Hauntology Parish Newsletter - "Feint May" Edition: Kilkenny Electroacoustic Research Laboratory; Boards of Canada; Keith Seatman; Fil OK / We're in the Water; Naomi Elizabeth; Haunted Generation; A Year in the Country

Goodness, but it's been glorious out there in the parish lately.

The combination of all that heavy rain earlier in the year - and the spell of cloudless skies and midsummer heat in late April -  resulted in a virulent verdancy I've never seen before.

What did the poet say? 

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

    It will flame out, like shining from shook foil

Dancersend was incandescent last week.

And then, the other day, driving past the station and through those four or five fields of rape (such an unfortunate name) I was floored, overawed, by the flaming fluorescence of yellow stretching out in every direction as far as the eye could see. 

A vibrancy of hue I've never seen before. 

This photo - of a different field, at a less bright time of day -  doesn't nearly do it justice. 

And of course the bluebell woods -  again, so hard to capture on camera, the gaseousness of that peak-bloom purple haze.  

But I've gushed about this time of year in England before. 

So - even though the birdsong is our surroundsound symphony these days - we turn now to musical happenings of note in the parish.

From our Emerald Isle twin town Kilkenny, something really special:

Kilkenny Electroacoustic Research Laboratory Anthology Vol. 3 - The Stray Sod.

The latest - and last - installment of the compilation series documenting this Irish institution for electronic music composers active in the 1970s and 1980s.  

But what a way to go out - it's a gorgeously varied selection of pieces, ranging from miniature electronic radio-plays to tone poems woven out of chimes and drones to dulcet folk songs.

You can buy it here either as a digital download or as a compact disc that comes with a beautifully illustrated and intricately informative 70-page book about the Kilkenny Electroacoustic Research Laboratory's history,  a pull-out A3 poster of the Ireland Pavilion Expo '74, a Radagast's Allotment Macpaint design by Johnny Donnelly, and a special thank you letter from the Label Director.

Release irrationale:

In this third, and final, volume of the Kilkenny Electroacoustic Research Laboratory Anthology, we focus on several disparate yet conceptually linked topics, many of which connect to the Kiely cousins, Owen and Tom, who have been briefly mentioned in previous volumes. The first half of the book focuses largely on the foundations which led to the events of the second half. The second half of the book will focus largely on the arts, crafts and lifestyle collective founded by the Kielys, Radagast’s Allotment.

In our first chapter we cover the creation and publication of the 1971 children’s book and accompanying audio cassette Upon the Air. Written and produced by Gerry Duggan and Jacinta Delaney and illustrated by the renowned Irish equine artist Johnny ‘Ding Dong’ Donnelly, Upon the Air, was the first and only children’s book made in the lab. It was intended to disseminate Delaney’s early-years sound studies research to a wider audience, though was a commercial failure.

The second chapter of the book covers an ill-fated, government funded, immersive art installation which had been planned for the Irish pavilion at the 1974 World’s Expo in Spokane, Washington, U.S.A. In this chapter we cover the development of the installation, which was a collaboration between K.E.R.L. founding member, Eoghan Comerford and the Dublin-based artist duo Beamish and Watson. We also explore the government in-fighting which led to the ultimate failure of the project.

Chapter three documents the musical works of the Kilkenny folklorist and composer Maeve Scully (1947-2011), her connection to the Radagast’s Allotment and K.E.R.L., and the rediscovery of her work by a younger generation of composers, musicians and improvisers throughout the world. Maeve would go on to become a key member in Radagast’s Allotment and would frequently make use of the facilities in the Electroacoustic Lab to realise her ‘Mayday Dew’ series of compositions.

The radio adaptation of T.V. Delaney’s, post-apocalyptic ecological science fiction novel The Capsules of Posterity – The Aurochs, is the topic of our fourth chapter. Initially published in ’76 by Tamhóg Press, the book was adapted into a radio play by Antrim Productions and K.E.R.L. It was produced by Tony Quinn, Tom Kiely and Eoghan Comerford and broadcast in 1981. The production process of this adaptation is often cited as the origin for the ideas which later became the formalised Radagast’s Allotment.

At this halfway point of the book, we have included several pages from the first edition of the Radagast’s Allotment Almanac, which came out in the summer of ’85 and was designed by Johnny Donnelly using MacPaint. It gives an insight into the activities and interests of the group, which we will then explore in the second half of the book.

Next, we have an interview which I conducted in a pub in London with the Radagast’s Allotment founding member, Owen Kiely, last year, where we talked at length about Dian Cécht and his band after Dian Cécht, The Triskelion. Owen does not suffer fools lightly, though we have printed the interview in full as it gives an insight into the culture and condition which led up the founding and eventual collapse of Radagast’s Allotment and the Kilkenny Electroacoustic Research Laboratory.

In chapter six we cover the activities of the Radagast’s Allotment, an arts, crafts and lifestyle organisation described by Hannah Sheppard-Noonan, in her book Bards, Binaural Beats, and Borderline Personality Disorder – Mental Illness in a Rural Arts Community as showing ‘all the signs of being a new religious movement, though lacked anyone with basic, never mind effective, organisational skills, which fundamentally prevented the group from fully actualising into a cult.’

Socracht Rothlach, which was a collaboration between one of the guitarists from The Triskelion, Stevie Larkin, and the K.E.R.L. member Packie Bolger, is the topic of chapter seven. The release was the second in K.E.R.L.’s Relaxation Series and was, like most things released by the lab, a commercial failure. In the chapter we cover the process of making the album, its musical qualities and the life and death of Stevie Larkin.

Our final chapter is about Tom Kiely and his group The Small Green Hand, who had splintered off from Radagast’s Allotment in the mid-80s, and who, inspired by Italian Futurists and the Viennese Actionists, attempted to poison a significant amount of the Kilkenny public in an attempt to ‘herald a new Irish techno-feudal utopia.’

Vivere Solem Et Oppositum,

Neil P. Quigley

April ‘26

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The Kilkenny release has understandably and deservedly overshadowed everything else going at the moment.

But I do want to shine a spotlight on some other parish activities that may have escaped your notice.

For instance, those secretive brothers behind Boards of Canada have been shyly, slyly, hinting at a forthcoming release, their first in an absolute age. 

It would be a shame if they were so coy about it that Inferno didn't get the attention it probably merits. 

Fresh from their epic BoC treatise "Corduroy Psychedelia", Split Infinities has another essay that interpretatively irradiates BoC's teaser releases so far: Boards of Canada’s ‘Prophecy at 1420 MHz’: Spinoza, Bataille, Nasr, and the Aesthetics of Prophetic Transmission -

Susurrations of Cosmic Consciousness or Notes Toward a Hydrogen Communism

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Talking of things getting overlooked... I fear that I missed the Keith Seatman album, owing to the long gap since the last newsletter - Counting To Ten Then Back Again came out in February and now there is a remix of a track off the LP, "Clip Clop", done by Simon Heartfield. 

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Conversely, I am a little early in drawing your attention to a new album by Fil OK, titled The Belltower, and out in June.

Well, not really early, actually -  as it is part 2 of a trilogy of LPs released this year, with The Steeple already out and hearable here, and the final installment, The Dome, due in the autumn. 

The trilogy is under Fil's alter-ego We're in the Water and it's sweetly spooky electro-pop in the vicinity of John Foxx and the Belbury Circle 

Naturally, I'm all in favor of ecclesiastical electronica. 

Although going by the release-rationale, this second installment of the trilogy is less about the ethereal and spiritual and more about the corporeal:

"The concept of the album is how our bodies constantly guide us: through instinct and movement we are attracted to pleasure, beauty, nourishment, relief, connection and survival, and intuitively away from pain, discomfort, danger, excess and the grotesque. These impulses can be gentle or relentless, welcome or intrusive. We call them needs, instincts, desires – but, at their core, they are simply the language of the organism itself. To live is to inhabit this system: to navigate and direct a restless, vivid machine of nerves and muscles as it carries us forward through life....  Where The Steeple leaned into cerebral electronic textures, The Belltower brings guitars and beats into sharper focus, emphasizing the resonance and vibration of bells and twanging guitar refrains on tracks like "Nothing Is Certain But Death", "The Headaches" and "Not Sleepy", as well as rhythm and distortion on "Not Quite Naked" and "Storm Before The Calm" – the latter a dark electro murder ballad inspired by David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. Lyrically, the new album explores a range of bodily states and experiences - waking, breathing, seeing, identifying, enjoying, suffering, escaping, fornicating, violating, dying and the peculiar theatre of cohabiting... 

"The three new works planned for this year each interpret the lyrics and music of the songs literally as architectural spaces, placing them conceptually in these three grand, holy places of worship, celebration and contemplation.

"Whereas The Steeple imagined the mind as a place of elevation and introspection, The Belltower represents the body - vibrating in visceral resonance - tunes and rhythms designed to make the blood flow and the body move."

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Talking of "sweetly spooky" - not really hauntology, and not a new release, but newly nailed to my brain - is year-abroad student Naomi Elizabeth, currently studying Instagrammatology at Pendley  Manor Arts Institute, but I for one think she should go back to making tunes like these...

Wet Leg goes hyperpop

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Bob Fischer's latest Haunted Generation column has a bunch of haunty activity, names mostly unfamiliar to me. Like this fine fellow

and this atmospheric, shortwave radio inspired audio-drama 

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The supernaturally prolific Stephen Prince of A Year in the Country has yet another book out  (how does he do it?! Surely he is now in double figures? My refractory period for a new all-new tome seems to be a decade!).

Ghost Signals: The Shadowlands Of British Analogue Television 1968-1995

Full information about its scope and contents, and how to buy it, is at the A Year in the Country blog. 

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A Year in the Country brings us back to where we started - the English countryside, succulently ablaze this month, a vernal inferno

And for all this, nature is never spent;

    There lives the dearest freshness deep down things

Hauntology Parish Newsletter - Harvest Edition - Lo Five; eMMplekz; A Year in the Country; Belbury Poly

 Spied in the window of Book Nook!

Cover Design by Rachel Laine

Alerted by Folk Horror Revival - detective work by John Coulhart at { feuilleton }

Also to be seen on the shelves of the Book Nook  

Yes, a new tome from the prolific Stephen Prince  -  A Year in the Country: Lost Transmissions: Dystopic Visions, Alternate Realities, Paranormal Quests and Exploratory Electronica

It follows swiftly on the heels of last year's A Year in the Country: Cathode Ray and Celluloid Hinterlands: The Rural Dreamscapes, Reimagined Mythical Folklore and Shadowed Undergrowth of Film and Television  - and the three A Year in the Country books that preceded that! With another two tomes not in the series, that makes seven in total.

I don't know how Stephen does it...  I feel like a right slow-poke in comparison.

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Talking about prolific fellows, Lo Five has a very nice new record, Persistence of Love, recently released on Castles in Space. Inhabiting that muzzy grayscale sound that is all his own. Makes you feel as if there's a film across your ears - like looking at a landscape with reduced visibility caused by light rain. Suits these unseasonably overcast and damp days here in England. 

Here's Neil's release rationale: 

"This collection of tracks came about during a period of transition for me, from changing the way I wanted to make music to a method that was more intuitive and free-flowing. I spent a lot of time experimenting with sequencing and different bits of hardware I'd acquired. I was also playing around with an old four track cassette recorder, which was loads of fun. I think the end result feels a little broader in sound and composition as all but one of these tracks were the result of recording a live jam down to a stereo mix. I recorded dozens of these until I'd found 'the one'.

"That way of capturing a performance really excites me, it's like a crystallised moment in time when the planets have aligned. When you're really absorbed into the flow of it and there's something extra guiding you.

"Thematically, it all reflects this ongoing interest I have in consciousnesses, spiritual enlightenment, truth realisation, whatever you want to call it. At the time I'd been reading a lot about advaita, which is Sanskrit for 'not two', or what western spiritual teachers call non-duality, where it's seen there is no separation between anything, no individual self, no subject and object, just this infinite eternal consciousness. I read a few of the classic teachings from gurus such as Ramaana Maharishi, Jiddu Krishnamurti and Nisargadatta Maharaj, which reflect modern accounts of contemporary teachers like Richard Rose, Jan, Frazier and Rupert Spira.

"There seems to be this slow reconciliation between ancient eastern spiritual teachings and western psychology and neuroscience. That really fascinates me and seems to filter through to whatever I'm working on."

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Unexpected silo seepage from a retiree of this parish! A trio of remixes by Baron Mordant of eMMplekz fan favorite, "Gloomy Leper Techno" - also on Castles in Space

Emission transmission: 

The collaborative eMMplekz project between Baron Mordant and Ekoplekz ran itself ragged from 2012-2016 and yielded some of their most satisfying work for the Mordant Music label - the Baron had finally found his voice in a skip behind Poundland and let his fetid alphabet loose across Ekoplekz’s mouldy electronic battlefield…lyrical Escher abstractions married to Cy Twombly soundscapes at a time when maybe only the Sleaford Mods were harrowing similar ground, albeit more commercially…the project bowed out on a low high with the ‘Rook to TN34’ album and the “Cheers mate, bye” lyric pinging off every surface…in 2022 with that still naggingly in mind the Baron set out on reframing ‘Gloomy Leper Techno’ in some different shades and the resulting ‘MMongrel versions’ were picked up by Castles in Space for this 12” vinyl

release…njoi/endure…IBM, Hastings 2023.

 

GLT scrawl:

“Cheers mate, bye

I see rooftops in Staines, people as drains (cheers mate, bye)

The bee in the bonnet humming Ashcroft’s ’Sonnet’ (cheers mate, bye)

Rhyming’s like climbing, surmounting a fountain (cheers mate, bye)

Wanking the walk, tanking the talk (cheers mate, bye)

A dismal day in every way (cheers mate bye)

Bandcamp’s digital damp (cheers mate bye)

I want you to follow thru…why is it you let him in?

Cheers mate, bye.”

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Finally, there's a new Belbury Poly album out  on Ghost Box in a few days time - The Path. 

It's unusual - a full-band sound, incorporating a spoken-word element. And the voice speaks in an American accent!

Hauntology Parish Newsletter - Christmas Bumper Issue

Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!

Moon Wiring Club cometh with his customary seasonal offering: Cavity Slabs. Like the atypical summertime long-player Ghastly Garden Centres of earlier this year, Slabs is a brisk and beat-driven effort, veering away from the boggy hinterland of ambience and vocal gloop into which much of Ian Hodgson's output this past decade has sunk so deliriously. Focused and concise, the new record  boasts just eight tuff tunes. The reference point this time around is breakbeat hardcore - in moments, I'm reminded of the phat-but-spooky sound of Eon, although Ian says the launchpad for the new direction was actually this obscure tune:



This very very early Moving Shadow track (by a group later and slightly better known for their Rising High releases) first reached Ian's eardrums via an Autechre radio show from many years ago. "It always stuck with me. It’s that mix of beats with ‘anything goes’ sampling and environmental sounds ~ it always makes me think of coastlines... and a sort of grey mistiness."

                                  

The aim with Cavity Slabs was to take a detour round the ongoing overload of rave-replicas, with their neurotic attention to period detail and naked nostalgia, and instead reactivate the bygone playfulness and incongruous-samples-clumsily-collaged approach of the early Nineties, which threw up so many genre-of-one anomalies and half-realised oddments alongside the classic bangers and slammers.
                                     
           

^^^a megamix of three tunes from the album^^^

"I wanted to compose something that reflected the dankness / mystery of fog without it being an ambient drone affair," adds Ian. The name Cavity Slabs comes from a pile of building materials Ian passed on a rainy-day stroll, which conjured associations both of vinyl platters and "limestone moorside and burial chambers". The overall atmosphere and thematic is caught in the slogan "COAX ANCIENT VOICES FROM THE LANDSCAPE" and track titles like "Cromlech Technology" - cromlech being a megalithic altar-tomb or circle of standing stones around a burial mound.



Cavity Slabs is available for purchase here .

But wait... there's more... adding to the Xmas feast, there's a new, radically different version of an old MWC fave: a DL-only VULPINE REDUX edition of Somewhere A Fox Is Getting Married.  "The original album plus 47 minutes of 12 bonus track alternate takes / extended versions / tangentially related nonsense from the vaults circa 2006-2011" including unreleased experiments like "35 Year Sit Down" and the lost "Schlagerdelia" classic "Mountain Men".




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Talking of "grey mistiness" -  remiss have I been in not alerting parishioners to this new release by  Lo Five - Wirral-based electronician Neil Grant.



There's a really nice "mundane mystical" atmosphere to the sound Neil's worked up on Geography of the Abyss - muzzy textures like looking out through a coach window that's streaked with rippling rivulets of heavy rain, or trying to peer through the frosted-glass window of your front door to see who's coming up the path. The vibe of the album reminds me of the sort of trance you can fall into while travelling on a train or a bus, that feeling of slipping outside the moorings of time.


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A record that not only remissly passed without comment from me, but that I missed completely when it originally came out in June - Vanishing Twin's The Age of Immunology.




Triffic stuff -  at times like The Focus Group if based around "proper" musicianship rather than sampladelia. As with their previous album Choose Your Own Adventure, the starting points of Broadcast, Stereolab, White Noise, library music, etc, are still discernible, but now they are definitively on a journey of their own.

‘You Are Not an Island’, ‘Invisible World’ and ‘Planete Sauvage’ were apparently "recorded in nighttime sessions in an abandoned mill in Sudbury"!




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More remissness - alert overdue for the release of the audio element of Andrew Pekler's wonderful Phantom Islands - A Sonic Atlas  project of last year.



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A recommendation from parish elder Bruce Levenstein



Release rationale:

Mount Maxwell continues his run of 1970s themed releases with a full length meditation on the perceptual experiences of children born in the wake of the 1960's cultural revolution. Highly ambivalent in tone, Only Children marks a departure from earlier MM releases both in its use of acoustic instruments and in a newfound sense of criticality towards its subject matter; the back-to-the-land optimism of tracks like 'Nature ID' in uneasy proximity to the skeptical disquiet of 'Weird Places' and 'Nomad'. 

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Bruce also brings to my attention this effort



Release rationale:

There was a certain something about watching television in the 70s and 80s. The static crackle when you switched on your set. The faint smell of ozone as it slowly warmed up. The chunky buttons (including such flights of fancy as 'BBC3' and 'ITV2"). And, of course, the programmes themselves.

Whether it was HTV's seminal Folk Horror tinged children's classics 'Sky' or Children of the Stones, BBC1's fiercely intelligent 'adult-show-for-kids' 'The Changes' or ITV's everyday tale of alien possession, 'Chocky', the era was bursting with inventive, unforgettable and yes, terrifying shows.

The only thing more memorable than the actual programmes were their theme tunes. The unique talents of Paddy Kingsland, Sidney Saget, Eric Wetherell, John Hyde and many more were responsible for the atmospheric, eerie soundscapes which formed the aural backdrop to our favourite shows. Which is where Kev Oyston (The Soulless Party) and Colin Morrison (Castles in Space) come in. They've corralled the best of today's innovative electronic musicians, and together they've created 'Scarred For Life: The Album', a collection of new music inspired by the terrifying televisual sounds of our childhoods.

All proceeds for this album will go to aid Cancer Research UK, a charity which is close to the hearts of some of our artists, one of whom is currently undergoing treatment for cancer.

Enjoy. And remember: DO have nightmares. They're good for you.

-Stephen Brotherstone & Dave Laurence, co-authors 'Scarred For Life Volume One: the 1970's'. .

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The incredibly prolific and thorough Stephen Prince of A Year in the Country - independent scholar of the rustic eerie and convenor of reliably interesting compilations - has just published a second book.



Straying From the Pathways: Hidden Histories, Echoes of the Future's Past and the Unsettled Landscape is the companion volume to last year's Wandering Through Spectral Fields: Journeys in Otherly Pastoralism, the Further Reaches of Folk and the Parallel Worlds of Hauntology. 

How does Stephen do it?!?

More information about Straying From the Pathways here.

Hark at this here Table of Contents!

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

2. Fractured Dream Transmissions and a Collapsing into Ghosts: John Carpenter – Prince of Darkness, Halloween III: Season of the Witch, Village of the Damned, Christine – Nigel Kneale – Martin Quatermass – John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos

3. Hinterland Tales of Hidden Histories and Unobserved Edgeland Transgressions: Adrian McKinty’s In the Morning I’ll Be Gone – Clare Carson’s Orkney Twilight – David Peace’s GB84 – Tony White’s The Fountain in the Forest

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

5. The Village and Seaside Idyll Gone Rogue: Hot Fuzz – The Avengers’ “Murdersville” – The Prisoner – In My Mind – Malcolm Pryce’s Aberystwyth Mon Amour

6. Albion in the Overgrowth and Timeslip Echoes: Requiem – The Living and the Dead – Britannia – Detectorists

7. In Cars – Building a Better Future, Peculiarly Subversive Enchantments and Faded Futuristic Glamour: In the Company of Ghosts: The Poetics of the Motorway – Joe
 Moran’s On Roads: A Hidden History – Chris Petit’s Radio On – Autophoto – Martin Parr’s Abandoned Morris Minors of the West of Ireland – The Friends of Eddie Coyle – Killing Them Softly – Langdon Clay’s Cars: New York City 1974-76

8. Brutalism, Reaching for the Sky and Bugs in Utopia: Peter Chadwick’s This Brutal World – Bladerunner – J.G.Ballard – Ben Wheatley – High-Rise – Peter Mitchell’s Memento Mori – Brick High-Rise

9. Battles with the Old Guard and the Continuing sparking of Vivid Undercurrents: A Very Peculiar Practice – Edge of Darkness

10. Lycanthropes, Dark Fairy Tales and the Dangers of Wandering off the Path: The Company of Wolves – Danielle Dax – Red Riding Hood – Wolfen – Hansel & Gretel: Witchhunters – The Keep

11. The Empty City Film and Other Visions of the End of Days – Survival and Shopping in the Post-Apocalypse: Day of the Triffids – Into the Forest – Night of the Comet –The Quiet Earth

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

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Now this is a little odd - not only is this here chap trespassing on Hatherley's terrain, he's borrowed his first name too! 




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Finally -  and no doubt this morsel of news has already reached your flabbergasted ears  -  but cor blimey guvnor,  Paul Weller's only going to release a record on Ghost Box! The In Another Room EP is out early next year. And it's actually rather good.

Hauntology Parish Newsletter - June 2018 : Moon Wiring Club stuff 'n' nonsense; Bloxham Tapes; new A Year in the Country themed album The Shildam Hall Tapes; Andrew Pekler's Phantom Islands

Celebrating the Summer Solstice tomorrow, here's a new Moon Wiring Club mix! 

Mr. Hodgson describes it as starting out as your "pretty standard hyper-soup of the usual 70s/80s audio synth nonsense with added vocal bitsy" that then veers into an unexpected "Industrial dance selection... everyone needs to have heard Soma Holiday at least once."

Mr. Hodgson also points out some related MWC action:

-  new MWC back catalogue now available for the first time at Bandcamp

- a MWC interview that features in new "folk horror" book  Harvest Hymns. Volume II - Sweet Fruits

-  MWC track contributed to "3rd Wave" hauntology compilation, Present At The Terminal, on the  Modern Aviation label

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Mr. Hodgson mentions in passing a new 3rd Wave hauntology entity possibly worth checking out -  Bloxham Tapes.  

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A Year In the Country have a new themed album involving multiple contributors out next month, The Shildam Hall Tapes, which sounds excellently eerie on a first listen. 

Release rationale: 

 “Reflections on an imaginary film.” 

In the late 1960s a film crew began work on a well-funded feature film in a country mansion, having been granted permission by the young heir of the estate. 

Amidst rumours of aristocratic decadence, psychedelic use and even possibly dabbling in the occult, the film production collapsed, although it is said that a rough cut of it and the accompanying soundtrack were completed but they are thought to have been filed away and lost amongst storage vaults. 

Few of the cast or crew have spoken about events since and any reports from then seem to contradict one another and vary wildly in terms of what actually happened on the set. 

A large number of those involved, including a number of industry figures who at the time were considered to have bright futures, simply seemed to disappear or step aside from the film industry following the film's collapse, their careers seemingly derailed or cast adrift by their experiences. 

Little is known of the film's plot but several unedited sections of the film and its soundtrack have surfaced, found amongst old film stock sold as a job lot at auction - although how they came to be there is unknown. 

The fragments of footage and audio that have appeared seem to show a film which was attempting to interweave and reflect the heady cultural mix of the times; of experiments and explorations in new ways of living, a burgeoning counter culture, a growing interest in and reinterpretation of folk culture and music, early electronic music experimentation, high fashion, psychedelia and the crossing over of the worlds of the aristocracy with pop/counter culture and elements of the underworld. 

The Shildam Hall Tapes takes those fragments as its starting point and imagines what the completed soundtrack may have sounded like; creating a soundtrack for a film that never was. 

My memory is getting foggier as the years advance, but I think - I think - that I forgot to flag up this recent A Year in the Country release from just last month, Audio Albion

release rationale: 

Audio Albion is a music and field recording map of Britain, which focuses on rural and edgeland areas. 

Each track contains field recordings from locations throughout the land and is accompanied by notes on the recordings by the contributors. 

The tracks record the sounds found and heard when wandering down pathways, over fields, through marshes, alongside rivers, down into caves and caverns, climbing hills, along coastlands, through remote mountain forestland, amongst the signs of industry and infrastructure and its discarded debris. 

Intertwined with the literal recording of locations, the album explores the history, myths and beliefs of the places, their atmospheres and undercurrents, personal and cultural connections - the layered stories that lie amongst, alongside and beneath the earth, plants and wildlife. 

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News from the parish's twinned town in West Germany - Andrew Pekler invents a new genre - hauntonautology - with the announcement of  Phantom Islands – A Sonic Atlas  - "an interactive online map that charts the sounds and histories of islands that were once found on nautical maps but have since disappeared." Part of the larger Fourth Worlds online project /  real-world exhibition + conference for "l'ethnographie imaginaire dans l'experimentation musicale et sonore". 

Release rationale: 

"Phantom Islands are artifacts of the age of maritime discovery and colonial expansion. During centuries of ocean exploration these islands were sighted, charted, described and even landed on – but their existence was never ultimately verified. Poised between cartographic fact and maritime fiction, they haunted seafarers’ maps for hundreds of years, providing inspiration for legend, fantasy, and counterfactual histories. Phantom Islands – A Sonic Atlas interprets these imaginations in the form of a map of speculative sounds from 27 phantom islands around the world.

"Explore the map by clicking on the names of phantom islands to learn the histories of their discoveries and the dates of their cartographical existence. Zoom in on individual islands to hear their musical, biophonic and geophonic soundscapes. Or, engage Cruise mode to be taken on an audio tour of all the Phantom Islands – ideal for passive listening in a separate browser window or tab. (In this mode, all the sounds, played in sequence, amount to something like my new album.) Recommended browsers: Chrome (version 67+), Firefox (version 60+ ), Safari (version 11+). Not usable on mobile devices. 

"Phantom Islands – A Sonic Atlas was commissioned by Jeu de Paume for the exhibition Fourth Worlds: Imaginary Ethnography in Music and Sound and was produced with the support of DICRéAM, CNC. "