone Rogue: - 83

Hot Fuzz – The Avengers’ “Murdersville” – The Prisoner – In My Mind – Malcolm Pryce’s Aberystwyth Mon Amour.

6. Albion in the Overgrowth and Timeslip Echoes: - 104

Requiem – The Living and the Dead – Britannia – Detectorists

7. In Cars – Building a Better Future, Perculiarly Subversive Enchantments and Faded Futuristic Glamour: - 121

In the Company of Ghosts: The Poetics of the Motorway – Joe Moran’s On Roads: A Hidden History – Chris Petit’s Radio On – Autophoto – Martin Parr’s Abandoned Morris Minors of the West of the Ireland – The Friends of Eddie Coyle – Killing Them Softly – Langdom Clay’s Cars: New York City 1974-76

8. Brutalism, Reaching for the Sky and Bugs in Utopia: - 137

Peter Chadwick’s This Brutal World – Bladerunner – J.G. Ballard – Ben Wheatley – High-Rise – Perter Mitchell’s Memento Mori – Brick High-Rise.

9. Battles with the Old Guard nad the Continuing sparking of Vivid Undercurrents: - 159

A Very Peculiar Practice – Edge of Darkness

10. Lycanthropes, Dark Fairy Tales and the Dangers of Wandering off the Path: - 169

The Company of Wolves – Danielle Dax – Red Riding Hood – Wolfen – Hansel & Gretel: Witchhunters – The Keep.

11. The Empty City Film nad Other Visions of the End of Days – Survival and Shopping in the Post-Apocalypse: - 187

Day of the Triffids – Into the Forest – Night of the Comet – The Quiet Earth.

12. Universe Creation, Spectral Lines in the Cultural Landscape and Reimagined Echoes from the Past: - 206

Hauntology – Hypnagogic Pop – Synthwave – D.A.L.I.’s When Haro Met Sally – Nocturne’s Dark Seed – Beyond the Black Rainbow – Mo’Wax, UNKLE, Tricky, Massive Attack, Potishead, DJ Shadow, Andrea Parker – Ghost Box Records, The Focus Group, Belbury Poly – The Memory Band – The Delaware Road – Rowan : Morrison – Howlround – Mark Fisher – the BBC Radiophonic Workshop – Adrian Younge’s Electronique Void – DJ Food – Grey Frequency – Keith Seatman – Douglas Powell – Akiha Den Den – The Ghosty in the MP3 – Black Channels – The Quietened Village – The Corn Mother.

 

INTRODUCTION

A Year In The Country is a project which has a broad reach, but at its core is an exploration of what could be called “otherly pastoralism”, where the further reaches of folk music and culture meet and intertwine with the parallel worlds of what has come to be known as “hauntology”;1 a cultural subgenre characterized by spectral echoes of the past and a yearning for lost progressive futures.

The project has produced book and music releases alongside over 1,000 posts on its website, consisting both of artwork and written pieces inspired by, and relating to, that otherly pastoral/spectral hauntological intertwining.

It travels along, and connects, multilayered and often hidden pathways and signposts that have sometimes become buried in the cultural undergrowth of time; from explorations of the eerie landscape to hinterland tales of hidden histories via Brutalist architecture, acid folk, “edgelands”, electronic music innovators, folkloric film and photography, hazily misremembered televisual tales and transmissions, folk horror, the faded modernity and future ruins of road travel, apocalyptic “empty city” films, dark fairy tales, imaginary film soundtracks, dreams of lost futures, photographic countercultural festival archives and experiments in temporary autonomous zones.

I began A Year In The Country in 2014, but the roots of it probably stretch back to several years before to a time when I was living in a city and just out of curiosity I listened to a friend’s copy of the compilation album Gather in the Mushrooms: The British Acid Folk Underground 1968-1974, which was released in 2004 and curated by Bob Stanley of Saint Etienne. The musical explorations on the album and its general pushing back of the boundaries of folk music seemed to open up something in my mind.

However, though the inspiration to create A Year In The Country can be directly attributed to listening to that album, in truth I can probably trace the lineage of its creation back to a childhood spent, at one point, living in a small rural village where I enjoyed bike-riding, climbing hills, damming rivers and so forth. But it was not all bucolic high jinks as around the same time I became increasingly aware of the dark clouds of the threat of the Cold War. Indeed, the surrounding country side was littered with signs of previous conflicts such as old military fortifications; from time-to-time unexploded weapons would be found and airforce jets would regularly fly overhead at levels so low it almost seemed as though you could reach up and touch them as they practiced their radar evasion techniques.

In later childhood years, I would live on the edge of the country side and one of my playground haunts was a semi-developed camp site which had formerly been some form of military base and which contained derelict, rubbish-filled, submerged air raid shelters that friends and I would convince each other were haunted. When visiting relatives, we would play on another “edgeland” site under buzzing electricity pylons in an area that it now quite lush and verdant but which at the time was full of discarded household appliances. We would tumble down the hill, past these old fridges and washing machines – which we were warned not to play in, in case we became trapped – towards a river that would change colour to orange, blue, green and so on, in accordance with which chemicals were being emptied into it from the dye factory upstream.

This was all accompanied by a growing appreciation of exploratory, dystopic and catastrophic science fiction in books and via television that, at times, was probably too advanced for me; from the hyperinflation and societal collapse of Noah’s Castle (1979) to the final series and book of Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass (1979) and its extraterrestrial harvesting of youth tribes, via John Wyndham’s post-apocalyptic Day of the Triffids (1951) and its sometimes terrifying 1981 television adaptation as well as the invaded village threat of his The Midwich Cuckoos (1957).

It also took in amongst other tales the likes of the resource-depleted future of Soylent Green (1973) and the mysterious incarceration of Patrick McGoohan’s character in the picturesque but subtly unsettling Village in The Prisoner (1967-68). In addition to this, there was the sense of being confused but intrigued by the sometimes fringe and more exploratory areas of science fiction; the alternative historical timelines and sometimes hallucinogenic nature in some of Michael Moorcock’s and Philip K. Dick’s fiction from the 1960s and 1970s, and the darkly dystopian, post-apocalyptic near future world of Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s V for Vendetta (1982-89) – episodes of which I originally read as they were published in the early-to-mid 1980s, in the Warrior comic anthology.

All of this seemed to somehow subconsciously percolate and impart a sense of the countryside as both a place of beauty and respite as well as somewhere which might possess hidden undercurrents and a dark flipside, and this alongside an interest in imagined parallel worlds would eventually provide fertile ground for the roots of A Year In The Country.

When I formally instigated the project in 2014 I knew little of work that explored the flipside of the pastoral, but coincidentally and quite by accident I seemed stumble upon and become fascinated by it, just as it truly flowered and began increasingly to share territory with hauntology, to the extent that there now seems to be an abundance of work available in both these related areas.

At the core of such work there area number of common cultural reference points, inspirations and touchstones often from the 1970s and the later 1960s, such as the towering trio of films The Wicker Man (1973), The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971) and Witchfinder General (1968), which have since become labeled – and to a degree define – folk horror; the unsettling and challenging British children´s fantasy television that was possibly a bit too odd for its intended audience such as The Changes (1975), The Owl Service (1969-70) and Children of the Stones (1977), alongside the darkly anti-pastoral Penda’s Fen (1974); as well as old public information films and TV idents, and the electronic music innovations of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and so on.

Many of these, and related works, are present and referred to in this book, but much as the music collected on Gather in the Mushrooms… did with my perceptions of what constitutes folk, I also wanted to push the boundaries back a little to consider work which, directly or indirectly, takes that canonic core as its inspiration for the creation of new work; explores the undercurrents and flipsides of the 1980s; digs down further and allows us glimpses of Albion in the overgrowth within the context of contemporary television; and points us towards where hitherto unexplored otherly pastoral hinterlands, hauntological-esque specters, lost futures and reimagined echoes of the past might be found.

I hope you enjoy this book as much as I have enjoyed discovering these “patterns under the plough” (or under the tower block, motorway and amongst the flickers of the cathode ray), and that it helps inspire you to set off on your own voyages of discovery and wanderings through bountiful spectral fields.

Stephen Prince (2nd March 2019)

1. For a further definition of hauntology, see A Definition of Hauntology; its Recurring Themes and its Confluence and Intertwining with Otherly Folk on page 14.

 

Preface: A Definition of Hauntology; its Recurring Themes and its Confluence and Intertwining with Otherly Folk

One of the recurring themes of this book and the A Year In The Country project as a whole, is a consideration of hauntology. This is a relatively niche cultural phrase/genre name that not all readers will necessarily know of, and so, below is a definition or overview of hauntology.

Though it is hard to precisely define what hauntology is, it has come to be used as a way of identifying particular strands of music and cultural tendencies. As a cultural category it is fluid and not strictly delineated, but below are some of the recurring themes and characteristics of hauntological work:

1) Music and culture that draws from and examines a sense of loss, yearning or nostalgia for a post-war utopian, progressive, modernist future that was never quite reached.

2) a tendency to see some kind of unsettledness and hidden layers of meaning in previous decades’ public information films and TV idents and “a bit too scary and odd for children, though that is who they were aimed at “television drama programmes from the late 1960s to about 1980, which as mentioned in the Introduction include the likes of The Owl Service (1968), Children of the Stones (1977) and The Changes (1975)

3) Graphic design as well as a particular kind of more-often-than not electronic, often analogue synthesizer-based and/or previous period-orientated music that references and reinterprets some forms of older culture and related artifacts, often focusing on the period from approximately the mid-1960s to 1979’ and generally of British origin.

Such reference points include previous decades’ library music (i.e. music created for industry use in films, television, adverts etc. rather than for public sale); the electronic music innovations of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop; educational materials and book cover artwork including period school text books; Pelican non-fiction titles which tended to have a distinctive aesthetic that combined functionality and a sense of idealism; and the stark sometimes seemingly almost accidentally darkly-hued designs of the Penguin Modern Poets books of the 1960s and 70s, which often featured minimalist, heavily-posterised images of nature.

4) a reimagining and misremembering of the above, and other, sources to create forms of music and culture that seem familiar, comforting and also often unsettling and not a little eerie; work that is accompanied by a sense of being haunted by specters of its, and our, cultural past, to loosely paraphrase philosopher Jacques Derrida who coined the phrase and created the original concept of hauntology.2

5) The use and foregrounding of recording medium noise and imperfections, such as the crackle and hiss of vinyl, tape wobble and so on that calls attention to the decaying nature of older analogue mediums and which can be used to create a sense of time out of joint and edge memories of previous eras.

6) The drawing together and utilizing of the above elements to conjure a sense of an often strange, parallel or imagined world, or “Midwichian”3 Britain.

Hauntology is often, but not exclusively, used to refer British culture and music, and it is thought to have been first used in relation to this by the writers Marks Fisher and Simon Reynolds to describe a loose cultural grouping of music and attendant culture which began to coalesce in the UK around the early mid-2000s.

As a loose genre, hauntology has retained a fair degree of cultural and aesthetic diversity that takes in the eldritch educationalism of Ghost Box Records, the playful psychedelic whimsy and break beats of Blank Workshop and the darkly humorous reinterpretations of period official warning posters of Scarfolk amongst others.

However, the term has also been used more widely to describe the likes of American hypnagogic pop and Italian Occult Psychedelia; musical subgenres which also reimagine and create spectral echoes of the past but which tend to utilize as their source material or inspiration, different areas and sometimes eras of culture.

A further recurring theme in this book and the A Year In The Country project as a whole is what may initially appear to be a curious and disparate occurrence and which it may be helpful to add some background and explanation to; the ways in which in an area or two of music and culture, folk music and folkloric-orientated work, of the underground, acid, psych, wyrd and otherly variety, has come to share common ground with synthesised work and in particular electronica of a leftfield and hauntological variety.

This is an area of culture where the use, appreciation and romance of often older electronic music technologies, reference points and inspirations segues and intertwines with the more bucolic wanderings and landscapes of exploratory, otherly pastoralism and folk culture. This has become a part of the cultural landscape which, in the words of author, artist, musician and curator Kristen Gallernaux, is:

“planted permanently somewhere between the history of the first transistor, the paranormal, and nature-driven worlds of the folkloric…”

On the surface such folkloric and spectral electronic musical and cultural forms are very disparate and yet both have come to explore and share similar landscapes. What may be one of the underlying linking points with both otherly folk etc., and hauntology, is a yearning for lost utopias. Thus, in more otherly folk-orientated culture this is possibly related to a yearning for lost Arcadian idylls, whilst in hauntological culture it may be connected to a yearning for lost progressive post-war futures that never fully came to fruition.

Both of these intertwined areas of music and culture have revered relics: for otherly folkloric work these may include those from that lost idyll which are spectrally imprinted with some form of loss, such as, in the words of Rob Young, “old buildings, texts, songs, etc., [which] are like talismans to be treasured, as a connective chain to the past.”4

Hauntological talismans may also include items from those referred to above: TV idents from previous decades, public information films and television series from the late 1960s to late 1970s which have gained unsettledness and hidden layers of meaning with the passing of time  - alongside the likes of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and Brutalist architecture – and which also are considered to contain spectral echoes in reference to the aforementioned lost progressive futures.

These two strands of otherly folkloric and hauntological work and culture may appear at first to be cultural cuckoos in the same nest and / or strange bedfellows. However, they have come to be seen as fellow travellers who rather than being divided by differing surface aestethics are drawn together by a similarly exploratory and often visionary or utopian spirit, and who respectively shadow and inform one another’s journeys within an alternative cultural landscape.

The text in this section is a partly revised version of that which was originally published in the book A Year In The Country: Wandering Through Spectral Fields (20189. An alternative version is also included in Folk Horror Revival: Urban Wyrd – 1. Spirits of Time (2109).

 

1. This period of the mid-19602 to the later 170s may be chosen as significant for a hauntologically-related work for a number of reasons, such as during this time the optimism and, at times, utopian ideals of the immediate post-war years to the 1960s tipped over in Britain into a period of social, political, economic strife and conflict. The later 1970s, and 1979 in particular, when Margaret Thatcher’s right-leaning government was elected, is often considered to be a defining point when society began to move towards a more neoliberal, individualistic and monetarist stance. Also this period is when many of those creating, or interested in, hauntological work were born, or had their formative years. As such, culture from this era from which hauntological work often draws, has a pre-existing resonance. Aside from its sometimes inherent oddness, such culture may also be seen as being imbued with an antediluvian quality – broadcasts, remnants or echoes from an “other” time and the progressive lost futures which are referred to in the abovementioned recurring themes and characteristics of hauntology.

 

2. Hauntology is a portmanteau or blending of the meanings of two words; “haunt” and “ontology”. Ontology is the philosophical study of “being”, which focuses on abstract questions such as whether there is such a thing as objective reality and what kinds of things or entities exist in the universe. Ontology is sometimes associated with foundationalist thinkers who believe that: “to arrive at truth it is necessary to start with the most fundamental issues – to be sure about the foundations of philosophy – and then work our way up from there to more specific questions.” (Quoted from the Philosophy Terms website.)

 

3. “Midwichian” is used to imply a sense of a conventional, comfortable, sometimes bucolic place and society where something untoward, quietly unsettling and possibly unexplained has happened or lurks semi-hidden beneath the surface of things. It derives from John Wyndham’s book The Midwich Cuckoos (1957) and the subsequent film adaptation Village of the Damned (1960) in which a pleasant rural village is severely disrupted by a stealthy and surreptitious alien invasion. See chapter 3 for more on this.

 

4. Quoted from Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music by Rob Young, published in 2011.







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