NEWS: A Year in the Country publish 'Ghost Signals: The Shadowlands of British Analogue Television 1968-1995'.

Our fellow explorer in wyrd territories Stephen Prince of the 'A Year in the Country' blog has another of his fascinating collections available as of today, 'Ghost Signals: The Shadowlands of British Analogue Television 1968-1995', an examination of pre-digital wyrd TV. 

From the release blurb...
Before the ubiquity of streaming, British television was a landscape with room for strange experiments, folk-horror nightmares, and “wyrd” transmissions. Today, many of these programmes have vanished from official channels, leaving behind only “ghost signals“: a shadowland of terrestrial TV hidden in plain sight across the unmediated and unmarketed corners of the internet.

GHOST SIGNALS maps this territory from 1968 – the foundational “wyrd” year of acid folk and iconic folk horror – to 1995, the dawn of the digital revolution. The book delves into a unique era where public funding met social experimentation, creating a “broad diet” of television that was often as challenging as it was chilling.

This landscape invited viewers to encounter the seasonal hauntings of A GHOST STORY FOR CHRISTMAS, the suburban occult of SCORPION TALES: GREAT ALBERT, and the layered mythologies of THE MOON STALLION. It was a time that embraced the edgeland quiet horror of UNNATURAL CAUSES: LOST PROPERTY, the prescient virtual worlds of PLAY FOR TOMORROW: SHADES, and the metatextual timeslip satire of SCREENPLAY: THE BLACK AND BLUE LAMP. From the paranormal pathways of LEAP IN THE DARK: JACK BE NIMBLE to the non-horror folk horror of PLAY FOR TODAY: THE LONELY MAN’S LOVER, these broadcasts pushed the boundaries of the terrestrial signal.

The book is available in paperback and ebook from:
ayearinthecountry.co.uk/ghost-signals-the-shadowlands-of-british-analogue-television-1968-1995-paperback-and-ebook/

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If you enjoy what we do here on Wyrd Britain and would like to help us continue then we would very much welcome a donation towards keeping the blog going - paypal.me/wyrdbritain

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NEWS: A Year In The Country publish new collection, 'Other Worlds'

Our friend Stephen Prince over at the fabulous 'A Year In The Country' has just announced the latest of his collections.  

Stephen's books are always a fascinating read and are heartily recommended.

Here's the blurb...

A Year In The Country: Other Worlds

Searching For Far Off Lands Via Witchcraft Battles, Spectral Streets, Faded Visions Of the Future And The Secrets Of The Stones

A Year In The Country: Other Worlds intertwines and cross pollinates the A Year In The Country project’s core exploration of wyrd and hauntological culture with journeys to far off lands and seeks out hidden links in the cultural undergrowth.

Amongst other wyrd and far off lands it wanders to the Winter of Discontent witchcraft battles of the 1979 television adaptation of M.R. James’ Casting the Runes and the timeslip folk horror Cold War dread of Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense’s And The Wall Came Tumbling Down…

Takes a trip into the surreal dreamscape pop fantasia of Nancy Sinatra’s Movin’ With Nancy television special and spends a night in the triple bill genre melding wonderworld of the Scala cinema…

Visits the ghosts of city streets via The Sandbaggers, The Gentle Touch and Adam Scovell’s Local Haunts and opens the time capsules of faded history in The Likely Lads and the modernist’s photozines…

Steps into the shadows of the 1980s secret state cycle of British film and television via Menace Unseen and Bird of Prey and crosses over the thresholds of Kate Bush and Suzanne Cianni’s boundary breaking worlds…

Unearths the hidden histories of The Profumo Affair, Mitch Glazer’s Magic city and Edward Norton’s Motherless Brooklyn and explores the frontier-like autonomous zones of Walter Hill’s The Driver, Ryan Andrew Hooper’s The Toll and John Michael McDonagh’s The Guard…

Enters the endless “wilderness of mirrors” espionage games of Andrew Williams’ Witchfinder and conjures the lost visions of the future that are buried inside Karyn Kusama’s Aeon Flux and Robert Longo and William Gibson’s Johnny Mnemonic.

The book reflects and records a wide ranging personal cultural journey through the byways, highways, darkened alleys and edgelands of culture and variously visits, revisits and at times brings to the surface the sometimes subterranean themes and culture that have inspired and underpin A Year In The Country’s journeys amongst the wyrd spectral tales of culture.

More details and ordering info can be found here...

https://ayearinthecountry.co.uk/a-year-in-the-country-other-worlds-book-released/

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If you enjoy what we do here on Wyrd Britain and would like to help us continue then we would very much welcome a donation towards keeping the blog going - paypal.me/wyrdbritain

Affiliate links are provided for your convenience and to help mitigate running costs.

A Year In The Country - In Every Mind

An apology:  I started writing this review several months ago and it got somewhat derailed by my taking a short cut down a flight of stairs and not being able to finish it due to the whole operation and recuperation thing, not to mention the accompanying opiates.  So, it's very late going online but it is still available on both download and disc - I just checked - so it's definitely worth sharing.

Spinning out from his really rather wonderful blog of the same name is A Year In The Country's 'In Every Mind' a collection of 12 tracks that act as an eminently suitable companion to the blog itself.

The music has a stated inspirational link to 1960s UK television oddity 'The Owl Service' but it'll take better ears than mine to point out any links other than a shared hallucinatory quality that leaves a distinct feeling of perplexed awe at the conclusion.  What I can hear are echoes of the synthesizer rich David Cronenberg soundtracks woven through the deep, dark, sonic manipulations of British post-industrialists like Coil and dada cut-up maestros Nurse with Wound alongside the haunted, bucolic, landscapes of Comus and the Incredible String Band.

'In Every Mind' is a set that traverses genres and crashes notional boundaries with abandon creating a truly mesmerising array of sounds that are melded to great a ghost fiction; a spectral narrative haunting the echoes of a half remembered chimerical fantasy.

Torridon Gate

Howlround
(A Year in the Country)
CD

This third album from London's finest manipulators of magnetic tape, Howlround, is a slow burning, deeply atmospheric corker.  Produced entirely from recordings made from the gate referenced in the title, the duo of Robin (the Fog) and Chris (Weaver) have coaxed a dizzying array of unsettling and even sorrowful sounds from this most functional of objects and have layered them to astonishing effect.

The Howlround modus is based very much on that of the early years of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and as such they record their sound sources onto loops of tape of varying sizes which are then played via three tape recorders with all processing and editing done within the machines.  In this way the composition that the two have persuaded the tapes to reveal is as otherworldly and queasily creepy as it is beautifully earthy.  There's a gritty texture that evokes stories of the gate's history, it's place and it's age but through all that there is movement. The sounds expose themselves, transform and meld producing a piece of music that is at times introspective, at times vociferous and in a constant state of resurgence and restless agitation. 

The end result as presented here is a piece of music that whilst acknowledging the debt it's playful manner of execution owes to the workshop of the 1960s, is, in conception, timeless and really rather fun.

(www.ayearinthecountry.co.uk)
(www.howlround.co.uk)