File under: Trails and Influences / Year 3 Wanderings

I can’t remember how I came acroos Thistletown but it’s been an interesting find.

Released by Will Hodgkinson on his record label Big Bertha, which seemed to be created as much as an art project/experiment in how such things worked as being a traditional record label.

I know little about the band, though that’s okay, it means I can just appreciate the music.

The little I know includes that the album was produced by Michael Tyack from Circulus and recording was held up at one point I think because they didn’t want to disturb a nesting duck…

If you should appreciate semi-lost privately pressed acid/psych/underground folk from the late 1960s and 1970s along the lines of Midwinter and Caedmon, the crystalline folk expressions of Lutine  and the folk-esque retravellings of Espers, you may well find much to like here.

In fact in parts, the music contained within the album could well be from a “semi-lost privately pressed acid/psych/underground folk from the late 1960s and 1970s”… not in a purely retro, retreading manner but more in that seems to capture the spirit of or be in part from some flipside of the history and culture of Britain, to live in some other bucolic parallel, a separate time both enchanted and enchanting.

As far as I know Rosemarie is out of print but it can often be found for but a few pence or pounds.

A curiousity and well worth a wander towards.

 

Intertwined wanderings around these parts:
Day #3/365: Gather In The Mushrooms: something of a starting point via an accidental stumbling into the British acid folk undeground

Day #50/365: Lutine – music for the mind to wander with…

Day #93/365: Seasons They Change and the sweetly strange concoctions of private pressings…

Day #107/365: Archie Fisher & Acid Tracks – An Introduction to the roots of psych-folk: subculture not from beneath the paving stones but from under the plough

Day #132/365: Espers, coruscation and the demise of monarchs…

Day #257/365: Further coruscations; Lutine, White Flowers and textural voyages…

Elsewhere in the ether:
Peruse the album here. Thistletown at Big Bertha here and traces in the ether here.

 

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One of the cultural considerations that I have returned to during A Year In The Country is Mark Fisher’s comments about the circuit between the experimental/avant garde and the mainstream being broken:

“But I think what’s also missing is this circuit between the experimental, the avant-garde and the popular. It’s that circuit that’s disappeared. Instead what we have is Experimental(TM), which is actually well established genres with their own niche markets which have no relation to a mainstream. And despite the network propaganda, the mainstream still exists, but in a more unchallenged way than previously. Why? Well, because people like me have our own niches now. In order to get some sort of audience I don’t have to be on the BBC. You know, there’s lots of space on the internet for me. And that just means that it allows the Simon Cowell’s of the world to dominate the mainstream.”

One song I often think of in relation to such things and a time when that circuit was not so faulty, is Laurie Anderson’s O’Superman, which was released as a single in 1981 and reached No.2 in the UK charts (which was at a time when to do so probably meant selling hundreds of thousands of copies and being part of mainstream national attention and discussion.)

Listening to it and watching the accompanying video with its minimal, repetitive, art house/performance art nature and the songs references to industrial/political/military themes, conflicts and force, it’s somewhat hard to imagine it as part the mainstream charts or culture today.

In that sense it seems to belong not just to an earlier period in culture and history but quite possibly to another plane of existence quite separate to our own.

Audio Visual Transmission Guide: Laurie Anderson’s O’Superman

Local Broadcasts:
Day #307/365: A journey from a precipice to a cliff edge, via documents of preparing for the end of the world, a curious commercialism, the tonic/lampoonery of laughter, broken cultural circuits and quiet/quietening niches…

 

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Dawn Edition £11.95. Night Edition £24.95.

Available via our Artifacts Shop, our Bandcamp Ether Victrola and Norman Records.
Released 8th August 2017.

Undercurrents was partly inspired by living in the countryside for the first time since I was young, where because of the more exposed nature of rural life I found myself in closer contact with, more overtly affected by and able to directly observe the elements and nature than via life in the city.

This coincided with an interest in and exploration of an otherly take on pastoralism and creating the A Year In The Country project; of coming to know the land as a place of beauty, exploration and escape that you may well drift off into but where there is also a sometimes unsettled undercurrent and layering of history and culture.

I found myself drawn to areas of culture that draw from the landscape, the patterns beneath the plough, the pylons and amongst the edgelands and where they meet with the lost progressive futures, spectral histories and parallel worlds of what has come to be known as hauntology.

Undercurrents is an audio exploration and interweaving of these themes – a wandering amongst nature, electronic soundscapes, field recordings, the flow of water through and across the land and the flipside of bucolic dreams.

Preview clips from the album at our Soundcloud Mark II Ether Victrola

 

Undercurrent Dawn Edition. Limited to 104 copies. £11.95.
Hand-finished white/black CDr album in textured recycled fold out sleeve with 3 x inserts and badge.

Top of CD.                                                          Bottom of CD.

Further encasement details:
1) Custom printed using archival giclée pigment ink.
2) Includes 25mm/1″ badge, secured with removable glue on string bound tag.
3) Back of one insert hand numbered and signed.

 

Undercurents Night Edition. Limited to 104 copies. £24.95.
Hand-finished box-set contains: album on all black CDr, 12 page string bound booklet, 4 x badge pack, 1 x large badge, 2 x stickers, 1 x print.


Top of CD.                                                            Bottom of CD.

Further encasement details:
1) Booklet/cover art custom printed using archival giclée pigment ink.
2) Contained in a matchbox style sliding two-part rigid matt card box with cover print.
3) Fully black CDr (black on top, black on playable side).
4) Black string bound booklet: 12 pages (6 sides printed);
Printed on textured fine art cotton rag paper, heavy card and semi-transparent vellum.
Hand numbered and signed on the reverse.
5) 4 x badge set, contained in a see-through polythene bag with a folded card header.
6) 1 x large badge.
7) 1 x square sticker, 1 x landscape format sticker.
8) Print on textured fine art cotton rag paper. Hand numbered and signed on the reverse.

(File Under: Encasements / Artifacts – Artifact #4a)

 

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Charles Frégers Wilder Mann book and its photographs of folkloric costumes involving the transformation of man into beast has been something of an ongoing reference point for A Year In The Country…

…but until quite recently I hadn’t explored his other work all that much, although I knew that he had released another book of folkloric costumes.

Anyways, I’ve just had a look at his Yokainoshima: Island Of Monsters book of Japanese rural folklore costumes…

…and, well, I’m not quite which set of images is more out there; Wilder Mann or Yokainoshima.

Looking at the Yokainoshima photographs I wandered if our own folkloric ritual costumes look just as bizarre to people from over the seas and its just because I’m not used to seeing them that these Japanese costumes seem so, hmmm, peculiar (said in a good way).

They put me in mind of Axel Hoedt’s photographs of southwest German folkloric costume in his Once A Year book, in that to my eye and mind they seem to be channelling some kind of more outlandish club kid wear, along the lines of the 2003 film Party Monster which is set in the outer limits of New York nightlife.

Some of the images connect to our own straw bear traditions, some seem to be connected to natural fertility and some are nearer to a mutatedly stylised take on traditional Japanese clothing.

(File post under: Other Pathway Pointers And Markers)

Directions and Destinations:
Charles Frégers photographs
The Yokainoshima book

Local places of interest:
Day #69/365: Charles Frégers Wilder Mann and rituals away from the shores of albion
Day #272/365: Axel Hoedt’s folkloric club kid rogues gallery and symbolic expulsions…
Wanderings #2/52a: Merry Brownfield’s Merry England / The Eccentricity Of English Attire
Wanderings #18/52a: Further Not-Quite-So-Mainstream Pastoralism And 1970s British Science Fiction Costume And Effects Prototyping…

 

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File under: A Year In The Country Ocular Explorations

 

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A while ago I read Freak Out The Squares, which is former Pulp member Russel Senior’s autobiography of his time with the band.

In it there is a section where he talks about a time where pre their fame he and former members of Pulp went on an expedition through underground tunnels beneath Sheffield that were used for sluicing industrial run off, how that journey became increasingly dangerous feeling and that it inspired the Pulp song Wickerman (which was recorded after he left).

I most probably listened to the song when We Love Life, the album it was on came out but hadn’t remembered it until then.

Listening to it now it struck me as a curious piece of culture, one that interweaves samples from the original The Wicker Man film soundtrack recording and hence otherly folkloric concerns, alongside a sense of urban exploration, the true history of the band, spoken word, a certain grandiosity in its production (courtesy of producer Scott Walker?), the social history of Sheffield and surrounding areas and a yearning, wistful love story.

Here are a selection of the lyrics:

“Just behind the station, before you reach the traffic island, a river runs through a concrete channel. 
I took you there once; I think it was after the Leadmill. 
The water was dirty & smelt of industrialisation
Little mesters coughing their lungs up & globules the colour of tomato ketchup. 
But it flows…
Underneath the city through dirty brickwork conduits
Connecting white witches on the Moor with pre-Raphaelites down in Broomhall. 
Beneath the old Trebor factory that burnt down in the early seventies…
And the river flows on…
And it finally comes above ground again at Forge Dam: the place where we first met.”

Jarvis Cocker, who I assume wrote the lyrics, said that he used to live on The Wicker which is a street in Sheffield and so I guess that’s where the title in part comes from.

In a further connection with otherly folklore, what the real life story of the band wandering through these tunnels also put me in mind of was the underground tunnel sequence in Ben Wheatley’s The Kill List.

But I won’t talk too much of that as I want to sleep tonight.

The album We Love Life seems to have been a mixture of classic Pulp-like kitchen sink-esque observation and an interest/attempt to connect with the basics of a more natural life, particularly so in related artwork and on songs such as Trees and Sunrise, alongside which the band played a series of concerts in forests to support its release.

(File Post Under: Cathode Ray & Cinematic Explorations, Radiowave Resonations & Audiological Investigations)

Audio Visual Transmission Guide: Pulp’s Wickerman

 

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Although I’m wary of revelling too much or gratuitously in appreciations of abandoned structures, certain online sites and collections of photographs catch my eye…

One of those is the Disused Stations website which focuses on abandoned railway stations in the UK.

(The last train at Belmont station, which for some and various reasons seems particularly for myself seems to have a particularly sad or regretful air to it).

Disused Stations is an encyclopaedic and somewhat exhaustive text, archival image and contemporary photography collection and mapping of such places – and it is quite staggering to see just how many hundreds of stations there once were across the UK that are no longer in use.

As a site and project, it put me in mind of Subterranea Britannica’s documenting of forgotten structures and installations.

And like that site, the photographs can capture a sense of a lost age, of lost futures and a related melancholia.

They can have a haunting quality that seem at points to conjure the spirit of a very particular time that now seems far, far away from our own.

That is particularly so I suppose with the Disused Stations site in terms of its connection with the once publicly owned rail network.

(File post under: Other Pathway Pointers And Markers)

Directions and Destinations:
Disused Stations
Disused Stations: Belmont Station
Disused Stations: Acrow Station

 

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File under: Trails and Influences / Year 3 Wanderings

And in a further consideration of natural forms of calligraphy, patterns and marks upon the land…

I think one of the things that draws me to images/books like this, is that sometimes the patterns they create seem nearer to something genuinely abstract than a document of real/natural life and the land…

 

Intertwined wanderings around these parts:
Wanderings #15/52a: Other Views / The Patterns Beneath The Plough, The Pylons And Amongst The Edgelands #1

Elsewhere in the ether:
The images here are from the 1989 book Shadow Of Heaven by Patricia Macdonald, published by Aurum. Peruse it here.

 

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There have been a number of new broadcasts and reviews of the From The Furthest Signals album…

First up is a review in issue 31 of Electronic Sound magazine by Push: “The ghosts are out of the machines. Lock your windows tonight.”

You can visit Electronic Sound and issue 31 here (there is also a rather generous introductory subscription offer for the magazine which can be found here).

Keith Seatman’s track Curious Noises and Distant Voices from the album was played on the Gated Canal Community Radio show which is presented and compiled by the record labels Front & Follow and The Geography Trip.

The show is hosted by Reform Radio and you can find Keith Seatman’s track in some rather fine company (including a mix by IX Tab which wanders amongst the Hidden Reverse sides of music) at Gated Canal’s Tumblr site and at Mixcloud.

Max Reinhardt played Grey Frequency’s Ident (IV) from the album on BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction show. Ident (IV) plays around 1:09 and the album is also mentioned around 1:19.

Visit the show here, where you can find Ident (IV) also in some fine company (including Anne Briggs, whose work is much appreciated around these parts).

Sunrise Ocean Bender played Polypores’ Signals Caught Off The Coast on their radio show, alongside the likes of Helios Creed, UFO and various wanderings amongst underground and space rock. Originally broadcast on WRIR FM the show featuring the track can be found at Sunrise Ocean Bender’s site here and also at Mixcloud.

Kim Harten reviewed the album at her site Bliss Aquamarine, where her indepth consideration of the different tracks can be found alongside an earlier review of The Restless Field. Visit those here.

Thanks to all involved for their ongoing support: Push, Neil Mason and all at Electronic Sound, Justin and Rob of Gated Canal Community Radio, Max Reinhardt and all at Late Junction, Kevin McFadin of Sunrise Ocean Bender and Kim Harten of Bliss Aquamarine.

Not forgetting those whose music is included on the album: Circle/Temple, David Colohan, Sharron Kraus, Time Attendant, Depatterning, Sproatly Smith, Field Lines Cartographer, Grey Frequency, Keith Seatman, Polypores, The Haren And The Moon, Pulselovers and Listening Center.

Tip of the hat to all.

More information on From The Furthest Signals can be found around these parts here and the album can be previewed at Soundcloud

It can be ordered at our Artifacts Shop, Bandcamp and Norman Records.

Other reviews and broadcasts etc of the album by Music Won’t Save You, John Coulthart, Violet Apple, Dave Thompson at Goldmine/Spin Cycle, We Are Cult, Whisperinandhollerin, Flatland Frequencies and More Than Human, alongside earlier broadcasts by Gated Canal Community Radio and Sunrise Ocean Bender can be visited around these parts here.

 

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File under: A Year In The Country Ocular Explorations

 

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File under: Trails and Influences / Year 3 Wanderings

I suppose if you take the phrase edgelands as in part referring to transitional areas, often where industry/man made areas meet the countryside, then the book Grenzfalle / Falling Barriers could be seen as a document of a type of edgelands…

…but, well this is an edgelands with a particular brutal, brutalist architecture.

The book was published in 2009 and is a collection of photographs taken by six different photographers of the barriers that divided East and West Germany, just as the country began to be reunited.

(The photographers in question are Gerhard Zwickert, Eberhard Kloppel, Peter Leske, Heinz Dargelis, Werner Schulze, Bernd-Horst Sefzik.)

While a lot of imagery of such things has focused on the Berlin wall, this is more a document of the barriers in the landscape, next to frontier villages and so on.

There’s a curious harshness or possibly even (static) violence to these structures, their purpose and the philosophy that underlined them.

It is a fascinating, enthralling, moving book and I’m rather glad I found it.

Although the images were taken in 1990, they seem to harken back to an earlier, nearer mid century time somehow and reminded me of Paul Virilio’s Bunker Archaeology photographs…

I could easily be posting most of the images within it from now to whenever but I thought the best way to go about it was possibly to select just one book spread by each of the six photographers (not an easy task)… so here goes…

Intertwined wanderings around these parts:
Day #160/365: Edgelands Report Documents; Cases #1a (return), #2a-5a.

Day #229/365: A Bear’s Ghosts…

Week #33/52: Bunker Archives #4; Paul Virilio’s Bunker Archaeology and accidental utilitarian art

Week #34/52: Restricted Areas – Further Wanderings Amongst A Bear’s Ghosts

Week #9/52: Christopher Herwig’s Soviet Bus Stops, echoes of reaching for the cosmos, folkloric breakfast adornment and other artfully pragmatic curio collectings, encasings and bindings…

Elsewhere in the ether:
Peruse the book here and at the publishers Kerber Verlag.

 

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When I was watching the 1999 television series The Last Train, some of the derelict sites that were used as locations seemed almost surreal and unexpectedly abandoned; it was genuinely odd to see a hi-de-hi like traditional British holiday camp in a state of abandonment and collapse, while the cooling towers that are seen in one episode seem just too monumental in scale and purpose to have been discarded.

When I was looking up online about the series, I came across various examples of what is sometimes known as urban exploration (exploring and photographing derelict places and structures) that featured the locations from The Last Train.

I was particularly taken by these of Thorpe Marsh power plant and its cooling towers; they seemed to capture a grand or monumental nature of the structures and put me in mind of photographs of Soviet era abandoned places and the way that they seem to be nearer to monuments to a lost time and age rather than merely derelict often utilitarian structures.

(File post under: Other Pathway Pointers And Markers)

Directions and Destinations:
Report – Thorpe Marsh Power Plant, Doncaster – February 2011

Local places of interest:
Day #229/365: A Bear’s Ghosts…
Day #346/365: Audiological Reflections and Pathways #1; a library of loss
Week #9/52: Christopher Herwig’s Soviet Bus Stops, echoes of reaching for the cosmos, folkloric breakfast adornment and other artfully pragmatic curio collectings, encasings and bindings…
Week #49/52: The Wanderings Of Veloelectroindustrial

 

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Dawn Edition £11.95. Night Edition £24.95.

Available via our Artifacts Shop, our Bandcamp Ether Victrola and Norman Records.

Undercurrents was partly inspired by living in the countryside for the first time since I was young, where because of the more exposed nature of rural life I found myself in closer contact with, more overtly affected by and able to directly observe the elements and nature than via life in the city.

This coincided with an interest in and exploration of an otherly take on pastoralism and creating the A Year In The Country project; of coming to know the land as a place of beauty, exploration and escape that you may well drift off into but where there is also a sometimes unsettled undercurrent and layering of history and culture.

I found myself drawn to areas of culture that draw from the landscape, the patterns beneath the plough, the pylons and amongst the edgelands and where they meet with the lost progressive futures, spectral histories and parallel worlds of what has come to be known as hauntology.

Undercurrents is an audio exploration and interweaving of these themes – a wandering amongst nature, electronic soundscapes, field recordings, the flow of water through and across the land and the flipside of bucolic dreams.

Preview clips from the album at our Soundcloud Mark II Ether Victrola

 

Undercurrent Dawn Edition. Limited to 104 copies. £11.95.
Hand-finished white/black CDr album in textured recycled fold out sleeve with 3 x inserts and badge.

Top of CD.                                                          Bottom of CD.

Further encasement details:
1) Custom printed using archival giclée pigment ink.
2) Includes 25mm/1″ badge, secured with removable glue on string bound tag.
3) Back of one insert hand numbered and signed.

 

Undercurents Night Edition. Limited to 104 copies. £24.95.
Hand-finished box-set contains: album on all black CDr, 12 page string bound booklet, 4 x badge pack, 1 x large badge, 2 x stickers, 1 x print.


Top of CD.                                                            Bottom of CD.

Further encasement details:
1) Booklet/cover art custom printed using archival giclée pigment ink.
2) Contained in a matchbox style sliding two-part rigid matt card box with cover print.
3) Fully black CDr (black on top, black on playable side).
4) Black string bound booklet: 12 pages (6 sides printed);
Printed on textured fine art cotton rag paper, heavy card and semi-transparent vellum.
Hand numbered and signed on the reverse.
5) 4 x badge set, contained in a see-through polythene bag with a folded card header.
6) 1 x large badge.
7) 1 x square sticker, 1 x landscape format sticker.
8) Print on textured fine art cotton rag paper. Hand numbered and signed on the reverse.

(File Under: Encasements / Artifacts – Artifact #4a)

 

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The Last Train is a 1999 television series written by Matthew Graham, who was co-creator and one of the writers for the series Life On Mars and Ashes To Ashes, both of which dealt with a form of time travel or dislocation.

The Last Train also deals with similar themes in a way but rather here it is through the passengers of a train carriage who are accidentally placed in suspended animation and awake a number of years after a world wide cataclysm to what seems to be a deserted and derelict world.

As far as I know it is not available commercially but can be viewed online in a degraded quality version.

The muted grey-green colours of the version you can watch, along with the often murky, subterranean settings makes it seem almost as though you could be watching a semi-lost 1970s British television series rather than one from the turn of the millennium and it seems to be a broadcast from some curiously multi-layered, fractured point in time.

One of the most intriguing aspects of the series is that it is something of an urban explorer’s delight as it features quite a number of abandoned spaces; derelict and disused offices, railway stations, factories, cooling towers, refineries and a Pontin’s hi-de-hi-esque holiday camp.

Those aspects, combined with the quality of the video put me in mind of both the societal collapse of the final series of Quatermass and the “bad wires” destruction of technology in The Changes and compounded the sense of it being a semi-lost 1970s series…

(File Post Under: Cathode Ray & Cinematic Explorations, Radiowave Resonations & Audiological Investigations)

Audio Visual Transmission Guide: The Last Train

 

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File under: A Year In The Country Ocular Explorations

 

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I have something of a softspot for the record label Front & Follow.

I probably first came across their releases via Lutine’s White Flowers album in 2014, which they released.

Lutine were an early(ish) discovery in the first year of A Year In The Country and theirs is beautiful, transportative work.

I was wandering how to describe their music and I thought what I wrote back when might well still be appropriate:

“If you should take sprinklings, seedings and pathways to and from the following then you may arrive at some sense of this body of work; the songbird travellers of Finders Keepers, in particular Paper Dollhouse and Magpahi, the coruscating journeys of Espers, possibly the purity of that teller/re-teller of old stories Anne Briggs, voices such as Audrey Copard from past revivals of folkloric music that seem to have stepped aside and into spaces of their own, the swooping ancient tellings of Dead Can Dance and Lisa Gerrard, the encompassing tranquil dramaticisms of the Cocteau Twins, interrelated Songs From The Siren and their journeying alongside swathes of minimalist piano from Mr Harold Budd… White Flowers puts me in mind of a peak point of the label 4AD, when it was a home for fragile, textured beauty and explorations, such journeys being enhanced, accompanied and often encased by the work of Vaughan Oliver/v23.”

I may well add a sort of reimagined medievalism to the above…

I have just rediscovered their 8-track collection of reinterpretations of tracks from White Flowers by the likes of Laura Cannell, Sarah Angliss & Stephen Hiscock, Michael Tanner, Kemper Norton and Saint Etienne’s Pete Wiggs amongst others.

Listening to that collection is like being allowed a brief portal back to that peak point of 4AD records. Lovely stuff.

If you should like to take a wander through the further reaches and experimental areas of music then a visit to The Outer Church compilation released by Front & Follow may well also be an hour or two well spent.

The Outer Church was established by Joseph Stannard (now of Wire magazine) and the compilation features a selection of those who performed at The Outer Church, including Grumbling Fur, Pye Corner Audio, Black Mountain, Ekoplekz, Hong Kong In The 60s, Paper Dollhouse etc.

Front & Follow’s The Blow series of cassettes, where two musicians are each given a side of the tape have also caught my eye/ear and seem to be a good space and impetus for musical explorations.

They include work by sometimes fellow AYITC travellers Time Attendant, Howlround and Sophie Cooper, alongside Julian Bradley, IX Tab and Hoofus:

“‘The Blow’ project brings two artists together to formulate a collaborative release of their own making. Each artist has a side of audio (30-45 mins in length) to do whatever they want with. The two artists are encouraged to work together on the release, but the length and depth of this collaboration is completely up to them and agreed on a release-by-release basis – there are no set parameters, no fancy rules, no memorandum of understanding, no initiation ceremonies.”

Musically and/or visually Front & Follow’s releases seem to at times explore a parallel take on pastoral concerns, whether via the reimagined folk of Lutine, the evocative minimal chamber music and wild animal calls of Laura Cannel’s Beneath Swooping Talons or Kemper Norton’s ecologically concerned tales meets lost Cornish kingdom album Toll.

While a release such as Pye Corner Audio’s Black Mist EP may exist musically in another universe’s electronic dance club and wander amongst related fractured equipment but the cover evokes a darkly minimal mixture of natural beauty and possibly previous era’s places of worship.

Along with record label The Geography Trip, Front & Follow also broadcast the Gated Canal Community Radio show, where such otherly pastoral interests interweave with the spectral interests of what has come to be known as hauntology.

Alongside the actual shows, listening to “Welcome to the Gated Canal Community Radio Show” is a playful sixty seconds well spent.

And talking of playful aspects…

Despite the serious and/or experimental nature of some of the Front & Follow’s releases, there is an underlying humour to the label which is nice to see: the introductory banner to their website has the byline “offering a firm handshake to sonic reverie since 2007”, while they describe themselves as “a record label based in Manchester, UK.  We do what we can.” and that “no initiation ceremonies” from the description of the Blow releases makes me chuckle.

(File Post Under: Cathode Ray & Cinematic Explorations, Radiowave Resonations & Audiological Investigations)

Audio Visual Transmission Guide:
Front & Follow at Bandcamp
Welcome to the Gated Canal Community Radio Show
Gated Canal Community Radio
See & Hear at Front & Follow’s main site

 

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File under: Trails and Influences / Year 3 Wanderings

A smattering of Broadcast related items/avant-pop artifacts and cultural constellations…

1) The booklet included with the 2015 represses of Broadcast’s albums.

Along with Mother Is The Milky Way, this seems to be one of the very rarest of Broadcast artifacts.

I know that it was included with initial copies of the represses but I don’t know how many copies were printed/included and apart from the initial press mentioning about the booklet, I’ve never seen another copy, photographs of it or a mention of it being included with an album that is for sale/resale since the initial period of the re-releases.

It’s a lovely thing which feels very precious; only 8 pages long, approximately 10 inches in dimensions but feels encyclopedic, gathering together 6 different covers designed by Julian House over the years for Broadcast’s albums and two cover images of Trish Keenan in avant-pop high priestess garb.

Seek and you may find (or not)…

2) Transmission: Possible; interview in NME, 3rd June 2000.

It’s been a fair old while since I’ve picked up an old copy of the weekly music press such as the NME and it was a genuinely odd experience, it feels like such a time capsule from another era.

I guess this issue from just after the millenium was published just before the internet really started to kick in, just before the magazines power, reach and influence started to wane.

One of the things that struck me on reading the magazine was just how important it was once upon a time with regards to “making or breaking” bands etc, in the sense that there weren’t all that many outlets back then for indie/independent/leftfield/younger persons/student-esque music.

And there, in the middle of it all, something of a cuckoo in the nest, are Broadcast.

With hindsight they seem somewhat out of place but I guess for a brief(ish) moment they were marketed in a similar way to other young people/student-esque etc bands.

3) Trish Keenan’s sleeve notes for the Finders Keepers/B-Music release of the soundtrack to Valerie And Her Week Of Wonders.

This seems to be a pretty rare item nowadays, which is a shame as it’s a fine gathering of work and the sleeve notes are well worth a read and peruse.

They include a consideration of the cinematic background of the film by Peter Hames, author of the book The Czechoslovak New Wave and Andy Votel’s (who is one of the people behind Finders Keepers) notes which are a personal history snapshot of cultural discovery and subsequent cultural explorations and searching.

Trish Keenan’s notes are relatively brief but they are very evocative, particularly in capturing a sense of the point when a piece of work does seem to literally open up new pathways within your mind and very firmly take root within them.

In a way, it is a reflection of a form of (non-lysergic) psychedelic awakenings.

 

Intertwined wanderings around these parts:
Day #33/365: Broadcast and the Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age and the recalibrations of past cathode ray stories…

Day #178/365: The cuckoo in the nest: sitting down with a cup of cha, a slice of toast, Broadcast, Emerald Web, Ghost Box Records and other fellow Shindig travellers…

Day #251/365: Broadcast; constellators and artifacts

Week #43/52: Broadcast – Mother Is The Milky Way and gently milling around avant-garde, non-populist pop

Audio Visual Transmission Guide #28/52a: Valerie And Her Week Of Wonders – Unreleased Variations Away From Bricks And Mortar

 

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From The Furthest Signals album preview clips are online for listening to.

Visit them at our Soundcloud Mark II Ether Victrola.

Pre-order the album 25th July 2017. Release date 8th August 2017.

Will be available at our Artifacts Shop and our Bandcamp Ether Victrola.

Further details on the album can be found here.

 

(File Under: Encasements / Artifacts – Artifact #4a)

 

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From the late 1960s to earlier 1970s there were a number of female musicians working around folk music who for a fair few years were lost to view…

They include Vashti Bunyan, Linda Perhacs, Shelagh Macdonald and Judy Dyble.

The last three of those were written about by Andrew Male and Mike Barnes in a feature called The Lost Women Of Folk in Mojo magazine back in November 2013, which is a fine exploration of the history of and interviews with those performers.

Shelagh McDonald and Judy Dyble’s work I have a longstanding softspot for, probably in part because both of them appear on the Pete Wiggs compiled Gather In The Mushrooms compilation (subtitled the British acid folk underground 1968-1974) that was one of the early inspirations for A Year In The Country.

On that album Judy Dyble performs a song called Morning Way with the band Trader Horne, of which in the early days of A Year In The Country I said:

“I think it was Forest’s Graveyard or maybe Trader Horne’s Morning Way that first grabbed my attention and made me realise that something other than my preconceptions about folk music was going on here. The first lines on Morning Way are “Dreaming strands of nightmare are sticking to my feet…”, followed close after by a somewhat angelic female voice in counterpart and well, I thought “This is odd, I like this…””

I find Judy Dyble’s voice captivating, entrancing and very evocative and on her earlier recordings it seems to capture and summon the atmosphere and spirit of the time and transport me back then…

I thought it was a shame that for a fair few years she had been slightly lost to view in the history of folk and in terms of her work with Fairport Convention (with whom she was the original female singer), so its good to see that over the years she is no longer so much one of the “lost women of folk”.

As the years have progressed she has stepped back into the public eye; beginning in 1981 she has guested at a number of live performances with Fairport Convention and in 2003 began recording again and has since put out a number of albums and singles.

More recently has seen an anthology of her work released by Earth records and also the release of a biography that she co-wrote with prolific author (and sometime A Year In The Country reviewer at Goldmine Magazine/Spin Cycle) Dave Thompson, both of which are well worth an exploration in terms of looking back at growing up in the 1960s, a highpoint of folk explorations in the later 1960s/early 1970s and what one of those who was connected to such things went on to do.

(File post under: Other Pathway Pointers And Markers)

Directions and Destinations:
Judy Dyble and Dave Thompson’s An Accidental Musician
Judy Dyble’s Anthology
An Accidental Musician at Judy Dyble’s website
The Lost Women Of Folk issue of Mojo magazine
Dave Thompson’s Spin Cycle at Goldmine Magazine

Local places of interest:
Day #3/365: Gather In The Mushrooms: something of a starting point via an accidental stumbling into the British acid folk undeground
Day #267/365: Morning Way. Trader Horne

 

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File under: A Year In The Country Ocular Explorations

 

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