A Year In The Country

Gentle, drifting, softly woozy psych-ambient from 1968… Apparently the band were an influence on Broadcast and Portishead…

 

Links:

• Stream “Cloud Song” on Spotify
• The “A garden of (un)earthly delights and a wardrobe of fineries…” post at A Year In The Country

 

If you’re reading this it’s quite likely you already know who Boards of Canada are but just in case below is some background information on them:

Boards of Canada are a duo of Michael Sandison and Marcus Eoin, who for a considerable period were based in rural Scotland near to the capital city Edinburgh. They are known for creating distinctive and influential often electronic melodic music that incorporates a hazy, nostalgic, distant dream-like and almost hallucinatory atmosphere which utilises vintage synthesisers, samples from 1970s public broadcasting programmes and other previous decades’ media, analogue production methods and aesthetics/flaws such as tape flutter and hip hop inspired breakbeats.

They originally formed in 1986 and have a somewhat enigmatic public persona, in part due to rarely performing live or giving interviews, and when they do so these are often conducted via email, alongside increasing lengths of time between releasing new work (they have released various singles and EPs and the albums Twoism, Boc Maxima, Music Has the Right to Children, Geogaddi, The Campfire Headphase and Tomorrow’s Harvest in 1995, 1996, 1998, 2002, 2005 and 2013 respectively). Adding to this enigmatic air, their work appears to contain cryptic, unexplained, subliminal meanings and messages, either through the use of spoken word samples and/or in a more hidden way in the atmospheres it creates, alongside the use of esoteric methods of production and inspirations:

“They have based a number of… songs on mathematical equations (working out frequencies for melodies that directly correlate to the changing amount of light in one day, for example).” (Quoted from “Breaking Into Heaven”, interview with Boards of Canada by Emma Warren, The Face Volume 3 Number 48, January 2001.)

Their work could be considered to represent a form of midway or transitional point between the likes of instrumental downtempo electronica released by the likes of  Wall of Sound and Mo’Wax around the mid-1990s and the hauntological electronica that began to be created and released from around the mid-2000s by Ghost Box Records etc, with the founders of the latter having spoken of how Boards of Canada could be considered an early example of and influence on work that has come to be labelled as hauntological.

One of the relatively few interviews in general, and in person in particular, that Boards of Canada have given was with Rob Young for issue 260 of Wire magazine which was published in October 2005. Looking back both the date of that issue’s publication and also the interviewer now seem to have a particular significance in the lineage of hauntology and where it interconnects with otherly pastoral culture, the themes and expressions of which intersect with Boards of Canada’s work: Rob Young would go on to write the book Electric Eden (2010), which was possibly the first book to extensively explore the fringes and undercurrents of folk and pastoral music and culture and also to intertwine that hauntology; while the mid-2000s was the time when hauntology began to coalesce as a music and cultural form, with for example Ghost Box Records being founded and beginning to release records in 2004; and it was also around this time that the writers Simon Reynolds and Mark Fisher were amongst the first to use the phrase hauntology to describe such work.

There are a number of similarities in terms of recurring inspirations, themes, aesthetics and so on between Boards of Canada’s work and hauntology, with the duo’s work both anticipating and exploring such things in parallel with hauntology. One example of this is how much of hauntology tries to create the sense of a parallel world and how similar could be said of Boards of Canada:

“It’s like we’re inhabiting an alternative, parallel present where maybe someone in the past took a different branch to the way things actually went.” (Quoted from “Boards of the Underground”, interview with Boards of Canada by Richard Southern, Jockey Slut Volume 3 Number 11, December 2000.)

Boards of Canada also share with hauntology a sense and exploration of “the past inside the present” (which is a phrase that is sampled on the “Music is Math” track on the duo’s album Geogaddi) and both often invoke a form of nostalgia without being a straightforward replication of past eras’ music and culture, which can create a comforting sense of familiarity and also an unsettling atmosphere of something unexplained and untoward on the edge of memory and consciousness:

“There are textures in what we try to do… which borrow from certain sounds or eras – even in visual things that we do as well, artwork – to trigger something, almost a cascade. It’s like a memory that someone has – even though it’s artificial, they never even had the memory; it’s just you’re ageing a song. And then people feel, is that something familiar I knew from years ago?” (Quoted from “Protect and Survive”, interview with Boards of Canada by Rob Young, The Wire issue 260, October 2005).

Boards of Canada also share with hauntology an interest in certain strands of 1970s television and an accompanying hazily skewed or eldritch take on educationalism, public information films,  government organisations and so on, with the duo taking their name from a Canadian government organisation called the National Film Board of Canada which is dedicated to distributing educational film, the output of which they watched when young after their families emigrated for a time to Canada. They have spoken in interviews about how the aesthetic of their work was influenced by viewing such films, in particular the characteristics and flaws of their era’s media (such as tape flutter etc) and this interconnects with Boards of Canada and hauntology drawing from a wider sphere of older educational and children’s television and its electronic soundtracks:

“Among the many common concerns [between Boards of Canada and Ghost Box artists such as The Focus Group and the Advisory circle]… a nostalgic fascination for television stands out as the major connection. During the ’70s especially, children’s TV programming in the UK featured a peculiar preponderance of ghost stories, tales of the uncanny, and apocalyptic scenarios (like “The Changes”, in which the populace rises up and destroys all technology). In between this creepy fare, young eyes were regularly assaulted by Public Information Films, a genre of [government-commissioned] short British programs made for TV broadcast and ostensibly designed to educate and advise [but which often contained suprisingly unsettling atmospheres and themes]… The unsettling content of all this vintage kids-oriented TV seeped into the brains of Sandison and Eoin at a vulnerable age. But what seems to have lingered even more insidiously in the memory of BoC, and the hauntologists that came after them, is the music. For many Brit kids, the sound effects and incidental motifs made for these programs by outfits like the BBC Radiophonic Workshop were their first exposure to abstract electronic sounds. Speaking in 1998, Sandison claimed that these theme tunes and soundtracks were ‘a stronger influence than modern music, or any other music that we listened to back then. Like it or not, they’re the tunes that keep going around in our heads.'” (Quoted from “Why Boards of Canada’s Music Has the Right to Children Is the Greatest Psychedelic Album of the ’90s”, Simon Reynolds, pitchfork.com, 3rd April 2018.)

There is at times a form of melancholia present in both Boards of Canada’s work and hauntology:

“[Hauntological music and culture] draws from and examines a sense of loss, yearning or nostalgia for a post-war utopian, progressive, modernist future that was never quite reached, which is often accompanied by a sense of lingering Cold War dread.” (Quoted from A Year In The Country: Straying From The Pathways, 2018.)

Connected to which in the above article Reynolds writes:

“Another hauntology theme that Boards of Canada anticipated is the notion of the lost future. Again, this tends to be identified most with the ’70s and that decade’s queasy ambivalence about runaway technological change: on the one hand, there was still a lingering post-World War II optimism abroad, but it was increasingly contaminated with paranoid anxiety about ecological catastrophe and the rise of a surveillance state. ‘Looking back at TV and film from that decade, a lot of what you see was pretty dark,’ says Sandison. By the early ’90s, when BoC were finding their identity, ‘all the sounds and pictures from back then seemed like a kind of partially-remembered nightmare.’” (Quoted from “Why Boards of Canada’s Music…”, as above.)

Boards of Canada’s 2013 album Tomorrow’s Harvest contains a hidden, layered and possibly even bleak connection with and evocation of the Cold War and dystopian futures. The album’s title was inspired by a US website which sells survivalist supplies intended for use in a crisis scenario such as dried foods, solar power equipment and so on, while the front cover image of a sun bleached city skyscape off in the distance doesn’t seem to so much represent a view of the vitality of sunlight but rather has a queasy unsettling air:

“The cover appears to be a photo of the San Francisco skyline, shot from the vantage point of Alameda Naval Air Station, a now defunct military base operational during the cold war.” (Quoted from “Boards of Canada: ‘We’ve become a lot more nihilistic over the years'”, Louis Pattison, theguardian.com, 6th June 2013.)

When, in the above interview with Louis Pattison, Boards of Canada were asked if this image and its location were a coincidence or did it point towards themes and concepts in the record, Eoin replied:

“Yeah, definitely – of course that’s an ingredient of the theme on this record. In fact if you look again at the San Francisco skyline on the cover it’s actually a ghost of the city. You’re looking straight through it.” (Quoted from “Boards of Canada…”, as above.)

The album booklet and insert artwork which accompanied the release of Tomorrow’s Harvest appears to futher explore and infer such dystopic and unsettling themes and feature grids of often indistinct and cropped photographs that also often incorporate the scanlines and/or pixel dot patterns of older cathode ray televisions and monitors. They are unaccompanied by any explanatory text and while they were presumedly created for the album  there is something about them which makes them appear as though they are possibly unsanctioned stills from some form of official surveillance.

The images include a number of communications masts and infrastructure that also unstatedly infers a sense of some indefinable past Cold War paranoia infused decade, alongside the likes of a potentially broken down car, featureless silhouettes of people off in the distance, brutalist concrete architecture, arid desert and a forest or crops which has been decimated by some unknown event. These sit alongside occasional views of still healthy seeming natural landscapes, which only seem to highlight the desolate and unsettling nature of the other images and to leave the viewer with a sense that they may well be isolated last pockets of such things after a time of catastrophe.

Exploring the flipside and undercurrents of the pastoral and folk music is something of a recurring theme in Boards of Canada’s work and in interviews they have included the British psychedelic folk band The Incredible String Band, that were formed in 1966, as one of their “likes” or influences. Such elements were given more overt expression on the Campfire Headphase album, which included more organic instrumentation such as acoustic guitars, albeit still heavily treated, alongside more conventional song structures. The resulting work in part appears to represent an hallucinatory time stretched event experienced around a campfire and at times is not dissimilar to listening to a group of friends jamming around the embers of the fire late into the night, although as filtered through the half-memory of a distant dream rather than being a straightforward recording or recollection.

Such pastoral elements could be considered to connect with the way in which and location that Boards of Canada make their music. For much of the time when working as Boards of Canada they have been based, as mentioned at the start of the post, in rural Scotland near to the capital city of Edinburgh and at a remove from wider and/or urban trends and influences:

“[Eoin spoke of how ] ‘This whole project has come about with us living on the outskirts of Edinburgh… and for the last two decades we’ve been working on it from here, and we’ve had no reason to want to relocate to the city or to the south or anything, it’s as simple as that. In fact, we actually find to some extent this so-called hermetic bubble that we live in is actually making it a lot easier for us to do our thing and not feel any urge to make it DJ friendly, or make it work for a certain social or club environment.'”

Their music’s creation of a self-contained seeming world and its distinctive character can also be seen as, in part, a reflection of that “hermetic bubble” and a reaction against the city and urban aesthetics:

“They stand for… above all, a rural ideal completely opposite to the fast-paced urban excitement that has powered pop music for nearly 50 years.” (Quoted from “Breaking Into Heaven”, as above.)

Another distinctive aspect of Boards of Canada’s work that it shares with and anticipated in hauntology is the use of previous eras’ synthesised sounds alongside, as referred to at the start of this post, audio aesthetics which recall older analogue recording equipment and media, such as tape wobble, vinyl imperfections etc:

“[In hauntology the] use and foregrounding of recording medium noise and imperfections, such as the crackle and hiss of vinyl, tape wobble and so on calls attention to the decaying nature of older analogue mediums and… can be used to create a sense of time out of joint and edge memories of previous eras.” (Quoted from A Year In The Country…, as above.)

Elsewhere at A Year In The Country:

• Boards Of Canada – Tomorrows Harvest; Stuck At The Starting Post / Tumbled From A Future Phase IV
• Boards of Canada, The Delaware Road, Mo’Wax, UNKLE, DJ Shadow, Tricky, Portishead, Massive Attack, Moon Wiring Club, DJ Food, Belbury Poly, The Memory Band, Grantby, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and Andrea Parker – Universe Creation and Spectral Lines in the Cultural Landscape
• Electric Eden – Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music – Folk Vs Pop, Less Harvested Cultural Landscapes and Acts of Enclosure, Old and New
• A Definition of Hauntology – Its Recurring Themes and its Confluence and Intertwining with Otherly Folk
• Spectres vs Retro – Simon Reynolds’ Haunted Audio Article in Wire Magazine
• Ghost Box Records – Parallel Worlds, Conjuring Spectral Memories, Magic Old and New and Slipstream Trips to the Panda Pops Disco

 

A rare vocal track from cosmic new age synth explorers Emerald Web… an arpeggiated fairy tale flight of fantasy…

 

Links:

• Stream “Flight of the Raven” at Spotify
• Dragon Wings and Wizard’s Tales at Finders Keepers Records
• “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” post at A Year In The Country

 

Starting today, Friday 7th May 2021, there is a sale and bargains to be had at the A Year In The Country Artifacts Shop and Bandcamp.

The 2018 The Corn Mother CD album and its explorations of a lost folkloric fever dream film and cassettes of Airwaves: Songs From The Sentinels and its gathering and weaving of scattered radio signals plucked from the ether are available at reduced prices.

Also there are some copies of the Wandering Through Spectral Fields and Straying From The Pathways books that have slight print variations, imperfections etc, also at reduced prices.

Thanks as always to those who created the music for the The Corn Mother album: Gavino Morretti, Pulselovers, The Heartwood Institute, United Bible Studies (David Colohan, Dom Cooper of The Owl Service / Rif Mountain and Alison O’Donnell of Mellow Candle), Widow’s Weeds, Depatterning, Sproatly Smith and Field Lines Cartographer.

Also thanks for the dab hand editorial and design work on the A Year In The Country books and The Corn Mother album by Ian Lowey and Suzy Prince of the online and bricks and mortar bookshop Bopcap Books, of which I have written previously:

“Where else are you likely to hear Blue Note Strikes a Radical Chord, Serge Gainsbourg, The Advisory Circle’s Ways of Seeing and The Sound of Music as ‘interpreted to gloriously kitsch effect by Slovenian industrial ironists Laibach’ while perusing a selection of carefully curated vintage cult books and literature curios?”

“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 on The Corn Mother

“Spectral sounds made for wandering the moors [while] radio waves permeate the fog-cloaked air… interference, plain piano song, shimmering electronics, remote listening and shadowy melodies make for an elegant and sinister experience…” Include Me Out on Airwaves: Songs From The Sentinels

“Straying From The Pathways is a comprehensive and hugely satisfying read, both as a book and as a reference guide to the liminal and the eerie in popular culture. There are numerous rabbit holes and recommendations for the reader in which to wander or to explore, and the book as a whole rewards repeated readings, such is the wealth of ideas or intriguing cross-referencing between genres and mediums… Highly recommended; a haunted house of a book that you will wish to frequent time and time again.” Grey Malkin, Moof on A Year In The Country: Straying From The Pathways

“A new book caught my eye recently – the title A Year In The Country: Wandering Through Spectral Fields, that goes in search of the darker, eerier side of the bucolic countryside dream by looking at films of a certain genre, books, TV series, music; it is great to have this fascinating subject explored so thoroughly and brought together under one title.” Verity Sharp, Late Junction, BBC Radio 3

 

In 2020 the normally heavy and doom metal orientated label Svart released on CD and vinyl Dominik Scherrer and Natasha Khan’s soundtrack for the television series Requiem (2018), a supernatural thriller in which an urbane London sophisticate classical cellist comes adrift as she attempts to unravel a set of mysteries connected to her past in a Welsh town and its surrounding rural area.

The soundtrack brings to mind a classic darkly playful ethereal release back when on 4AD that you never knew existed – think His Name Is Alive’s debut Livonia (1990) – and as with the series contains an air of what Scherrer describes as “pastoral spook”.

There is something about the series that seems to hint at hidden layers in the story, and this somehow places it at a subtle, eerie remove from much of mainstream television drama.

The album’s booklet includes writing by Erik Stein which reveals that the series does indeed include (semi-hidden) layers. Stein discusses how the series and album refer to and draw from the work of real life 16-17th century Anglo-Welsh mathematician, astronomer, teacher, occultist and alchemist John Dee, with the series featuring one of his books and the (imagined) work of his son.

Stein discusses how Dee and his collaborator John Kelley:

“formed the foundations of so-called ‘Enochian’ magic, a system of ceremonial sorcery based on the evocation and commanding of various spirits. Dee and Kelley claimed that they could communicate with these spirits through their own ‘Enochian’ language, [which they said] had been revealed to them directly via a series of angels.”

Stein describes how Scherrer and Khan used the names of those ‘Enochian’ angels for the album’s track names (“Aigra”, Naa”, “Izraz” etc) and also that Khan “uses ‘Enochian’ words and phrases as her lyrics” during the album.

Dee also claimed to speak to angels and spirits via a black mirror and created an esoteric figure called the Monas Hieroglyphica (which is said to embody his vision of the unity of the cosmos and has a horned devil-like meets EinstĂĽrzende Neubauten logo appearance), both of which interconnect with elements that appear in the series.

Requiem made for intriguing yet unsettling viewing before I knew all that. Now… well, brrrrr indeed.

Elsewhere:

• The Requiem soundtrack at Svart Records
• The Requiem soundtrack at Norman Records
• Dominik Scherrer’s website
• Bat for Lashes’ website
• Requiem at the BBC’s site (includes clips, trailer, an interview with screenwriter Kris Mrksa etc)

 

Elsewhere at A Year In The Country:

• Requiem – Further Glimpses of Albion in the Overgrowth and Related Considerations
• Requiem – Sidestepping Modern Methods, Curiously Banal Infrastructure and Other Considerations
• Requiem – Whisperings of Otherworldly Pastoralism, Hidden Layers and Intertwinings
• Requiem is also written about in the A Year In The Country: Straying From The Pathways book

 

Otherworldly pop with shades of Nico and Broadcast, all wrapped up in artwork by Julian House of Ghost Box Records. A b-side discovered a fair old time ago now via the “lucky dip”-esque racks of cheap promo CD singles that you used to find in second hand record shops.

 

Links:

• Stream “Just to Play” on Spotify
• The “Midnight Movies, (re)findings, crumbling textures and a certain geometric otherlyness…” post at A Year In The Country

 

Shadows was a supernatural and fantasy young adult orientated British television anthology drama series that featured 20 approximately half-hour stand alone episodes, and was produced by the commercial broadcaster Thames Television and was broadcast for three seasons between 1975 and 1978. It is part of the strand of late 1960s and 1970s British television that also included the likes of The Owl Service (1969-1970), The Changes (1975), Children of the Stones (1977) and Raven (1977), which often contained and explored surprisingly complex, challenging and at times dark themes and atmospheres, particularly considering its intended younger audience, and which in part due to these characteristics has become a reference point for hauntological related and/or otherly pastoral or wyrd culture.

“The Inheritance” episode, originally broadcast in 1976 as part of the series’ second season, and written by Josephine Poole involves a son called Martin, who is on the threshold of adulthood and though he lives in an urban area he wants to work in the countryside. As with other episodes previously discussed it explores issues around youthful autonomy as he is at odds with his mother, who wants him to take up an office job in insurance.

Martin’s aged and ill grandfather, who has spent his life working rurally as a deer harbourer, comes to stay with them and shows him a deer antler he once found, which is from a type of deer he had never seen and which mysteriously left no tracks. The grandfather, who very much seems like he belongs to another era and has little time for modern ways nor the mother’s wish for her son to work in an office, goes on to tell Martin of how in the old days antlers were worshipped and people used to do a horn dance, the meaning of which he says went back to “the dark days”. He also tells Martin of how a close bond grows between the harbourer and the deer, who seem to know when one of the harbourers has died or will do soon, and come to pay their respect.

His grandfather’s tales and connection with the land further fuel Martin’s desire not to work in an office, and they both set off to a nearby park early in the morning in order to watch the wild deer. When Martin subsequently wanders through the park on his own he sees a group of five men in Medieval style costume, who are wearing deer skull and antler horn headdresses, and who undertake a form of folkloric ritual dance to also Medieval style music before fading away, after which he finds a similar rare antler to the one his grandfather has.

The horn dancer’s appearing seems not so much due to a form of time travel or portal but rather to be an intrusion onto the mortal plane of the spirit world. Curiously Martin seems largely unperturbed by seeing the horn dancers, or even to find it especially unusual, and after being told about it his grandfather replies by saying the dance was incomplete as there should have been six participants, and that he wishes he could have seen the dance before he died.

Following this the episode features a very visually striking sequence where it steps away from realist aesthetics when Martin has an unsettled nights sleep and has fever dream-like visions of the horn dancers but this time in a form of tinted negative. As the sequence segues into colour it is revealed that one of the dancers is his grandfather, who says his grandson’s name as Martin awakes.

The grandfather has died in the night, apparently not being able to see the horn dance before he died, but rather to have joined it in the afterlife. Martin’s mother gives Martin his grandfather’s inheritance, which is the key to his harbourers cottage, and therefore a way for Martin to more easily fulfil his wish to work in the countryside.

In a final discussion, or relatively mild mannered showdown, between Martin and his mother over his futures plans, she says how she grew up in the countryside and just wanted better for her children and to “get away from the mud”. Martin’s reply is that he has to make his own choice and that he is “opting for the wind”.

Martin’s wish to work in the countryside in the episode connects with the back to the land movement which gathered pace after the late 1960s, as part of which people wished to reconnect with the basics of life, nature and agriculture and were drawn to a rural way of life. As with Martin’s similar desires, this was not so much a strictly counter cultural movement but it overlapped with it in terms of participants and inspiration, such as a rejection of rampant consumerism and careerist defined lives.

As previously mentioned the episode was written by Josephine Poole, who since 1961 has published more than two dozen books for children, young adults and adults. These include the young adult novel Billy Buck (1972), which shares some similar themes with “The Inheritance”, in particular the way it revolves around an ancient horn dance. However, whereas in “The Inheritance” the dance is depicted in a positive light, in Billy Buck it is used in conjunction with bonfire night revels as a way of exploiting a rural village for sinister purposes by driving the locals to hysteria and tapping into their appetite for persecution in order to destroy an ancient family.

(As an aside Josephine Poole also worked on the animation of the 1978 film Watership Down, in which a group of rabbits flee their doomed warren, and which mixes mythology and a gritty realism that borders at points on darkly tinged horror. She also wrote six of the episodes of supernatural anthology drama series West Country Tales broadcast between 1982-1983, the first season of which had a then fairly unique premise as it was based on purported real-life experiences sent in by viewers in response to a BBC appeal for submissions.)

Billy Buck can be grouped with two other young adult books published in the early 1970s, William Rayner’s Stag Boy (1971) and Penelope Lively’s The Wild Hunt of Hagworthy (1971), all three of which draw from similar mythical and folkloric associations with deer and related real world folk rituals:

“They share the setting of Exmoor and the Devon/Somerset border, where a deeply-buried folk heritage rises from the landscape – [including] a horn dance of the type still enacted today at Abbots Bromley, a wild hunt, [and] an ancient antlered helmet.” (Quoted from “Running with the Deer – 1971 in Children’s Literature”, Jem, whistlesinthewind.wordpress.com, 2012.)

(As a further aside, Penelope Lively also wrote the “Time Out of Mind” episode of Shadows, which involves a form of magic realist-like time travel into the world of an antique doll’s house.)

Alongside sharing these folkloric themes the books also connect with a wider trend in 1970s literature:

“The invasion of ancient folklore and myth into the present is a feature of many novels for ‘young adults’ of the late sixties and early seventies. There had been… the Alan Garner effect: in 1967 [his novel] The Owl Service redefined the remit of this type of writing, beyond ‘writing for children’, ambitious in the way it dealt with human emotions against an older, wiser and more powerful landscape. The stories were different because they were as rooted in everyday realism as the kitchen-sink dramas of British film… They existed against a particular sense of modernity at the time: heritage culture hadn’t really begun; things were either ‘old-fashioned’, or they were ‘modern’… [A possible name for this type of story could be] ‘British Ancient Landscape Hauntological Domestic Realist Wilderness'”(Quoted from “Running with the Deer – 1971 in Children’s Literature” and “Appreciating Josephine Poole – Moon Eyes”, Jem, whistlesinthewind.wordpress.com, 2012.)

This “invasion of ancient folklore and myth into the present” in fictional young adult orientated work was something of a recurring feature of 1970s British television including the likes of the previously mentioned The Changes, Raven and The Moon Stallion (1978) that draw from Arthurian legend, alongside “The Inheritance” and also some other episodes of Shadows. It is particularly present in “The Dark Encounter” written by Susan Cooper, which seems to exist in and explore a similar world and themes as her The Dark is Rising Sequence of five contemporary set young adult novels that were published between 1965 and 1977, which at the Wyrd Britain website were called “one of the [young adult fiction] cornerstones of Wyrd Britain” (as in culture which could also be called otherly pastoral, wyrd rural or wyrd folk and where it intertwines with hauntological culture) and which draw from Arthurian legends, English folklore and Celtic and Norse mythology.

I may well visit “The Dark Encounter” episode further another time…

Elsewhere:

• The Shadows DVD released by Network (but ÂŁ9 at the time of writing for the complete boxset, something of a bargain)
• Shadows’ premiere at the Talking Pictures TV archival television station
• The Wyrd Britain website
• The Whistles in the Wind website

 

Elsewhere at A Year In The Country:

• Shadows and Otherly Introductions
• She Wants to be Flowers – Filming The Owl Service
• The Owl Service, The Changes, Robin Redbreast, The Ash Tree, Sky, Penda’s Fen and Red Shift – Wanderings Through Spectral Television Landscapes
• The Intro to The Owl Service
• The Owl Service: fashion plates and (another) peek behind the curtain
• Filming The Owl Service; Tomato Soap and Lonely Stones
• The Changes / The Disruption – Notes on a Flipside of the Pastoral Conversation
• The Changes, Threads the bad wires and the ghosts of transmissions
• Children Of The Stones intro

 

Natura Journal is an occasional publication that via themed individual issues explores the natural world and our environment through photography and accompanying text.

Founded by Sophie Goodison, with editorial assistance by  James Hollis, the first issue is handsomely printed and through the use of  an elegant and uncluttered layout provides a stunningly beautiful, meditative and calming journey across a number of landscapes, including the Bavarian Alps, the Lofoten Islands off the coast of Northern Norway and the coastline of Cornwall:

“This volume of Natura explores the theme form… We journey from the high peaks of Southern Germany, across distant lands to Northern Norway and back to the familiar edge of the English coastline. We uncover freedom found in an Arctic breath… discuss land shaped by an ice age… take a walk in the footsteps of Vikings, and journey through some of the oldest rocks on Earth. We voyage through mountains that stretch across eight alpine countries, and embrace the kaleidoscopic colours of wildflowers.”

The photographs at times contain an almost ethereal, otherworldly character but the journal isn’t so much “wyrd rural” but rather could perhaps be filed alongside the likes of the publisher Little Toller, the Ernest Journal and Barbara Bosworth and Margot Anne Kelley’s book The Meadow in terms of providing a subtly alternate view of the landscape and natural world.

Often the photographs capture a sense of the scale and longstanding nature of the landscapes, where change can take millions of years to occur. Highlighting this and the relatively modern arrival of human civilisation, only in two of the photographs do any people appear, although they are merely tiny pinpricks in amongst the natural landscape.

Elsewhere in some of the photographs of the Lofoten Islands traditional red coloured wooden houses appear, the design of which follows a lineage back to Viking times and which are built on stilts. These are positioned somewhat precariously as they overhang the sea on an outcrop of rocky coastline and are again dwarfed by nature, in this instance being set against an imposing and slightly ominous seeming backdrop of a dark coastal mountain range, and have an isolated “edge of the world” character to them.

The photography of rock formations, the light on the sea and so on at times become almost like abstract images and textures, while the accompanying text  which explores the history of areas and the writer’s journey through them has an often poetic, almost lush or balm-like character that envelopes and immerses the reader.

There is a certain refreshing anonymity to the journal in terms of its creator, as though the project and the atmosphere it creates are the overriding concern. In relation to which, to indicate who created the photography, writing etc throughout the journal there is just one small line of text which says  “Created by Sophie Goodison” on the credits page. On the Natura website Goodison is listed as Founder & Creative Director but the photographs and writing are not directly credited to her, and it is only at one remove from the journal and project on her personal portfolio website that she is listed as being responsible for graphic / layout design, writing and photography work on Natura.

 

Elsewhere:

• Natura Journal
• Little Toller
• Ernest Journal
• Barbara Bosworth & Margot Anne Kelley’s The Meadow book at the Radius Books’ site

Elsewhere at A Year In The Country:

• Lisa Bond’s Landscape Phantasms
• Further Natural Calligraphy / Carving The Land / The Story of Land Art
• The Shadow Of Heaven – Further Marks andd Patterns Upon the Land
• Other Views / The Patterns Beneath the Plough, the Pylons and Amongst the Edgelands
• Recording the Layers Upon and Under the Land
• Solargraphy / The Ongoing Moment / Ernest Journal
• Barbara Bosworth & Margot Anne Kelley’s The Meadow – Recordings and Reflections of an Unhurried Space

 

As also recorded by sometimes A Year In Country contributors Lutine… there’s a purity and simplicity to this 1956 version that feels like a moment of peace and calm.

 

Links:

• Stream “Died of Love” at Spotify
• English Folk Songs at Folkways’ site
• The “Audrey Copard – English Folk Songs and dew on the corn…” post at A Year In The Country

 

Footnotes:

1. This period of the mid-1960s to the later 1970s may be chosen as significant for 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, and so has come to be associated with the yearning for lost post-war progressive futures that are referred to above. 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 abovementioned progressive lost futures. Sometimes in hauntological work the early 1980s will also be referenced, which may in part be due to this being a transitional or liminal time in relation to changes in society.
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 philosophyterms.com website.)
3. “Midwichian” is used to imply a sense of a conventional, comfortable, sometimes bucolic places 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 existence is severely disrupted by a preternatural stealthy and surreptitious alien invasion.
4. The word wyrd in this context and elsewhere in the book is used to imply variously an eldritch, uncanny, weird, eerie, unsettling etc sense of rural and folk orientated culture.

Elsewhere:

• Marks Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life
• Simon Reynold’s blissblog
• Simon Reynold’s Retromania blog
• Folk Horror Revival: Urban Wyrd – 1. Spirits of Time
• Rob Young’s Electric Eden site
• Jonny Trunk’s The Music Library book
• Ghost Box Records
• Blank Workshop / Moon Wiring Club
• Scarfolk
• Kristen Gallerneaux’s site

 

Elsewhere at A Year In The Country:

• Hauntology, places where society goes to dream, the deletion of spectres and the making of an ungenre
• A Lineage of Spectres Part 1 – From Hauntology to Hypnagogic Pop
• A Lineage of Spectres Part 2 – Hauntology, Hypnagogic Pop, Synthwave and the Creation of Mystical Half-Hidden Worlds
• Rouge’s Foam – Hauntology: The Past Inside The Present and an awareness that the ghosts will always win
• 14 tracks – “Hauntology: A peculiar sonic fiction”
• The jump cuts of hauntological antecedents…
• Spectres vs Retro
• Mark Fisher’s Ghosts Of My Life and a very particular mourning and melancholia for a future’s past…

 

The final track on The Fallen by Watchbird conceptual pop project album of “cosmic aquatic folklore”… the soundtrack to a Czech New Wave film from the edges of imagination…

 

Links:

• Stream “Silver Chord” at Spotify
• The Fallen by Watchbird at Jane Weaver’s Bandcamp page
• “The Fallen By Watchbird – Jane Weaver Septième Soeur; the start of a journey through cosmic aquatic folklore, kunstmärche and otherly film fables…” post at A Year In The Country

 

I’ve been wandering over to have a look / listen to See Blue Audio’s releases for a while now over the last couple of years or so.

Founded by Matthew Duffield it’s a record label based in Barcelona in Spain, which on its Bandcamp page describes its output as “Ambient / electronic beatless / cinematic downtempo / eclectic / introspective… Shade rather than light…”

What their output, for myself, brings to mind at times is the kind of work that Mo’Wax might possibly be releasing if it was still an active record label. Or perhaps balearic chill out music subtly refracted through a glass darkly. Another reference point at times might be 1980s Japanese ambient music such as that included on the KankyĹŤ Ongaku: Japanese Ambient, Environmental & New Age Music 1980-1990 compilation album released by Light In The Attic Records. Interconnected with which, if Emerald Web’s late 1970s / 1980s synthesised new age orientated music had tumbled through a time warp and arrived back home infused with later decades’ music technology then it might have sounded like some of the See Blue Audio releases.

Maps for the Lost by Fragile X was, I think, the label’s ninth release and is a five track EP/mini album:

“Over the five tracks of Maps for the Lost, the listener is taken on an audio journey where the music flows together using field recordings, spoken word samples, beatless soundscapes and sound design techniques. This goes far beyond being a sequence of tracks as this feeling of transportation is an inherent narrative throughout the music…” (Quoted from the Maps for the Lost Bandcamp page.)

That audio journey begins with “Departure from Nowhere” which opens with field recordings of passing traffic that segue into vast sounding darkly hued tones and pattering, passing noises  and creates a sense of entering into some unknown space or world, while second track “Wayfarer” utilises melodic glitches to atmospheric effect and creates a drifting soundscape which contains both a contrasting new age-like ambience and a hinted at unsettling atmosphere:

“Drifting in the audio void. Somewhere between chaos and calm.” (Quoted from the Fragile X Bandcamp page.)

There’s a subtle hauntological intertwined with otherly pastoral atmosphere and aesthetic to Maps for the Lost (and also some of See Blue Audio’s other releases), which is reflected in the release’s title / title track and the title of the fourth track “Passing the Ley Lines” and also in those two tracks’ videos, which are credited to J. Gorecki (aka Fragile X).

In the video for the “Maps for the Lost” title track the viewer is taken on a journey that begins by passing away from the coastline and then over a golden tinged sea and coastline at sunset, before darkened clouds rapidly unfurl and a both ominous and uplifting bass imposes itself on the audio as lightning repeatedly strikes onscreen… the silhouettes of a row of trees appears and are reflected in water at night time as via time lapse filming the stars twirl behind them… we are given a view through tree branches and over a hill formation of the cosmos above (the Milky Way?), with thousands of stars tumbling through the night sky akin to a form of cosmic snowfall, while comets streak briefly… eventually the journey comes to an end as the dawn breaks over forest, plants and the sea.

The video for “Passing the Ley Lines” begins with a wide-open inland waterway and field landscape before natural beauty and man-made infrastructure meld as a pylon strewn field appears with a huge plume of black smoke billowing out over it, the source of which is unclear (although it may be connected to some form of possibly industrial complex off in the distance)… close ups of plants change colour to unnatural hues as time passes… densely forested land passes below… the sun rises over silhouetted trees and cables as unidentified brief streaks of light travel through the air… bucolic landscape and water views appear before the Earth comes into view, a vibrantly hued jewel in the black backdrop of space… and then the sun rises over buildings and telegraph cables before the track, and again a form of journeying, ends.

Both of the tracks “Maps for the Lost” and “Passing the Ley Lines” feature gently arpeggiated electronica which mixes the aesthetics and at times euphoria of dance music with the wash and escape of ambient electronica and create an uplifting sense of space, freedom and renewal.

Maps for the Lost ends with “Full Circle (True North)”, which incorporates field recordings of running water, a simple Eno-esque piano refrain and spoken word samples of somebody describing some kind of otherworldly phenomena or aura that they are enveloped by and it creates an affecting elegiac ending to the release and the journey it takes the listener on.

Elsewhere:

• See Blue Audio’s Bandcamp page
• Fragile X’s Maps for the Lost Bandcamp page

 

The song has a mystical, epic, cinematic folkloric quality and it has lodged in my mind for a few years now after I discovered it via an online mix compiled by The Owl Service called “An Introduction To The Roots Of Psych-Folk”.

 

Links:

• Stream “Orfeo” at Spotify
• Orfeo 2016 reissue by Chariot Records
• The “Archie Fisher & Acid Tracks – An Introduction to the Roots of Psych-Folk: Subculture not from Beneath the Paving Stones but from Under the Plough” post at the A Year In The Country site

 

Leap in the Dark was a paranormal orientated British television anthology series broadcast on the BBC for four seasons in 1973, 1975, 1977 and 1980. There were 24 episodes in total, with the first series being documentary orientated, while seasons two and three mixed documentary footage with dramatisations of real-life cases of paranormal events. Season four featured original dramas themed around the paranormal and included episodes written by, amongst others, renowned writers Fay Weldon and Russell Hoban, alongside Alan Garner and David Rudkin, the latter two of whose work has since come to be associated with “wyrd” rural and folk or otherly pastoral culture.

At the time of writing only seven of the episodes were available to view online in degraded quality form via unofficial distribution. These include the first Pilot episode of season one, none of season two, two episodes of season three and four of season four. It is thought that all other episodes of season one were wiped and those of season two may also be lost. The British Film Institute’s National Archive, which catalogues and provides access to the BBC’s archival recordings, contains videocassette copies of all the episodes in season three and four. Some of these are not currently accessible by the general public as they are marked as “Status pending – Material requires inspection to determine preservation or access status”, which implies that it is not known if they are in viewable condition, or whether their condition may mean that they are too fragile to be played and viewed.

“To Kill a King”, written by Alan Garner, was the final episode of the fourth season of Leap in the Dark and if viewed with knowledge of Garner’s life it is a curiously self-reflective piece of work.

At the beginning of the episode nature, modernity and tradition are shown as being intimately intertwined in the drama’s location and a writer’s life, who is the central character; the opening shot is of a contemporary train rushing by, which segues into the bare trees of branches, that quickly come to foreground some form of large white radar-like dish, before the camera again moves to show a medieval style timber-framed house, which is the writer’s home.

The episode is set in and around this rural home where the writer lives a largely isolated life and shields himself from the outside world, and is suffering from a form of writer’s block and also possibly related mental distress and/or may have wider mental health issues.

There are only four characters seen onscreen: the writer, his agent, his sister and a spectral female presence which appears to be the writer’s elusive muse, and whose voice is only ever heard as a voiceover. Via this spectral muse lines of mystical verse come to the writer in the night, including the titular line “A night to kill a king is this”, but in the morning when he reads what he has written to his agent it is merely gobbledegook. The writer subsequently attempts to follow his spectral muse as she appears and moves through nearby fields, woods and a tunnel but she always remains aloof and elusive, and is apparently able to travel instantaneously across distances so that she is forever out of his reach.

The writer’s sister arrives unexpectedly and henpecks him about day-to-day matters (“Have a bath… the garden’s a mess” and so on) and when he, she and his agent eat together his mind seems to fracture. Following this the episode and the writer’s enclosed world come to resemble a less grand in scale version of Stanley Kubrick’s film The Shining, which was released in 1980, the same year that “To Kill a King” was first broadcast. In Kubrick’s film a writer, who is acting as a winter caretaker for an isolated snowbound hotel, and who has just two members of his immediate family for company, finds his mind fracturing in the enclosed world of the hotel; he endlessly types the same proverb on his typewriter and his sanity and world is invaded by hallucinatory preternatural or paranormal phenomena, presences and events. There are a number of similarities between this and Garner’s story: these include a writer who has lost their mental balance, the presence of just two other people closely connected to him, the unsettling use of a typewriter and also rhymes or proverbs, the sense of a fracturing mind and reality in the enclosed world of one building and the intrusion of spectral presences into that reality.

In “To Kill a King” as the writer’s mind and reality begin to fracture the phone rings and when he answers it his sister’s voice recites a child’s rhyme to him (“You are it…!”) Wandering off alone he sees an electric typewriter that begins to type on its own, typing that it could write and help before just repeating the word “help” coupled with a side note asking him what is he going to do about it, perhaps referring to his writer’s block, although this is unclear. Then a lump of coal which he earlier threw in frustration and anger into a pond appears in his hand, after which he becomes squashed against an invisible transparent surface as his mirror image is also trapped behind a television screen.

When this happens his sister and agent, who now seem to have become smugly taunting dopplegangers of themselves, appear and threaten to switch him off, shrinking him to a dot (as older cathode ray television’s images did when turned off) until he is nothing. In response to this he smashes the television screen and as he shouts in frustration the screen bleaches. There is a sense that he has reached his own personal lowest point and now has begun to recover, and he shaves and makes himself presentable, picks up notebooks, stokes the fire, sits and begins to recite the mystical verse he previously heard said by his spectral muse. His muse is then seen to enter the room and he begins to write again, after which the physical embodiment of his muse is no longer present, he is pictured alone and the episode ends with him focusing on his writing, apparently cured of his writer’s block.

“To Kill a King” appears to be deeply intertwined with Garner’s own life. The timber framed house is most probably actually Garner’s own home, who for a number of decades has lived in a Medieval timber framed home located next to Jodrell Bank radio observatory and the giant Lovell radio telescope, which is the radar-like dish shown in the drama. The house, as depicted in the episode, seems in some ways barely modernised; aside from it’s internal and external Medieval timber frame wall structure there is an open fire in the middle of a room with no obvious chimney and some of the lights are merely candles mounted on the walls.

Further connecting the episode with Garner’s life, he has written and spoken of how he was diagnosed in 1989 with manic depression, which he described as “the best news that I have ever heard” in The Voice that Thunders, a collection of his talks and seminars published in 1997, as it explained years of mania and inertia he had experienced. In an interview with Alison Flood titled “Alan Garner: a life in books”, which was published on theguardian.com on 17th August 2012, it is described how this included two years where for 12 hours per day he merely lay on the settee facing the wall, just waiting for the following 12 hours which he would spend in bed (and during which presumedly he was unable to write or find his “muse”). In the same interview he is also quoted as saying that he “went seemingly mad in less than three months” and sought psychotherapy following the adaptation of The Owl Service for television. With knowledge of such experiences in his life, “To Kill a King” seems very much like a form of creative autobiographical expression, perhaps a form of catharsis where he could explore and expel his own personal demons.

Although possibly merely an accident of the time of year when “To Kill a King” was filmed, the rural landscape in the episode seems to reflect the writer, and therefore also Garner’s at some points in his life, mental state; it is stark, even bleak, the trees are bare, the fields overcast and shrouded. As in David Rudkin’s “The Living Grave” episode of Leap in the Dark, nature’s vitality is further denuded by the degraded quality of the online video, as it both destaturates the imagery and also adds a murky cast to the rural scenes.

Adding to the autobiographical nature of the drama, the medal which the writer briefly looks at, before putting it away when his muse returns, is a Carnegie Medal. Only one of these are given per year as recognition for an outstanding new English language book for children or young adults, and in 1967 Garner was awarded one for The Owl Service.

Garner’s work has often been set in and around Alderley Edge, a village and rural area in the county of Cheshire in the UK:

“Garner grew up in Alderley Edge and can trace his ancestors there back over four centuries. As a child he played on the hill under which local legend says an army of knights sleep, guarded by a wizard until they are needed – a myth that became the basis for [The Weirdstone of Brisingamen – his first novel published in 1960].” (Quoted from “Alan Garner: a life in books”, as above.)

Garner says in the above article that his “background is deep and set in deep time, and in a narrow space, oral traditions going back a long, long time, which I inherited by osmosis”; in his work often it is as though he is attempting to add to this deep and narrow layering of stories and myth by setting it in the landscape he has lived amongst for many decades, while also attempting to ever more deeply embed and entwine himself with both that landscape and its myths.

As part of this layering his fiction and the real world at times quite explicitly entwine. For example aside from the appearance of the Lowell Telescope at Jodrell Bank in “To Kill a King”, in 2012 he published Boneland, the third novel in the “Weirdstone” trilogy, which tells the story of an astrophysicist who works at Jodrell bank, who is searching for his sister in the stars. Then in 2015 there was a series of lectures at Jodrell Bank named after him called The Garner Lectures, which explored the way science interacts with culture, the first of which was given by Garner himself (and that he said would be his last public appearance). As part of the promotion of the event, at the Jodrell Bank website a previously unpublished poem by Garner called House by Jodrell was posted, which both in its title and opening lines of “Across the field astronomers… Name stars. Trains pass” directly connects with both his home’s location and the opening and setting of “To Kill a King”. The episode is also connected with, revisited and returned to in the poem’s final line – “And a night to kill a king is this night” – which is from the mystical verse imparted by the writer’s spectral muse during the drama.

Returning again to both the character of the writer and the possible exploration and expression of Garner’s experiences with mental health issues in “To Kill a King”, the lines in the abovementioned mystical verse can also be seen to explore a related sense of isolation and effectively being removed from the world:

“I see not and I am not seen… Where twilight and the black night move together… in the four cornered castle… In the garth of glass…”

The use of the fairly obscure word “garth” could be seen as being an expression of such isolation, as it can variously be used to refer to a cloister, i.e. an area within a monastery or convent which only the religious are allowed to enter, a place or state of seclusion or to mean being secluded from the world as if in a cloister.

Although at points “To Kill a King”, as with much of the final series of Leap in the Dark, is not always easy viewing, even at times being harrowing, its final scene of the writer once again writing and seemingly having refound his muse and equilibrium, is something of an uplifting and hopeful ending for the series. However, it also has to be said there is still a certain stark unsettling air to the way that, after the image of him fades away, the only sound heard is the fast-paced scratching of his pen on the paper and it is difficult to know if this is an indication of a writer who is satisfyingly absorbed in his work after having rediscovering his muse or an indicator of him being caught up in a whirlwind of manic creation (which is something Garner has publicly discussed experiencing). The slightly unsettling air is accidentally added to due to the video of the episode which can be viewed online continuing to run after the programme has ended and an announcer saying “On BBC One now the late film is Touch of Evil” (!)

Elsewhere:

• The Garner Lectures – Exploring Science and Culture
• â€�House by Jodrell’, a poem by Alan Garner

 

Elsewhere at A Year In The Country:

• Filming The Owl Service; Tomato Soap and Lonely Stones
• Robin Redbreast, The Ash Tree, Sky, The Changes, Penda’s Fen, Red Shift and The Owl Service – Wanderings Through Spectral Television Landscapes
• The intro to The Owl Service
• The Owl Service: fashion plates and (another) peek behind the curtain
• A wander around Red Shift, layers of history, the miasma / amber of cultural replications and associated reinterpretations / utilitarianisms
• Memories of midnight dreams and other nocturnal flightways and pathways
• She Wants to be Flowers – Filming The Owl Service (Revisiting)

 

A subtly hazy dreamscape take on British New Wave cinema… and I always think “Interpret the rooms” is “Interpret the runes”.

 

Links:

• Stream “Tear in the Typing Pool” at Spotify
• Tender Buttons at Bleep’s site
• The “Broadcast – Recalibration, Constellation and Exploratory Pop” post at the A Year In The Country site

 

An early inspiration and reference point for A Year In The Country… a swirling pastoral “ghost box” of time out of joint.

 

Links:

• Stream “And the Cuckoo Comes” at Spotify
• Mind How You Go at Ghost Box Records’ site
• The “The Advisory Circle and ornithological intrigueries…” post at the A Year In The Country site

 

Gone to Earth was adapted from Mary Webb’s book originally published in 1917 and directed and written by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, who also collaborated on a number of other films, has long been something of a favourite around these parts. As I’ve written before, its depiction of the story seems to be straining at the very seams of acceptable cinema mores of the time, and features some wonderful, almost surreally vivid Technicolor views of the British countryside.

Set in the late 19th century amongst the landscape around a small rural town on the border between England and Wales, the plot involves a free-spirited young woman named Hazel Woodus who lives a rural life close to nature that is closely connected with older magical and supernatural beliefs. She marries a kind-hearted parson but, in part due to her husband’s unspoken attempt to create a respectful union between them, which precludes all but the most chaste of physical intimacies until she is “ready to be his wife”, she comes to feel rejected by him. She is driven into the arms of a predatory and manipulative squire, who is somewhat mocking of the parson’s religious beliefs and also something of an almost archetypal cad and bounder, and runs away with him to his home. This leads to conflict and ultimately tragic and deadly confrontations between the protagonists and also the society they live amongst, with regards to belief systems, morals, passions and the nature of their love and fidelity for one another.

It takes its title from a fox hunting cry used to indicate when a fox has “gone to earth” in a burrow, and most of the film was shot on location around the town and parish of Much Wenlock in the English county of Shropshire, and made use of many local people as extras, choir members etc.

The film had a troubled release as, although he was apparently involved throughout the filming, the executive producer David O. Selznick disliked the finished version. Although the exact reasons for this are difficult to fully discover, it has been reported that he accused the filmmakers of sticking too closely to the novel and not making the film as originally planned. Accompanying this, it has been said that his dislike of the film was also because he considered it over concentrated on the beauty of the English countryside and did not showcase his wife Jennifer Jones, who played Hazel, to the degree and in the manner he wanted it to.

Also both Selznick and Powell and Pressburger tended to create their films in an auteur-like manner and were not used to outside interference in terms of their vision for their work, and therefore there may have been a resulting clash of wills. Alongside which, viewed now Powell and Pressburger’s various film collaborations can be seen as a precursor to more left of centre arthouse cinema, albeit generally produced and couched in a manner which placed it amongst mainstream cinema. In contrast to this Selznick came from a much more overtly mainstream cinematic background, and was best known for the high profile, award winning and hugely commercially successful epic historical romance film Gone with the Wind (1939), and so their may have been a clash of aesthetics between him and Powell and Pressburger.

Selznick took The Archers, Powell and Pressburger’s production company, to court, in order to be allowed to change Gone to Earth and have the film’s European co-financier Alexander Korda fund reshoots. Although Selznick lost the case, he discovered that he had the right to alter it for the American release but would need to pay for any reshoots himself. He reassembled the principal actors, had some extra scenes shot in Hollywood and edited the film from 110 minutes down to 82 minutes, leaving around two-thirds of the original film intact. It was subsequently released during 1952 in the US as The Wild Heart.

I wrote about the film in A Year In The Country: Wandering Through Spectral Fields (2018) but at the time I had only been able to see the original Powell and Pressburger version, and to my knowledge The Wild Heart version was not still available for home viewing. It had been released on video cassette, more than once I think, in the US at some point in previous decades but copies of those (or even information about them) was difficult to find. All the various UK and elsewhere in the world home releases were always of Gone to Earth and for a long time I thought I would never get to see The Wild Heart version of the film. In fact I was not sure if it even still existed.

As I wrote in the last year of A Year In The Country, several years after first watching Gone to Earth I was browsing through the titles of upcoming films to be broadcast on archival television channel Talking Pictures TV, when all of a sudden I saw the title The Wild Heart. I thought “No, surely not”, but yes, it was indeed that The Wild Heart.

With seeing The Wild Heart there, I knew that it was available in the world, and discovered that in June 2019 it had been released on Blu-ray and DVD in the US by Kino Lorber, in single disc editions which contained both Gone to Earth and The Wild Heart. The Blu-ray and DVD are locked to Region A or 1, respectively, meaning that standard British Blu-ray and DVD players will not play them but because of, gawd bless ’em, multi-region Blu-ray players, I would finally be able to both watch and own it.

As referred to at the start of the post, Gone to Earth was filmed in Technicolor, which as I discuss in A Year In The Country: Wandering Through Spectral Fields (2018), gives it a distinctive non-realist character:

“[The film has a] Wizard of Oz-esque, Hollywood coating of beauty, glamour and quiet surreality which in part is created by the vibrant, rich colours of the Technicolor film process that it shares with that 1939 film… Often cinematic views of the British landscape are quite realist, possibly dour or even bleak in terms of atmosphere and their visual appearance and so Gone to Earth with its high end Hollywood razzle-dazzle which is contained in its imagery is a precious breath of fresh air… The film’s elements of older folkloric ways and its visual aspects combine to create a subtle magic realism in the film and the world and lives it shows, conjures and presents.”

In respect to this, there is a considerable difference in the colours and vibrancy of the transfers of the two versions on the Blu-ray. The Wild Heart’s transfer is much more vivid and seemingly also more in keeping with the original Technicolor production of the film, and this helps to create the abovementioned sense of magic realism. The transfer of Gone to Earth has a more muted quality, which seems to also slightly mute its depiction of a magic imbued landscape and story, and adds a more realist tone to it. The way this subtly changes the nature of the story serves to emphasise the way in which the visual nature of the film is inherently interconnected with and an important part of how it creates its almost otherworldly story.

Often in reviews etc of the two versions of the film The Wild Heart version is described as being inferior to Powell and Pressburger’s original Gone to Earth version but both have their merits. Gone to Earth has a more sedate, reflective pace that possibly grounds it more in previous decade’s cinema, and it also leaves more to the viewers imagination through not as directly explaining plot points etc. The Wild Heart’s story is more overtly signposted and made obvious, at times literally such as when a deadly open mineshaft has a warning sign that describes it as such. Accompanying this it has a certain rhythm and pace that draws the viewer in and makes the film feel more “modern” or nearer to contemporary film aesthetics, without having the sometimes almost frantic pace that some more recent film does.

Both versions of the film largely follow the same story arc, with the differences between the two and their running times being mostly due to a number of small incremental changes to how they are edited. One of the more major differences between the two versions of the film is that The Wild Heart includes an opening voiceover monologue that provides a background for Hazel’s story, and which has a Twilight Zone meets wyrd rural quality (and is also slightly dismissive of Hazel’s background and beliefs):

“The tale of pagan cruelty hangs in a mist of legend over the Earth’s far away places. This is one of them. The Shropshire border between Wales and England. Haunted like all borderlands. Here is a strange country of Roman ruins, crumbling heathen altars and a fearful ghost from whom the living still flee. It is the Black Huntsman, who rides the night wind with his phantom pack over God’s Little Mountain. And those of gypsy blood still whisper that to look upon the Huntsman, to hear his hunting horn and the angry baying of his hounds means… death. This is the story of Hazel Woodus, whose gypsy mother left her with a fear of the Black Huntsman’s godless cruelty. Fear born of ignorance. Ignorance that rejects salvation. It was the weak, the helpless and the untamed with whom this half gypsy girl found her only kinship. And this even as with the fox she loved, Hazel faced the Huntsman helpless and alone.”

Gone to Earth’s ending and its depiction of Hazel’s almost inevitable seeming, but still horribly shocking, doom seems harsher, bleaker and more sudden, and once it has happened the film ends very abruptly, which adds to its abrupt impact. This is slightly softened in The Wild Heart as the squire’s attempts to save her are slightly extended, and rather than ending suddenly on an image of what has caused her demise, this is followed by an image of a gnarled old leafless and subtly ominous seeming branch that was seen earlier in the film, a somewhat heartbreaking shot of Hazel’s shawl blowing in the wind atop the stone where she carried out a folkloric magical ritual in order to decide whether to run away to the squire’s and then an image of a subtly desolate seeming empty landscape.

One of the film’s main underlying themes is the clash between older beliefs rooted in nature, as represented by Hazel, and more “civilised” newer Christian beliefs, as represented by the parson and his parishioners. Hazel is torn between the two: she still places great store in her more magical beliefs and wants to bond with nature but also wishes to be part of, connect with and be accepted by the modern world. To a degree Hazel giving in to her physical passion for the squire can be seen to represent her being drawn to a less “civilised” pre-Christian way of being and a connection with nature but the squire seems to be a corrupted, darkened depiction of such things. His often untamed and unrepressed desires and behaviour are not an expression of a positive connection with nature, that Hazel herself has and is drawn to return to, but rather a form of self-centred aristocratic hedonism and self-serving pleasure seeking.

(Although in The Wild Heart, he is possibly depicted as less of a cad, as when the parson arrives at the squire’s home in order to take Hazel home and reclaim her as his wife, it is revealed that Hazel is pregnant with the squire’s child, and he wants to stand by her and asks the parson to divorce her so that they can be married. Hazel is not said to be pregnant in Gone to Earth and, although it is apparent that the squire has genuine feelings for her, he maintains a more brusquely dismissive attitude with regards to the true nature of them. Conversely, in Gone to Earth in this sequence, the parson is considerably harsher and more dismissive in his interactions with Hazel.)

For a while Hazel is able to intertwine her older magical nature based beliefs and ways of life with the modern world and more modern Christian beliefs, albeit with varying degrees of problems and even dysfunction. Despite marrying a parson and attempting to assimilate herself into the Christian faith and the modern world, often when Hazel has problems she turns to the book of spells and charms her gypsy mother left her; she also continues to keep a beloved pet fox, who she calls Foxy, which can be seen as a symbol of her connection with nature and a related belief in older magical ways. However it seems as though she will not be allowed to continue living with the old and new intertwined, and because of her protection of Foxy (and therefore, it is implied, her refusal to relinquish the old ways), both she and the fox are ultimately doomed: in the final scene Hazel attempts to defend Foxy from the dogs in a hunt that the squire is taking part in, and after scooping up Foxy she attempts to outrun them, which leads to tragic consequences.

Accompanying this there is a sense that Hazel’s personal transgressions and becoming untethered from her natural roots have an effect on and are similarly intertwined with the wider world. This unethering and its effects is unstatedly implied when she begins her affair with the squire at his home and leaves her pet fox behind at the parson’s rather than continuing her direct personal care and protection of it, and they are made overt when she is distraught by the squire’s servant killing blackbirds with a shotgun in order to stop them eating his fruit harvest, causing her to cry “It is as though I’ve killed them, coming here.”

Interconnecting with this response, Hazel is avowedly opposed to fox hunting and she is deeply concerned with protecting wildlife, and so her becoming involved with the squire, who is active in and relishes such hunting, further indicates how she has become untethered. This is heightened as one of Hazel’s main supernatural folklore inspired fears is that of the night wind riding “Black Huntsman”, as described in The Wild Heart’s opening monologue, and to a degree for her the squire is the human embodiment, or at least earthly representative, of this deadly wraith-like hunter.

(As an aside, some of the few overt expressions of the supernatural in the film involve the Black Huntsman, with the horses’ hooves of his disembodied pack sometimes mysteriously appearing on the soundtrack but remaining unseen to the viewer.)

It is not just through Hazel that the old ways and beliefs and more modern Christian beliefs are seen to intertwine and still exist: when the parson talks to God about how he will respect and protect Hazel if he marries her, he seems to be looking up at a large tree silhouetted against the night, as though his God still resides in nature, as did the old gods. Also when he gives a public prayer it is in front of a maypole, which are thought to have their origins in pagan Medieval cultures, and that in this scene has just been used as part of a folkloric ritual dance that takes place during a Christian church organised celebration. Although in the case of the maypole, any pre-Christian pagan meaning is likely to have been reduced to a mere shadow or echo as, while surviving Christianisation, by the time of the late 19th century when the film is set, it is likely they had lost their original meaning for those involved in the dance, as tended to happen in Britain as the centuries passed. With this in mind, rather than being a pagan totem, the presence of the maypole during the celebration can be seen as a more purely general celebratory symbol that acted to bring communities together.

To my knowledge there were two different film tie-in editions of Mary Webb’s novel that, as discussed at the start of the post, Gone to Earth and The Wild Heart were adaptations of. These included a British and an American edition, published in 1959 and 1953 respectively which, as often tended to be the case during the time of their release, have illustrated rather than photographic cover designs.

In contrast with later film tie-ins, where that it is the book of the film tends to be emblazoned quite clearly on the cover, it is not immediately obvious that they are film tie-ins. The US edition has “Jennifer Jones stars in the motion picture” printed in small text on the cover, while the British edition does not mention any connection to the film on the cover, but on the first page inside there is some, also small text, that says “The cover is from the Powell-Pressburger film, distributed by British Lion.”

I assume due to legal obligations in regards to Mary Webb’s book, the US edition of the novel tie-in, which was published the year after the film had been released as The Wild Heart, still has the original title of Gone to Earth, which I expect may have confused some readers and buyers.

The US edition has a map of the story’s setting on the back, that is emblazoned with the text “The haunted region of ‘Wild Wales’ where primitive passions flame in ‘Gone to Earth'”, which connects with The Wild Heart’s opening monologue description of events taking place amongst haunted borderlands. This mention of a “haunted” landscape, some of the semi-magical rural folklore of the film, along with the Harps in Heaven song sequence, which is sung by Hazel atop a hill to the harp accompaniment of her father, and has an enchanting otherworldly quality not dissimilar to acid folk of the late 1960s and 1970s, seem to presage the current interest in all things “wyrd” or “otherly” folk and pastoral. Or, as I say in A Year in the Country: Wandering Through Spectral Fields:

“As a film it… appears to be a forebear of later culture which would travel amongst the layered, hidden histories of the land and folklore, showing a world where faiths old and new are part of and/or mingle amongst folkloric beliefs and practices… In some ways the air of not-quite-real-ness that can be found in Gone to Earth makes it seem like a forerunner to the more adult fairy tale side of the Czech New Wave (especially Valerie and her Week of Wonders from 1970 and possibly Malá Morská VĂ­la/The Little Mermaid from 1976) and also of the style, character and imagery of a younger Kate Bush, of a free spirit cast out upon and amongst the moors.”

Connected to this sense of cultural forebearing, Samm Deighan, a writer and one of the editors of the horror film, literature and art magazine Diabolique, provides a commentary for Gone to Earth on its Blu-ray released by Kino Lorber, in which she talks of how the film can be seen as a precursor to what have come to be known as folk horror films (such as The Wicker Man released in 1973 etc). She suggests that Gone to Earth is not quite fantasy but edges on it, in part via, as in some folk horror film, the central character of Hazel having a near supernatural connection with the Earth and nature, one expression of which is her almost witch’s familiar-like pet fox who, as suggested previously, she seems incomplete and out of balance without.

Alongside which, and providing a line of connection between the two, The Wicker Man’s depiction of a pagan nature based belief system that openly embraces sexuality in conflict with a pious representative of Christian beliefs who denies his sexual desires can be seen to have been prefigured in Hazel’s struggles in Gone to Earth, and her, the parson and the squire’s conflicting beliefs and desires. And as in The Wicker Man, the characters and beliefs in Gone to Earth and The Wild Heart are depicted somewhat ambiguously; nobody, nor their beliefs, are depicted in a clear cut unambiguous manner. Rather there is more of a continuum of good and bad, right and wrong and so on. Considering this, one of Gone to Earth’s dominant underlying themes could be considered to be a depiction of the challenges and complexities of beliefs, both personal and systemic, and that none are “right” or “wrong”.

During her Blu-ray commentary for Gone to Earth, Deighan also discusses academic Tyson Pew’s comments on Powell and Pressburger’s somewhat odd and unsettling pastorally themed A Canterbury Tale (1944), with her saying that Gone to Earth can be seen as a form of sequel to it, and that Pew’s comments on it can also be applied to Gone To Earth. She discusses Pew describing the way in which A Canterbury Tale “exposes pastoralism’s inherent perversity”, quoting him as saying:

“The sexuality unleashed throughout its storyline projects England as both idyllic and menacing. The crux of A Canterbury Tale rises in its melancholic longing for a pastoral past that never existed and in this manner melancholia fractures national fantasies of historical and contemporary identity. In its vision of an edenic world of relaxed labour and bucolic virtue, the pastoral is as fantastic a genre as fairy tale or science fiction because this vision depends on the unobtainability of, indeed the impossibility of, this past in the present.”

This connects with the intertwining of a hauntological “yearning or nostalgia for a post-war utopian, progressive, modernist future that was never quite reached” with an otherly pastoral, wyrd folk etc related “yearning for lost Arcadian idylls”. Gone to Earth seems to be deeply threaded throughout with a related sense of yearning for the seemingly unobtainable, which finds its strongest expression in Hazel’s desire to find a way in which she can be allowed to connect with the modern world and her husband’s form of spirituality, while still being able to maintain and express her belief in the old, magical nature based ways and beliefs.

Elsewhere:

• The Wild Heart / Gone to Earth Kino Lorber Blu-ray release
• Talking Pictures TV
• The Harps in Heaven song section from Gone to Earth

Elsewhere at A Year In The Country:

• Gone to Earth / The Wild Heart, the Haunted Region of Wild Wales and a Sidestep into Talking Pictures TV’s Broadcasts of the Overlooked, Shadowed Archives of Cinema and Television
• Harps in Heaven, curious exoticisms, pathways and flickerings back through the days and years…
• Gone To Earth – “What A Queen Of Fools You Be”, Something Of A Return Wandering And A Landscape Set Free
• Mary Webb’s Gone to Earth and Forebears of the Layers Beneath the Land
• Gone to Earth – Earlier Traces of an Otherly Albion
• Zardoz, Gone to Earth, The Owl Service, The Village of the Damned, The Prisoner, Quatermass, The Wicker Man, The Touchables, Sapphire and Steel, The Nightmare Man, Phase IV and The Tomorrow People – A Gathering of a Cathode Ray Library and Rounding the Circle

 

To quote myself on Radio 4’s Late Junction “[The Duke of Burgundy] seems to exist outside of time, almost in an imaginary never never European hinterland… and the track… has an [accompanying] hazy, dreamlike, almost half-remembered sense of being a semi-lost pop treasure from a time you can’t quite place.”

 

Links:

• • • • Stream “The Duke of Burgundy” at Spotify
      • The “Katalin Varga, Berberian Sound Studio and The Duke of Burgundy – Arthouse Evolution and Crossing the Thresholds of the Hinterland Worlds of Peter Strickland” post at the A Year In The Country site