Hauntology Parish Newsletter - April-May 2018: A Year in the Country book; Ghost Box releases; Emotion Wave; media dropping

The big news in the parish is the publication this week of A Year in The Country: Wandering Through Spectral Fields by Stephen Prince of A Year In The Country the blog and the label.

Sub-subtitled "Journeys in Otherly Pastoralism, the Further Reaches of Folk and the Parallel Worlds of Hauntology", it's an excellent compendium of Prince's musings and meditations on all things wyrdly bucolic, uncanny, and elegiac, spanning a spectral spectrum from Richard Mabey to Zardoz, Virginia Astley to Sapphire & Steel. 

                                          


With the possible exception of Mark F's Ghosts of My Life, it's the first tome fully dedicated to all things hauntological (as opposed to various volumes about "folk horror" or 70s kids teevee)

You can buy it here, and here - and if you must (although then again, it's effectively funding righteous scourge The Washington Post, so why not?) here (UK) and here (US)

                                          



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In other parish goings-on, I have already mentioned the delightful debut album for Ghost Box from Portugal's Beautify Junkyards -  The Invisible World of... 











Fairly imminently there will be another fine album by The Advisory Circle - Ways of Seeing, out late May. 

Through his own imprint Cafe Kaput, Circle chief Jon Brooks also recently put out this album 



Neil Grant of Lo-Five - whose album When It's Time To Let Go for Patterned Air Recordings  pleasured me last year  - has set up a  collective of Liverpool-based experimental electronic musicians under the rubric Emotion Wave.  Here's Neil's project rationale .

Emotional Wave has some musical output  already under its collective belt and I believe there is a non-audio entity (printed matter) in the pipeline. And in a week or so Neil releases the Lo-Five miscellany Propagate - remixes, compilation tracks and one-off specials.



Neil also alerts me to his having put out a little while back some "super lo fi house tracks"  under the title My House Is Your House Volume One. Like Propagate,  it's a tide-you-over / palate cleanser type release before the follow-up to When It's Time To Let Go.



Love the graphic echo of Human League's "Being Boiled" single sleeve there.

(Neil informs me that this was actually unintended - he just got the figures from a Letraset pack! A nice eerie echo nonetheless)

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Finally, a rather tardy mention of an intriguing my-back-pages project Meadow House by Daniel Wilson of Radionics Radio renown. It's really on the very edge of this parish, in so far as it's not particularly haunty, but the back story to Daniel's self-invented Dada-prankster practice of media-dropping - "theact of recording special homemade music and dropping it for random people tofind" -  is pretty interesting.  







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The hypnagogia/memoradelia-tinged project Starblood has launched a series based around the concept of late-night TV sign-off themes.



Here's another of their tracks coming more from a dreampop / idyllitronic precinct than this particular parish but nice 'n' woozy nonetheless. 



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Parish elders Boards of Canada were recently venerated here and here. 


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If you haven't picked up the new issue of The Wire, there's a terrific piece by Matthew Ingram on That West Country Lot -- Hacker Farm, IX Tab, Kemper Norton -- and their pastoral-industrial sound.   Great photos by Jon Baker too -- strange it is indeed, after reading Kek-W's and Loki's blogs for years, to see what they actually look like.

In unofficial tandem, Pontone has a mix by IX Tab (that's Loki, a/k/a An Idiot's Guide To Dreaming, a/k/a Saxon Roach - no really, that's his real name) that lays out the "roots and traces... parapraxes and inarticulations, associations and mnemonics" behind the recent and excellent album Spindle & the Bregnut Tree (now out again in a "female version" on Twiggwytch Recordings)


Another That West Country Lot mix from Pontone, a primer on what they're calling Wyrd Albion, is in preparation.

Hacker Farm's new record UHF, also splendid, is released on December 10th by Exotic Pylon. Below is a promo film I hadn't noticed until now, where you can see some of their self-cobbled instruments.

Stop press - Kemper Norton also has a mini-album, titled Carn, out soon on Exotic Pylon.