A Sense of Doubt blog post #3103 - Hauntology and a Year in the Country
HAUNTOLOGY LIST GOOD READS
Hauntology
https://ayearinthecountry.co.uk/the-shildam-hall-tapes-novella-and-the-shildam-hall-tapes-the-falling-reverse-album-released/
The Shildam Hall Tapes novella and The Shildam Hall Tapes: The Falling Reverse album – Released
Released today 28th July 2021.
The novella is also available at Amazon UK, Amazon US and their other worldwide sites and at Lulu.
The book may also available to order from other bookshops etc, please direct any queries regarding that directly to them.
The CDs are now sold out but the album is available to download at our Bandcamp page, Amazon, The Tidal Store, 7digital etc and can be streamed on Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer, YouTube etc.
Written and recorded by Stephen Prince the novella and album are set among the cultural hinterlands of wyrd, otherly pastoral, folk, psychedelic and hauntological culture, and follow the journey of a song through time: one that appears to bring disarray to all who hear it. Is this coincidence or something more?
1799: A young woman who lives at the Shildam Hall country mansion writes a lament for a lover she can never be with, and locks it away forever.
1840: The song is discovered by one of her relatives and begins a journey through time. It entrances those who hear it, but does it also lead to their potential demise?
1969: A film set among the decadent milieu of late 1960s counterculture commences production at Shildam Hall, before collapsing amidst potential scandal after the song is rediscovered.
2004: A recording of the song is stumbled upon but all who listen to it seem to disappear…
The novella and album are further explorations of an imaginary abandoned film that first began on an album called The Shildam Hall Tapes released in 2018, which featured music by Gavino Morretti, Sproatly Smith, Field Lines Cartographer, Vic Mars, Circle/Temple, A Year In The Country, The Heartwood Instititute, David Colohan, Listening Center and Pulselovers.
The Shildam Hall Tapes: The Falling Reverse album is both a soundtrack to accompany the novella and also a standalone piece of work set amongst the fragmentary memories and dreamscapes of The Shildam Hall Tapes.
All of the above albums and novella can be listened to and read as standalone pieces of work. They also interconnect with the story and world of the near-mythical imaginary lost folkloric fever dream film The Corn Mother, which was explored in the 2020 novella The Corn Motherand album The Corn Mother: Night Wraiths, both of which were written and recorded by Stephen Prince; and also the 2018 album The Corn Mother, which again featured music by a variety of performers, including a number of those mentioned above, alongside Depatterning, United Bible Studies and Widow’s Weeds (see below for the full list of contributors).
As with the A Year In The Country project as a whole, which they are released as part of, the novellas’ and albums’ structures are inspired by the cycle of the year. Following the number of seasons, the novellas are each split into four sections; they have 52 chapters (which could also be considered scenes or episodes), the same number as there are weeks in the year; relating to the number of days in a non-leap year, each chapter’s text contains no more than 365 words; and as there are days in a week, the albums each have seven tracks.
The Shildam Hall Tapes: The Falling Reverse – Dawn Light Edition. Limited to 208 copies.
Hand-finished white/black CD album in speckled recycled fold-out sleeve with fold-out insert, sticker and badge.
Further album packaging details:
1. Custom printed using archival giclée pigment ink.
2. Metal badge, secured with removable glue on string bound tag.
3. Sticker printed on vinyl style material.
4. Folded sheet of accompanying notes, printed on textured laid paper, hand numbered and signed on back.
The Shildam Hall Tapes: The Falling Reverse tracklisting:
1. On The Moors (1799)
2. Day 12, Scene 2, Take 28 – Hoffman’s Fall (1970)
3. Blown Away Like Dust (1971)
4. An Ancient Find (1977)
5. Nobody Ever Really Knew What Happened (2004)
6. False Starts And Naysayers (2017)
7. Tumbling Through Time (1799-2020)
The titles of the album tracks contain a particular year or set of years, which refer to sections in both the novella and the timeline of The Shildam Hall Tapes’ world and story as a whole.
The Shildam Hall Tapes novella
78 pages. Softback.
The 2018 released The Shildam Hall Tapes album featured work by Gavino Morretti, Sproatly Smith, Field Lines Cartographer, Vic Mars, Circle/Temple, A Year In The Country (aka Stephen Prince), The Heartwood Institute, David Colohan, Listening Centre and Pulselovers.
Further details are at: www.ayearinthecountry.co.uk/the-shildam-hall-tapes-album-released
“The sounds venture into 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… Just as film is the visceral, visual experience needed to startle and stimulate the eyes, The Shildam Hall Tapes is the appropriate aural experience needed to caress and connect the ears to everything they are listening to.” Eoghan Lyng, We Are Cult
“An engaging collection of dark, ethereal and psychedelic experimental sounds.” Kim Harten, Bliss Aquamarine
“Every track unsettles and enthralls in equal measure.” Ben Graham, Shindig!
The Corn Mother novella and The Corn Mother: Night Wraiths album released in 2020 were both created by Stephen Prince.
“A ghostly record, where fact and fiction merge with unsettling noises, found sounds and atmospherics, all adding up to another immersive listen.” Terrascope
“Eerie, elegant and ever so evocative.” Thomas Patterson, Shindig!
“A fascinating and truly inventive novella… This is an original and significant piece of work, not only in its novel, singular and successful approach to folk horror and ‘imaginary’ films but in the creation of its own self referencing folklore.” Grey Malkin, Folk Horror Revival
Further details are at: www.ayearinthecountry.co.uk/the-corn-mother-novella-and-the-corn-mother-night-wraiths-album-released
The Corn Mother album released in 2018 includes music by Gavino Morretti, Pulselovers, The Heartwood Institute, United Bible Studies (David Colohan, Dominic Cooper of The Owl Service, Alison O’Donnell of Mellow Candle), A Year In The Country, Widow’s Weeds (featuring former members of/collaborators with The Hare And The Moon), Depatterning, Sproatly Smith and Field Lines Cartographer.
“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
Further details are at: www.ayearinthecountry.co.uk/the-corn-mother-album-released
Thanks to everybody who contributed, wrote about etc the above albums and books, including Suzy Prince and Ian Lowey of Bop Cap Books for the editing and design work. A tip of the hat to you all!
https://ayearinthecountry.co.uk/the-shildam-hall-tapes-album-released/
The Shildam Hall Tapes – Album Released
The CDs are now sold out but the album is available to download at our Bandcamp page, Amazon, The Tidal Store, 7digital etc and can be streamed on Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer, YouTube etc.
Released today 31st July 2018.
CD available via our Artifacts Shop, at Bandcamp and Norman Records.
Dawn Light Edition £11.95. Nightfall Edition £22.95.
Both editions are hand-finished and custom printed using archival giclée pigment ink by A Year In The Country
Download available at Bandcamp, iTunes, Amazon
Features work by Gavino Morretti, Sproatly Smith, Field Lines Cartographer, Vic Mars, Circle/Temple, A Year In The Country, The Heartwood Institute, David Colohan, Listening Centre and Pulselovers.
“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 filmstock 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.
“Every track unsettles and enthrals in equal measure.” Ben Graham, Shindig! magazine
“A gorgeously woven twilight apparition… amid a becoming spectral haze, these chiming serenades shimmer in and out of focus to play tic tac toe with both the enchanted and the eerie.” Mark Barton, The Sunday Experience
Nightfall Edition. Limited to 104 copies. £22.95
Hand-finished box-set contains: album on all black CD, 1 x sheet of accompanying notes, 1 print, 3 x stickers and 3 x badges.
Top of CD. Bottom of CD.
Further packaging details:
1) Cover, notes and print custom printed using archival giclée pigment ink.
2) Contained in a matchbox style sliding two-part rigid matt card box with cover print.
3) Fully black CD (black on top, black on playable side).
4) 1 x folded sheets of accompanying notes, printed on textured laid paper – numbered on back.
5) 1 x print on textured fine art cotton rag paper.
5) 1 x 2.5 cm badge, 1 x 4.5 cm badge.
6) 1 x 5.6 cm sticker, 1 x 3.5 cm sticker, 2 x 12cm stickers.
Dawn Light Edition. Limited to 104 copies. £11.95.
Hand-finished white/black CD album in textured recycled fold out sleeve with fold-out insert and badge.
Further packaging details:
1) Custom printed using archival giclée pigment ink.
2) Includes 2.5 cm badge, secured with removable glue on string bound tag.
3) 1 x folded sheet of accompanying notes, hand numbered on back.
Tracklisting:
1) Gavino Morretti – Dawn of a New Generation
2) Sproatly Smith – Galloping Backwards
3) Field Lines Cartographer – The Computer
4) Vic Mars – Ext – Day – Overgrown Garden
5) Circle/Temple – Maze Sequence
6) A Year In The Country – Day 12, Scene 2, Take 3; Hoffman’s Fall
7) The Heartwood Institute – Shildam Hall Seance
8) David Colohan – How We’ll Go Out
9) Listening Center – Cultivation I
10) Pulselovers – The Green Leaves of Shildam Hall
https://ayearinthecountry.co.uk/the-corn-mother-novella-and-the-corn-mother-night-wraiths-album-released/
https://ayearinthecountry.co.uk/shop/
https://ayearinthecountry.co.uk/the-a-year-in-the-country-wandering-through-spectral-fields-book-and-a-visual-accompaniment/
The A Year In The Country: Wandering Through Spectral Fields Book
Journeys in Otherly Pastoralism, the Further Reaches of Folk and the Parallel Worlds of Hauntology.
Paperback and Ebook are available at Amazon UK, Amazon US, Amazon Australia and their other international sites.
The book may also available to order from other bookshops etc, please direct any queries regarding that directly to them.
“The first book of it’s kind to catalogue all these disparate strands, many of which cross over time and space to influence one another.” DJ Food
“An essential field guide to a distinct aesthetic that remains loosely defined, like a fluttering night moth that would die if pinned down.” Ben Graham, Shindig!
“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
A Year In The Country is a set of year-long journeys through spectral fields; cyclical explorations of an otherly pastoralism, the outer reaches of folk culture and the spectres of hauntology. It is a wandering amongst subculture that draws from the undergrowth of the land.
As a project, it has included a website featuring writing, artwork and music which stems from that otherly pastoral/spectral hauntological intertwining, alongside a growing catalogue of album releases.
In keeping with the number of weeks in a year, the book is split into 52 chapters which draw together revised writings from the project alongside new journeyings. Connecting layered and, at times, semi-hidden cultural pathways and signposts, it journeys from acid folk to edgelands via electronic music innovators, folkloric film and photography, dreams of lost futures and misremembered televisual tales and transmissions.
It includes considerations of the work of writers including Rob Young, John Wyndham, Richard Mabey and Mark Fisher, musicians and groups The Owl Service, Jane Weaver, Shirley Collins, Broadcast, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Virginia Astley and Kate Bush, the artists Edward Chell, Jeremy Deller and Barbara Jones and the record labels Trunk, Folk Police, Ghost Box and Finders Keepers.
The book also explores television and film including Quatermass, The Moon and the Sledgehammer, Phase IV, Beyond the Black Rainbow, The Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water, Bagpuss, Travelling for a Living, The Duke of Burgundy, Sapphire & Steel, General Orders No. 9, Gone to Earth, The Changes, Children of the Stones, Sleep Furiously and The Wicker Man.
“Author Prince has pulled together a mass of material culled not only from the website and its associated albums, but also a great deal more that was written specifically for the book. And the result is spellbinding.” Dave Thompson, Goldmine
“This incredibly well-researched book, which is obviously written by a man with an enormous passion for this subject, is probably as comprehensive as it is possible to be. Stephen Prince’s densely packed tome covers everything from folkloric film and literature to electronic music to acid folk to folk horror to the dystopian fiction of John Wyndham and the classic unearthings of Nigel Kneale to the formation of under-the-furrows record labels like Trunk, Ghost Box and Finders Keepers. If you’re already interested in folk culture and want to be astonished by how deeply its roots run, you’ll treasure A Year in the Country enormously. Almost every one of the 52 chapters sideswiped me with a revelation that is already making me look at a genre I love with new, more appreciative eyes. Books this culturally valuable don’t grow on hedgerows, so make sure you harvest it immediately.” Ian White, Starburst
“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.” Simon Reynolds, author of Retromania and Energy Flash
Download two sample chapters at this web page: Contents list and sample chapters
Text extracts from the book can also be visited here.
The book has been designed/typeset by Ian Lowey of Bopcap Book Services and edited by Suzy Prince, who are the co-authors of The Graphic Art of the Underground: A Counter-Cultural History.
Book Chapter List:
1. Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music: Folk Vs Pop, Less Harvested Cultural Landscapes and Acts of Enclosure, Old and New
2. Gather in the Mushrooms: Early Signposts and Underground Acid Folk Explorations
3. Hauntology: Places Where Society Goes to Dream, the Defining and Deletion of Spectres and the Making of an Ungenre
4. Cuckoos in the Same Nest: Hauntological and Otherly Folk Confluences and Intertwinings
5. Ghost Box Records: Parallel Worlds, Conjuring Spectral Memories, Magic Old and New and Slipstream Trips to the Panda Pops Disco
6. Folk Horror Roots: From But a Few Seedlings Did a Great Forest Grow
7. 1973: A Time of Schism and a Dybbuk’s Dozen of Fractures
8. Broadcast: Recalibration, Constellation and Exploratory Pop
9. Tales From The Black Meadow, The Book of the Lost and The Equestrian Vortex: The Imagined Spaces of Imaginary Soundtracks
10. The Wicker Man: Notes on a Cultural Behemoth
11. Robin Redbreast, The Ash Tree, Sky, The Changes, Penda’s Fen Red Shift and The Owl Service: Wanderings Through Spectral Television Landscapes
12. A Bear’s Ghosts: Soviet Dreams and Lost Futures
13. From “Two Tribes” to WarGames: The Ascendancy of Apocalyptic Popular Culture
14. Christopher Priest’s A Dream of Wessex: Twentieth Century Slipstream Echoes
15. Sapphire & Steel and Ghosts in the Machine: Nowhere, Forever and Lost Spaces within Cultural Circuitry
16. Kill List, Puffball, In the Dark Half and Butter on the Latch: Folk Horror Descendants by Way of the Kitchen Sink
17. The Quietened Bunker, Waiting For The End of the World, Subterranea Britannica, Bunker Archaeology and The Delaware Road: Ghosts, Havens and Curious Repurposings Beneath Our Feet
18. From The Unofficial Countryside to Soft Estate: Edgeland Documents, Memories and Explorations
19. The Ballad of Shirley Collins and Pastoral Noir: Tales and Intertwinings from Hidden Furrows
20. “Savage Party” and Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased): Glimpses of Albion in the Overgrowth
21. Uncommonly British Days Out and the Following of Ghosts: File under Psychogeographic/Hauntological Stocking Fillers
22. Gone to Earth: Earlier Traces of an Otherly Albion
23. Queens of Evil, Tam Lin and The Touchables: High Fashion Transitional Psych Folk Horror, Pastoral Fantasy and Dreamlike Isolation
24. Luke Haines: Our Most Non-Hauntological Hauntologist
25. Tim Hart, Maddy Prior and “The Dalesman’s Litany”: A Yearning for Imaginative Idylls and a Counterpart to Tales of Hellish Mills
26. Katalin Varga, Berberian Sound Studio and The Duke of Burgundy : Arthouse Evolution and Crossing the Thresholds of the Hinterland Worlds of Peter Strickland
27. General Orders No. 9 and By Our Selves: Cinematic Pastoral Experimentalism
28. No Blade of Grass and Z.P.G.: A Curious Dystopian Mini-Genre
29. The Midwich Cuckoos and The Day of the Triffids: John Wyndham, Dystopian Tales, Celluloid Cuckoos and the Village as Anything But Idyll
30. Folk Archive and Unsophisticated Arts: Documenting the Overlooked and Unregulated
31. Folkloric Photography: A Lineage of Wanderings, Documentings and Imaginings
32. Poles and Pylons and The Telegraph Appreciation Society: A Continuum of Accidental Art
33. Symptoms and Images: Hauntological Begetters, the Uneasy Landscape and Gothic Bucolia
34. The Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water: Public Information Films and Lost Municipal Paternalisms
35. Magpahi, Paper Dollhouse and The Eccentronic Research Council: Finders Keepers/Bird Records Nestings and Considerations of Modern Day Magic
36. Vashti Bunyan: From Here to Before: Whispering Fairy Stories until They are Real
37. The Owl Service, Anne Briggs, The Watersons, Lutine and Audrey Copard: Folk Revisiters, Revivalists and Reinterpreters
38. The Seasons, Jonny Trunk, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and Howlround: A Yearning for Library Music, Experiments in Educational Music and Tape Loop Tributes
39. An Old Soul Returns: The Worlds and Interweavings of Kate Bush
40. The Stone Tape, Quatermass, The Road and The Twilight Language of Nigel Kneale: Unearthing Tales from Buried Ancient Pasts
41 Folklore Tapes and the Wyrd Britannia Festival: Journeying to Hidden Corners of the Land/the Ferrous Reels and Explorations of an Arcane Research Project
42. Skeletons: Pastoral Preternatural Fiction and a World, Time and Place of its Own Imagining
43. Field Trip-England: Jean Ritchie, George Pickow and Recordings from the End of an Era
44. Noah’s Castle: A Slightly Overlooked Artifact and Teatime Dystopias
45. Jane Weaver Septième Soeur and The Fallen by Watch Bird: Non-Populist Pop and Cosmic Aquatic Folklore
46. Detectorists, Bagpuss, The Wombles and The Good Life: Views from a Gentler Landscape
47. Weirdlore, Folk Police Recordings, Sproatly Smith and Seasons They Change: Notes From the Folk Underground, Legendary Lost Focal Points and Privately Pressed Folk
48. The Moon and The Sledgehammer and Sleep Furiously: Visions of Parallel and Fading Lives
49. From Gardens Where We Feel Secure, Wintersongs, Pilgrim Chants & Pastoral Trails: Lullabies for the Land and Gently Darkened Undercurrents
50. Strawberry Fields and Wreckers: The Countryside and Coastal Hinterland as Emotional Edgeland
51. Zardoz, Phase IV and Beyond the Black Rainbow: Seeking the Future in Secret Rooms from the Past and Psychedelic Cinematic Corners
52. Winstanley, A Field in England and The English Civil War Part II: Reflections on Turning Points and Moments When Anything Could Happen
“A Year In The Country is an excellent introduction to hauntology and related subjects, particularly as it guides the reader through some of the more obscure fields. There is a sensitivity here, and Prince has a talent for teasing out details.” Steve Toase, Fortean Times
“Embraces a wide range of avenues to bring together not only a sense of how far reaching and varied the origins, mainstays and current players of genres such as folk horror or hauntology can be, but crucially also how they intertwine and cross pollinate. Each chapter expertly charts its chosen subject’s impact upon the public consciousness as well as indicating that these artefacts are now part of a greater cultural cobweb that may well have threads and components that are radically different in genre or style but that equally have a strong commonality in their sense of unease and their haunted content; of similar ghosts in the machine (or spooks in the television and bookshelves). Further investigations delve into folklore, TV public information films and the landscape itself as a medium through which a certain mood, an uncanny, can be evoked.” Grey Malkin, Folk Horror Revival
“A written word accompaniment to the prolific hauntological label of the same name… a 340-page offering spread across 52 chapters, each one representing a week of the year. Bewitching stuff.” Electronic Sound – selected for their top ten books of the year in 2018
Below is an online “cut out and keep” set of visual accompaniments to the chapters of the A Year In The Country: Wandering Through Spectral Field book.
Chapter 1: Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music: Folk Vs Pop, Less Harvested Cultural Landscapes and Acts of Enclosure, Old and New
Left to right: the first and second British editions and the American edition of Rob Young’s Electric Eden book (2010-2011).
The gatefold cover and vinyl of Forest’s album Full Circle (1970).
The cover and vinyl of Kate Bush’s second album Lionheart (1978).
Construction scaffolding for statue in The Wicker Man film (1973).
Ghost Box Records logo/artwork.
The cover of one of the editions of Steeleye Span’s All Around My Hat single (1975) and characters from The Womble’s television series (1973-1975).
A period map showing enclosure/inclosure of the land.
Text extracts from Chapter 1 can be viewed here.
and more here:
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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2308.17 - 10:10
- Days ago = 2967 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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