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A Year In The Country: Wandering Through Spectral Fields: Journeys in Otherly Pastoralism, the Further Reaches of Folk and the Parallel Worlds of Hauntology
A Year In The Wandering Through Spectral Fields is an exploration of the undercurrents and flipside of bucolic dreams and where they meet and intertwine with the parallel worlds of hauntology; it connects layered and, at times, semi-hidden cultural pathways and signposts, journeying from acid folk to edgelands via electronic music innovators, folkloric film and photography, dreams of lost futures and misremembered televisual tales and transmissions.
The book 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.
Also explored are 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.
It draws together revised writings alongside new journeyings from the A Year In The Country project, which has undertaken 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, a selection of which are listed Electric Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Folk Vs Pop, Less Harvested Cultural Landscapes and Acts of Enclosure, Old and New Gather in the Early Signposts and Underground Acid Folk Explorations Places Where Society Goes to Dream, the Defining and Deletion of Spectres and the Making of an Ungenre Ghost Box Parallel Worlds, Conjuring Spectral Memories, Magic Old and New and Slipstream Trips to the Panda Pops Disco Folk Horror From But a Few Seedlings Did a Great Forest Grow Tales From The Black Meadow, The Book of the Lost and The Equestrian The Imagined Spaces of Imaginary Soundtracks Robin Redbreast, The Ash Tree, Sky, The Changes, Penda’s Fen Red Shift and The Owl Wanderings Through Spectral Television Landscapes Kill List, Puffball, In the Dark Half and Butter on the Folk Horror Descendants by Way of the Kitchen Sink Queens of Evil, Tam Lin and The High Fashion Transitional Psych Folk Horror, Pastoral Fantasy and Dreamlike Isolation Katalina Varga, Berberian Sound Studio and The Duke of Arthouse Evolution and Crossing the Thresholds of the Hinterland Worlds of Peter Strickland The Midwich Cuckoos and The Day of the John Wyndham, Dystopian Tales, Celluloid Cuckoos and the Village as Anything But Idyll The Spirit of Dark and Lonely Public Information Films and Lost Municipal Paternalisms The Seasons, Jonny Trunk, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and A Yearning for Library Music, Experiments in Educational Music and Tape Loop Tributes The Stone Tape, Quatermass, The Road and The Twilight Language of Nigel Unearthing Tales from Buried Ancient Pasts Detectorists, Bagpuss, The Wombles and The Good Views from a Gentler Landscape Weirdlore, Folk Police Recordings, Sproatly Smith and Seasons They Notes From the Folk Underground and Privately Pressed Folk
The book 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.
Also explored are 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.
It draws together revised writings alongside new journeyings from the A Year In The Country project, which has undertaken 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, a selection of which are listed Electric Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Folk Vs Pop, Less Harvested Cultural Landscapes and Acts of Enclosure, Old and New Gather in the Early Signposts and Underground Acid Folk Explorations Places Where Society Goes to Dream, the Defining and Deletion of Spectres and the Making of an Ungenre Ghost Box Parallel Worlds, Conjuring Spectral Memories, Magic Old and New and Slipstream Trips to the Panda Pops Disco Folk Horror From But a Few Seedlings Did a Great Forest Grow Tales From The Black Meadow, The Book of the Lost and The Equestrian The Imagined Spaces of Imaginary Soundtracks Robin Redbreast, The Ash Tree, Sky, The Changes, Penda’s Fen Red Shift and The Owl Wanderings Through Spectral Television Landscapes Kill List, Puffball, In the Dark Half and Butter on the Folk Horror Descendants by Way of the Kitchen Sink Queens of Evil, Tam Lin and The High Fashion Transitional Psych Folk Horror, Pastoral Fantasy and Dreamlike Isolation Katalina Varga, Berberian Sound Studio and The Duke of Arthouse Evolution and Crossing the Thresholds of the Hinterland Worlds of Peter Strickland The Midwich Cuckoos and The Day of the John Wyndham, Dystopian Tales, Celluloid Cuckoos and the Village as Anything But Idyll The Spirit of Dark and Lonely Public Information Films and Lost Municipal Paternalisms The Seasons, Jonny Trunk, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and A Yearning for Library Music, Experiments in Educational Music and Tape Loop Tributes The Stone Tape, Quatermass, The Road and The Twilight Language of Nigel Unearthing Tales from Buried Ancient Pasts Detectorists, Bagpuss, The Wombles and The Good Views from a Gentler Landscape Weirdlore, Folk Police Recordings, Sproatly Smith and Seasons They Notes From the Folk Underground and Privately Pressed Folk
338 pages, Paperback
Published March 19, 2018
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424 people want to read
About the author
Stephen Prince
43 books12 followersStephen Prince teaches film history, criticism, and theory at Virginia Tech’s School of Performing Arts . He received his Ph.D from the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.
Librarian’s note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Librarian’s note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
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September 28, 2018
If I’m not mistaken, all the content in A Year in the Country is available at the website, A Year in the Country. It’s a smorgasbord of strangeness and organized clutter, something like an old punk zine, but centered around the English landscape, the ‘60s and early ‘70s, folk music on the periphery, the subversion of idyllic notions of old Britain, collective mis-memory, and the sometimes-difficult-to-define realms of Hauntology. But reading what was constructed as a blog, now in the form of a (picture-less) book makes for a bit too much repetitiveness. If I see the term “left-of-center” one more time, I shall scream. I have no problems with the usage, and the phrase makes sense in the context of the places in which it is used. But the blog format more-or-less requires one to re-use terms to explicitly point the reader in the “right” direction. Since one almost never reads the entirety of a blog at once (oh, that I had the time), the author must include such phrases, and often their definition, on several different pages. Problem is, when you collate all of this into a book and don’t pare things down, these phrases become repetitive to the point of utter annoyance.
That said, it is rather difficult to effectively convey what we’ve got here in the form of a book, mostly because there is so much going on and so much overlap between (very short) chapters. And there’s no particular order to the book, either, since the blog format (there’s that word again) is really not much of a format at all, but, rather a dumping ground for ideas that spill out of the author’s head when the muse strikes, with no need for a relationship between blog posts that come before or after the post in question.
I’m making this sound much worse than it really is, but I’ve always been interested in questions of scope as it informs the way we look at the world. In fact, they fascinate me. But enough about the picture frame, let’s look at the picture.
A Year in the Country is intellectual goulash, meaning it’s messy, but very, very yummy. So here’s the recipe:
SOCIOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS
Underlying this whole work is a soft socialist narrative. It’s a fair look at the edge-lands of popular culture of the ‘60s through the early ‘80s. Having been a child at that time (born in Germany in ’69, graduated High School - in England - in ’87), I have memories of that time period (okay, well, not the ‘60s). Now I was raised in a military home. Dad was a veteran of the US Air Force for 26 years, 18 of which I was living at home. The first stirrings of politics I felt was during the Reagan years. Being young and dumb, I was a pretty staunch Reagan conservative. That has changed quite dramatically. Call me a Leftist, a snowflake, a democratic socialist, whatever. Times change and so have I.
And that’s the rub here. Times change. And when we look back on times, we tend to idealize or demonize what was happening “back then,” depending on our past and present proclivities. One thing I admire about this book is that it points out the seeming loss of the dream of a utopian society that was born in the ‘60s. The examples given herein show in movies and music, primarily, the decay of that dream as it is taking place. Such films as The Wicker Man and such television shows as Robin Redbreast are cited as examples of a Britain turning inward and re-examining the ‘60s view of an idealized Acadia, peeling back the pastoral glamor to look at the potentially ugly underside of rural life in the UK.
This idealization of rural life is posited by Rob Young as being the result of the Inclosure Acts from around 1760.
. . . common land was put into private ownership by government Inclosure Acts, forcing agricultural workers towards the newly expanding cities and factories . . . this displacement could be one of the roots of the British empathy with the countryside, with relics such as songs or texts from the world before this change having come to be revered as they seem to represent or connect to a pre-industrial “Fall” golden age.
Combine this with the fact that those who live in the cities were increasingly priced out of the market for open rural land, and one can see where the seeds of discontent were sown, seeds which started to grow in the ‘60s and ‘70s, but were ignored and left to dry up with the distraction of the glitzy ‘80s and Thatcher’s (and Reagans) Conservative government.
MUSIC
Much of A Year in the Country is taken up with the examination of music, particularly music that grazes in the interstices between folk and popular music. Another area that is examined in great detail is the rather esoteric realm of electronic music that is intentionally anachronistic and obscure.
For those of my age and older who lived in the UK for any amount of time, you will recall the ubiquity of bizarre background music on certain TV shows (I am talking primarily of British TV here, though there was a touch of this sort of thing in the US on some television commercials that I vaguely recall) and the strange electronic compositions that were sometimes used in the introduction of shows, accompanied by some abstract geometric shapes coming together to form the logo of some affiliate of the BBC or other government-sponsored sub-agencies who were responsible for producing educational shows, in particular. I suppose public television in the US had some of this, as well.
Believe it or not, there is an entire subgenre of music of this type (or derivative of it) that is being composed and released today. I’m listening to some right now as I type up this review. I quite like it. Your mileage may vary.
Again, this is rife with political implications. The music was primarily composed and performed by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Given the tension between the BBC and conservative political elements at the time, one can see why this music would now, in this day, be lauded as anthemic, “left-of-center” (augh, that phrase!), socially-conscious, publicly-owned music.
And here we intersect with that slippery notion of hauntology, that our present remembers the past as we want to remember it, rather than as it really was. In fact, the whole notion that we can even possibly remember the past as it really was is called into question. We idealize, we decontextualize, we recontextualize, and we celebrate a past that never was, longing for the faint wisps of a dream from our childhood-that-never-was.
But isn’t there something wonderful in this? I listen to a lot of what’s called “retrowave” or “synthwave” music – music that emulates the synthesizer music of the ‘80s, but is being composed now. I admit that when I allow myself the luxury of listening to this music, it “takes me back”. But back to what? Let’s face facts: Middle school sucked. I hated it. I tried to kill myself once at that time. My home was a bit of a wreck. I self-medicated to cope. Really, it was full of all kinds of suckitude. And yet, there were happy, good times, as well. When I listen to this music, it brings me back to the good times, not because those songs were real when I was young – they hadn’t even been written – but because it emulates the ideal ‘80s, the storybook Breakfast Club ending, where everyone is cool and “in this together”. This idea only exists in my head.
Isn’t that the wonder of imagination? That it can, over time, heal the soul, if we let it? Call it a survival mechanism, call it escapism, call it what you will – it works for me, and makes my present that much more bearable.
MOVIES
I am not much of a cinephile. I hardly ever watch TV any more. Outside of the occasional show that I come to love (Hello, Stranger Things!), I really haven’t watched much since, oh, about 1987 or so. And when people start conversing about actors and movies, I’m out. I just don’t have the brainspace to remember all the actors. I’m much more into reading and experiences than TV or movies.
When I do watch movies, I tend to have strange tastes. I love experimental film. Give me The Brother’s Quay and David Lynch all day long.
A Year in the Country gave enough references to strange (sometimes experimental) movies and TV to last me a very, very long time. You can take a look at the website to see those pieces referred to in the book. I don’t have any kind of exhaustive analysis of the analysis of the role of movies and television in this book, but you’ll find said analysis interwoven throughout. The last two chapters on “Zardoz, Phase IV, and Beyond the Black Rainbow: Seeking the Future in Secret Rooms From the Past and Psychedelic Cinematic Corners” and “Winstanley, A Field in England, and The English Civil War Part II: Reflections on Turning Points and Moments When Anything Could Happen” are particularly compelling.
PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY
One of my favorite things to do as a child and, particularly as a teenager, was to explore. I had the luxury of living outside of my native country for a good portion of my life. About ten of my first eighteen years of life were spent outside of the US. And since I lived in an age where bicycle helmets were optional, no one could call me on my cell phone, and parents believed that it was good for children to get outdoors, I was able to wander quite a bit. From World War II bunkers on the Italian coast to Roman pillars in far-flung artichoke fields to abandoned churches to a 12th-Century English priory that we broke and entered numerous times (ah, the parties we had in the wine cellar and the secret passageways we discovered!), I saw much that kids in the US didn’t get to see, and many of them never will, which is unfortunate. I count myself lucky.
One thing that I learned in Europe is that the sheer age of a place seems to hold a mystique, a “spirit,” if you will. The priory mentioned above was supposedly haunted, and I saw and heard some strange things there. Granted, me and my mates had been drinking a little and were probably over-excitable, since we had illegally broken into a “protected” (not very well) historical site. But I swear there were some things that were just plain unexplainable and seemed to arise from something beyond nervousness, a buzz, and coincidence.
Keep in mind that, while overseas, most of my time was spent living on a US Air Base (except in Italy, where we went native and lived in downtown Brindisi). I was surrounded by the Cold War. That war was my Dad’s business (the stories I can tell – well, the ones he told me before he died), and the accoutrements were all around. At the bases I lived at in Italy and England were antenna arrays called “Elephant Cages,” for example.
Now that the Cold War has ended (though I suspect round two is around the corner), many of these structures were left derelict. Since the threat of nuclear annihilation has subsided (for now), there are old, decommissioned structures that remain as a sort of temporal signpost for the war-that-never-was. Here again we slip into the realms of hauntology.
These empty shells where (classified) activity was frantic and fearful exude a sort of past paranoia for a coming apocalypse that didn’t come. But one wonders if the sense of fear that must have drenched such places didn’t rub off a bit, a’la Nigel Kneal’s The Stone Tapes (also mentioned repeatedly in this book). For that matter, since I’m referring to The Stone Tapes, couldn’t any place, any structure, be saturated with the psychic echoes of the past? This is the whole notion behind haunted houses, so there’s some precedent for this in the popular imagination, at least.
This idea of places having a certain “spirit,” combined with the earlier-mentioned flux between population centers from rural to urban areas (and the desire to get back to an idealized rural life again) speaks to me. Here’s why: I lived on the edge of several worlds as a child. I was mostly a loner, and I loved to explore those “edge places” between the city and the country, when suburbs were much less of a soft boundary between the two environments. I recall being fascinated by abandoned lots on the edges of farm fields, for example. While in England, a few of my English mates and I explored an abandoned, shutter-boarded school on the edge of a town (I can’t remember which town, though it was likely in Bedfordshire). You could stand with one foot on the cracked asphalt of a playground and another foot on a farmer’s field that stretched off into the hills, as far as the eye could see. I admit that I loved these interstitial spots, where one could almost feel a break in the psychogeography of a place. Furthermore, I was an American living overseas for most of my childhood – caught between two worlds. And even when I was in the US, I felt the clear distinction between civilian kids and us military “brats”. I find myself comfortable in that uncomfortable space between social circles. Which has, ironically, helped this self-avowed loner to learn to reach out to different people in different ways, according to their likes and needs. I am, if nothing else, a chameleon.
Or, at least, I remember being that way. Now that I’ve settled into life a bit more, my parents have both passed away (earlier this year), my children are adults, and I’ve lived in the same location for twenty-odd years now, perhaps I’ve lost my touch. I hope not. I seem to be able to take two sides of a given argument and at least give fair thoughts to both (though I have my opinions and am not afraid to state them, bluntly, at times – c.f. Twitter). I don’t really ever want to lose the magic of being on the edge between two worlds, whether sociological, cultural, or geographical. I’m comfortable in the spaces in-between. Maybe that’s because I have two or more potential escape routes!
LAST THOUGHTS
This whole idea of hauntology has, pardon the horrible “dad pun”, haunted me since I’ve discovered it. My memory is not what it used to be, and I recently watched my father lose his capacity for memory in the months before he died. My biological aunt, my father’s twin, has suffered from dementia for some years now. Guess I have something to look forward to. In the meantime, my emotional rear-view-mirror has become a bit idealized. Yes, I remember some heartache, but the good times are more vivid in my memory than the bad times: Being with friends, discovering the world, falling in love, the opening of new vistas (visually, intellectually, emotionally). There is a certain sadness, some grieving for lost friends and relationships, for permanent changes to places I once knew and loved. But I embrace that grief. It’s a part of who I am. I don’t wallow in it, but I embrace it. Maybe I’m just a nostalgic old fool in love with his own imagination. If so, fine. Leave me to it. I’m not living in the past, but I’m coming to peace with it and with the changes that come from its loss and mis-memory. In Stephen Prince’s words:
. . . we are possibly going through a period where there is a sense of loss of loss. This is a side effect of the contemporary endless and precise archiving and replication techniques which are available via digital technology, which is in contrast to previous eras . . .
So, let the past decay! I don’t much care about the idea of the “true” past as a whole (and I’m a historian, by academic training). My memory of the past is truth, for me. And it’s quite enough, loss and all.
That said, it is rather difficult to effectively convey what we’ve got here in the form of a book, mostly because there is so much going on and so much overlap between (very short) chapters. And there’s no particular order to the book, either, since the blog format (there’s that word again) is really not much of a format at all, but, rather a dumping ground for ideas that spill out of the author’s head when the muse strikes, with no need for a relationship between blog posts that come before or after the post in question.
I’m making this sound much worse than it really is, but I’ve always been interested in questions of scope as it informs the way we look at the world. In fact, they fascinate me. But enough about the picture frame, let’s look at the picture.
A Year in the Country is intellectual goulash, meaning it’s messy, but very, very yummy. So here’s the recipe:
SOCIOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS
Underlying this whole work is a soft socialist narrative. It’s a fair look at the edge-lands of popular culture of the ‘60s through the early ‘80s. Having been a child at that time (born in Germany in ’69, graduated High School - in England - in ’87), I have memories of that time period (okay, well, not the ‘60s). Now I was raised in a military home. Dad was a veteran of the US Air Force for 26 years, 18 of which I was living at home. The first stirrings of politics I felt was during the Reagan years. Being young and dumb, I was a pretty staunch Reagan conservative. That has changed quite dramatically. Call me a Leftist, a snowflake, a democratic socialist, whatever. Times change and so have I.
And that’s the rub here. Times change. And when we look back on times, we tend to idealize or demonize what was happening “back then,” depending on our past and present proclivities. One thing I admire about this book is that it points out the seeming loss of the dream of a utopian society that was born in the ‘60s. The examples given herein show in movies and music, primarily, the decay of that dream as it is taking place. Such films as The Wicker Man and such television shows as Robin Redbreast are cited as examples of a Britain turning inward and re-examining the ‘60s view of an idealized Acadia, peeling back the pastoral glamor to look at the potentially ugly underside of rural life in the UK.
This idealization of rural life is posited by Rob Young as being the result of the Inclosure Acts from around 1760.
. . . common land was put into private ownership by government Inclosure Acts, forcing agricultural workers towards the newly expanding cities and factories . . . this displacement could be one of the roots of the British empathy with the countryside, with relics such as songs or texts from the world before this change having come to be revered as they seem to represent or connect to a pre-industrial “Fall” golden age.
Combine this with the fact that those who live in the cities were increasingly priced out of the market for open rural land, and one can see where the seeds of discontent were sown, seeds which started to grow in the ‘60s and ‘70s, but were ignored and left to dry up with the distraction of the glitzy ‘80s and Thatcher’s (and Reagans) Conservative government.
MUSIC
Much of A Year in the Country is taken up with the examination of music, particularly music that grazes in the interstices between folk and popular music. Another area that is examined in great detail is the rather esoteric realm of electronic music that is intentionally anachronistic and obscure.
For those of my age and older who lived in the UK for any amount of time, you will recall the ubiquity of bizarre background music on certain TV shows (I am talking primarily of British TV here, though there was a touch of this sort of thing in the US on some television commercials that I vaguely recall) and the strange electronic compositions that were sometimes used in the introduction of shows, accompanied by some abstract geometric shapes coming together to form the logo of some affiliate of the BBC or other government-sponsored sub-agencies who were responsible for producing educational shows, in particular. I suppose public television in the US had some of this, as well.
Believe it or not, there is an entire subgenre of music of this type (or derivative of it) that is being composed and released today. I’m listening to some right now as I type up this review. I quite like it. Your mileage may vary.
Again, this is rife with political implications. The music was primarily composed and performed by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Given the tension between the BBC and conservative political elements at the time, one can see why this music would now, in this day, be lauded as anthemic, “left-of-center” (augh, that phrase!), socially-conscious, publicly-owned music.
And here we intersect with that slippery notion of hauntology, that our present remembers the past as we want to remember it, rather than as it really was. In fact, the whole notion that we can even possibly remember the past as it really was is called into question. We idealize, we decontextualize, we recontextualize, and we celebrate a past that never was, longing for the faint wisps of a dream from our childhood-that-never-was.
But isn’t there something wonderful in this? I listen to a lot of what’s called “retrowave” or “synthwave” music – music that emulates the synthesizer music of the ‘80s, but is being composed now. I admit that when I allow myself the luxury of listening to this music, it “takes me back”. But back to what? Let’s face facts: Middle school sucked. I hated it. I tried to kill myself once at that time. My home was a bit of a wreck. I self-medicated to cope. Really, it was full of all kinds of suckitude. And yet, there were happy, good times, as well. When I listen to this music, it brings me back to the good times, not because those songs were real when I was young – they hadn’t even been written – but because it emulates the ideal ‘80s, the storybook Breakfast Club ending, where everyone is cool and “in this together”. This idea only exists in my head.
Isn’t that the wonder of imagination? That it can, over time, heal the soul, if we let it? Call it a survival mechanism, call it escapism, call it what you will – it works for me, and makes my present that much more bearable.
MOVIES
I am not much of a cinephile. I hardly ever watch TV any more. Outside of the occasional show that I come to love (Hello, Stranger Things!), I really haven’t watched much since, oh, about 1987 or so. And when people start conversing about actors and movies, I’m out. I just don’t have the brainspace to remember all the actors. I’m much more into reading and experiences than TV or movies.
When I do watch movies, I tend to have strange tastes. I love experimental film. Give me The Brother’s Quay and David Lynch all day long.
A Year in the Country gave enough references to strange (sometimes experimental) movies and TV to last me a very, very long time. You can take a look at the website to see those pieces referred to in the book. I don’t have any kind of exhaustive analysis of the analysis of the role of movies and television in this book, but you’ll find said analysis interwoven throughout. The last two chapters on “Zardoz, Phase IV, and Beyond the Black Rainbow: Seeking the Future in Secret Rooms From the Past and Psychedelic Cinematic Corners” and “Winstanley, A Field in England, and The English Civil War Part II: Reflections on Turning Points and Moments When Anything Could Happen” are particularly compelling.
PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY
One of my favorite things to do as a child and, particularly as a teenager, was to explore. I had the luxury of living outside of my native country for a good portion of my life. About ten of my first eighteen years of life were spent outside of the US. And since I lived in an age where bicycle helmets were optional, no one could call me on my cell phone, and parents believed that it was good for children to get outdoors, I was able to wander quite a bit. From World War II bunkers on the Italian coast to Roman pillars in far-flung artichoke fields to abandoned churches to a 12th-Century English priory that we broke and entered numerous times (ah, the parties we had in the wine cellar and the secret passageways we discovered!), I saw much that kids in the US didn’t get to see, and many of them never will, which is unfortunate. I count myself lucky.
One thing that I learned in Europe is that the sheer age of a place seems to hold a mystique, a “spirit,” if you will. The priory mentioned above was supposedly haunted, and I saw and heard some strange things there. Granted, me and my mates had been drinking a little and were probably over-excitable, since we had illegally broken into a “protected” (not very well) historical site. But I swear there were some things that were just plain unexplainable and seemed to arise from something beyond nervousness, a buzz, and coincidence.
Keep in mind that, while overseas, most of my time was spent living on a US Air Base (except in Italy, where we went native and lived in downtown Brindisi). I was surrounded by the Cold War. That war was my Dad’s business (the stories I can tell – well, the ones he told me before he died), and the accoutrements were all around. At the bases I lived at in Italy and England were antenna arrays called “Elephant Cages,” for example.
Now that the Cold War has ended (though I suspect round two is around the corner), many of these structures were left derelict. Since the threat of nuclear annihilation has subsided (for now), there are old, decommissioned structures that remain as a sort of temporal signpost for the war-that-never-was. Here again we slip into the realms of hauntology.
These empty shells where (classified) activity was frantic and fearful exude a sort of past paranoia for a coming apocalypse that didn’t come. But one wonders if the sense of fear that must have drenched such places didn’t rub off a bit, a’la Nigel Kneal’s The Stone Tapes (also mentioned repeatedly in this book). For that matter, since I’m referring to The Stone Tapes, couldn’t any place, any structure, be saturated with the psychic echoes of the past? This is the whole notion behind haunted houses, so there’s some precedent for this in the popular imagination, at least.
This idea of places having a certain “spirit,” combined with the earlier-mentioned flux between population centers from rural to urban areas (and the desire to get back to an idealized rural life again) speaks to me. Here’s why: I lived on the edge of several worlds as a child. I was mostly a loner, and I loved to explore those “edge places” between the city and the country, when suburbs were much less of a soft boundary between the two environments. I recall being fascinated by abandoned lots on the edges of farm fields, for example. While in England, a few of my English mates and I explored an abandoned, shutter-boarded school on the edge of a town (I can’t remember which town, though it was likely in Bedfordshire). You could stand with one foot on the cracked asphalt of a playground and another foot on a farmer’s field that stretched off into the hills, as far as the eye could see. I admit that I loved these interstitial spots, where one could almost feel a break in the psychogeography of a place. Furthermore, I was an American living overseas for most of my childhood – caught between two worlds. And even when I was in the US, I felt the clear distinction between civilian kids and us military “brats”. I find myself comfortable in that uncomfortable space between social circles. Which has, ironically, helped this self-avowed loner to learn to reach out to different people in different ways, according to their likes and needs. I am, if nothing else, a chameleon.
Or, at least, I remember being that way. Now that I’ve settled into life a bit more, my parents have both passed away (earlier this year), my children are adults, and I’ve lived in the same location for twenty-odd years now, perhaps I’ve lost my touch. I hope not. I seem to be able to take two sides of a given argument and at least give fair thoughts to both (though I have my opinions and am not afraid to state them, bluntly, at times – c.f. Twitter). I don’t really ever want to lose the magic of being on the edge between two worlds, whether sociological, cultural, or geographical. I’m comfortable in the spaces in-between. Maybe that’s because I have two or more potential escape routes!
LAST THOUGHTS
This whole idea of hauntology has, pardon the horrible “dad pun”, haunted me since I’ve discovered it. My memory is not what it used to be, and I recently watched my father lose his capacity for memory in the months before he died. My biological aunt, my father’s twin, has suffered from dementia for some years now. Guess I have something to look forward to. In the meantime, my emotional rear-view-mirror has become a bit idealized. Yes, I remember some heartache, but the good times are more vivid in my memory than the bad times: Being with friends, discovering the world, falling in love, the opening of new vistas (visually, intellectually, emotionally). There is a certain sadness, some grieving for lost friends and relationships, for permanent changes to places I once knew and loved. But I embrace that grief. It’s a part of who I am. I don’t wallow in it, but I embrace it. Maybe I’m just a nostalgic old fool in love with his own imagination. If so, fine. Leave me to it. I’m not living in the past, but I’m coming to peace with it and with the changes that come from its loss and mis-memory. In Stephen Prince’s words:
. . . we are possibly going through a period where there is a sense of loss of loss. This is a side effect of the contemporary endless and precise archiving and replication techniques which are available via digital technology, which is in contrast to previous eras . . .
So, let the past decay! I don’t much care about the idea of the “true” past as a whole (and I’m a historian, by academic training). My memory of the past is truth, for me. And it’s quite enough, loss and all.
March 5, 2018
An exhaustively (and on occasion exhaustingly) deep dive into pop culture’s portrayal of the uncanny, the arcane, the paranormal, lost and imagined utopias, abandoned structures, folk horror, sci-fi both chilling and cheesy, analogue electronics, tv, film, art, books, and so much more. Thorough, insightful, academic. A pure and singleminded obsession with futurist nostalgia. I recommend reading in installments rather than all at once.
November 2, 2018
Like a map to a half-suspected territory, this compelling book of essays explores a contemporary English movement that I only knew through a vague understanding of "folk horror" as a film genre. Turns out there is much more lurking under the rich label of "hauntology." The term is a portmanteau of haunt and ontology and means, roughly, at least in this usage, a nostalgia or a yearning for a future that was expected but never arrived. This book is the distillation of a website that addresses the elements of art and culture that reflect the sense of an unrealized England, lost because it was overwhelmed by either modernity or post-modernity. Elements include offshoots of folk music, old British television fantasies, especially the works of Nigel Kneale, photographic collections of venerable customs or the edgelands beyond the towns, and a loose genre of horror films, best exemplified by the original The Wicker Man. As unlikely as the amalgam sounds, some beautiful art results from it. I've only scratched the surface of the music but I already admire many of the films that tap the ethos and have a better appreciation of concepts that underlie them.
Prince's writing is itself rather haunting, like a manifesto written in a trance, and his depthless affection for his material shines in every word. I fully intended to make these essays last a few weeks but could not stop myself from reading them. As a result, I have a dozen or so films to track down, some old TV series to find, and an entire sub-genre of music to sample.
Prince's writing is itself rather haunting, like a manifesto written in a trance, and his depthless affection for his material shines in every word. I fully intended to make these essays last a few weeks but could not stop myself from reading them. As a result, I have a dozen or so films to track down, some old TV series to find, and an entire sub-genre of music to sample.
August 9, 2018
This is a very personal account of a niche topic for better and for worse– upon completion I know more about ‘hauntology’ than I shall ever need! The author’s passion on this (and associated topics including sub-folk scenes and 60’s/ 70’s horror & dystopian fiction) shines through so brightly. The book itself sets a pace it doesn’t manage to maintain – perhaps a failure of concept over content, and you could probably have a much tighter 180 page book with better editing.
I am glad to have purchased it and read it as I stumbled across the ‘Year in the Country’ project via the ‘A Quietened Bunker’ album – and have really enjoyed the variety of music and artwork produced from this project. This book has added to my understanding of these and also pointed me into the direction of more music, movies and art in these genres that I may enjoy. If you enjoy UK Hauntology or the whimsy of British ‘countryside folk tales then this book – especially the first half – is worth checking out!
Also it references Little Chef. What is not to love about that?
I am glad to have purchased it and read it as I stumbled across the ‘Year in the Country’ project via the ‘A Quietened Bunker’ album – and have really enjoyed the variety of music and artwork produced from this project. This book has added to my understanding of these and also pointed me into the direction of more music, movies and art in these genres that I may enjoy. If you enjoy UK Hauntology or the whimsy of British ‘countryside folk tales then this book – especially the first half – is worth checking out!
Also it references Little Chef. What is not to love about that?
January 16, 2022
Please don't encourage people to self-publish their blogs
February 18, 2019
This book and the entire Year in the Country accompanying blog and mix CDs are an exploration in taste. I’m getting the sense that Mr. Prince and a generation of UK writers/listeners (approximately 35-55 years old) are coming to terms with their 70s childhoods – and that a lot of what was going on in the UK in those years “haunts” (pun intended) the present. With the internet making things forgotten or hard to obtain within reach again, this opens up avenues of exploration not possible 15-20 years ago.
Mr. Prince’s main touchstones are all things hauntological and by extension folk horror revival-esque: The Wicker Man seems to be the biggest one here – if you only watch one film mentioned in the entire book, it seems that The Wicker Man is it. (The other two members of the folk horror triumvirate – Blood on Satan’s Claw (too pervy) and Witchfinder General/The Conqueror Worm (too disturbingly violent) feature to a lesser extent – with both being actual period films rather than the plot line of Wicker Man - wherein the present is disrupted by rituals of the past – allowing a sense of the hauntological to seep in before Prince, Mark Fisher, Simon Reynolds, et al found that there was a subterranean connection between library music, hypnogogic pop, freak folk, electronic music, cosmic horror, weird fiction, BBC childrens’ shows, British television from the 70s in general, etc that was coming through in the music and movies of the present.)
I enjoyed that Prince let his own intuition guide him down whatever path he was wandering that week – be it Rob Young’s Electric Eden (or David Keenan’s England’s Hidden Reverse or Jeanette Leech’s Seasons They Change), Nigel Kneale, Ghost Box Records (really ground zero for all things hauntological – even the contemporaneous offshoots – Pye Corner Audio, Moon Wiring Club, Broadcast – have released something on Ghost Box) – Prince makes a interesting point about what could have been – the hope of some sort of almost communistic utopian world was promised in the glitches of the 70s (or in the main thrust of 60s acid-drenched idealism) and now those ghosts haunt certain strains of music and movies.
I love The Duke of Burgundy, Mandy, A Field in England, Kill List – Peter Strickland, Ben Wheatley, and Panos Cosmatos mine the wells Prince is exploring here. I would bring up Robert Eggers The Witch as being a particularly ripe candidate in the American strain of folk horror revival – it hits all of the bases quite well. And then the lines from Boards of Canada (I do feel that much of Ghost Box and its off-shoots sound like Boards, especially Geogaddi and Music has the Rights to Children) and The Caretaker with their warped samples and heavy beats (an American counterpoint would be DJ Shadow in the 90s – though his samples seem to place him closer to say Quentin Tarantino rather than The Wicker Man.). I’m at a bit of a loss because those BBC children’s shows were not part of my upbringing so maybe the frisson of nostalgia doesn’t quite resonate for me as much as these journalists. I like the visuals, the moods.
Bottom line is this – the book presents so many titles that anyone reading it would then have months of music, movies, and books to explore. I know I do now. Side note – there’s a brief mention of library music’s lack of commercial consideration allowed its creators to truly travel down adventurous avenues. They never had to sell out per se, which is why it is so strange and niche. I would opine that a similar strain happened after the Nirvana alternative explosion when the more obscure proponents of college rock or what have you felt that experimentation was cool. Sure, Tortoise eventually became “post-rock” and maybe sold some records, but that initial burst of “let’s just make what we want” seemed to be encouraged by the gods of commercial culture. The floodgates have opened again with Bandcamp but now the well is deep and daunting that it may scare off the masses who need these avenues to feel less alone. Or something like that.
Mr. Prince’s main touchstones are all things hauntological and by extension folk horror revival-esque: The Wicker Man seems to be the biggest one here – if you only watch one film mentioned in the entire book, it seems that The Wicker Man is it. (The other two members of the folk horror triumvirate – Blood on Satan’s Claw (too pervy) and Witchfinder General/The Conqueror Worm (too disturbingly violent) feature to a lesser extent – with both being actual period films rather than the plot line of Wicker Man - wherein the present is disrupted by rituals of the past – allowing a sense of the hauntological to seep in before Prince, Mark Fisher, Simon Reynolds, et al found that there was a subterranean connection between library music, hypnogogic pop, freak folk, electronic music, cosmic horror, weird fiction, BBC childrens’ shows, British television from the 70s in general, etc that was coming through in the music and movies of the present.)
I enjoyed that Prince let his own intuition guide him down whatever path he was wandering that week – be it Rob Young’s Electric Eden (or David Keenan’s England’s Hidden Reverse or Jeanette Leech’s Seasons They Change), Nigel Kneale, Ghost Box Records (really ground zero for all things hauntological – even the contemporaneous offshoots – Pye Corner Audio, Moon Wiring Club, Broadcast – have released something on Ghost Box) – Prince makes a interesting point about what could have been – the hope of some sort of almost communistic utopian world was promised in the glitches of the 70s (or in the main thrust of 60s acid-drenched idealism) and now those ghosts haunt certain strains of music and movies.
I love The Duke of Burgundy, Mandy, A Field in England, Kill List – Peter Strickland, Ben Wheatley, and Panos Cosmatos mine the wells Prince is exploring here. I would bring up Robert Eggers The Witch as being a particularly ripe candidate in the American strain of folk horror revival – it hits all of the bases quite well. And then the lines from Boards of Canada (I do feel that much of Ghost Box and its off-shoots sound like Boards, especially Geogaddi and Music has the Rights to Children) and The Caretaker with their warped samples and heavy beats (an American counterpoint would be DJ Shadow in the 90s – though his samples seem to place him closer to say Quentin Tarantino rather than The Wicker Man.). I’m at a bit of a loss because those BBC children’s shows were not part of my upbringing so maybe the frisson of nostalgia doesn’t quite resonate for me as much as these journalists. I like the visuals, the moods.
Bottom line is this – the book presents so many titles that anyone reading it would then have months of music, movies, and books to explore. I know I do now. Side note – there’s a brief mention of library music’s lack of commercial consideration allowed its creators to truly travel down adventurous avenues. They never had to sell out per se, which is why it is so strange and niche. I would opine that a similar strain happened after the Nirvana alternative explosion when the more obscure proponents of college rock or what have you felt that experimentation was cool. Sure, Tortoise eventually became “post-rock” and maybe sold some records, but that initial burst of “let’s just make what we want” seemed to be encouraged by the gods of commercial culture. The floodgates have opened again with Bandcamp but now the well is deep and daunting that it may scare off the masses who need these avenues to feel less alone. Or something like that.
April 30, 2022
A Year In The Country: Wandering Through Spectral Fields is a well researched and highly detailed compilation of essays on pieces of media in the Cold War and 1970s periods and how they relate to the concepts of hauntology, otherly pastoralism and folk culture. If you have knowledge of the period in question and the pieces of media being discussed, this will be a highly rewarding read. However, as was the case with my reading experience, not having this base knowledge can make many of the chapters seem repetitive, in both the analysis and the comparisons to other pieces of media, as you are unable to completely access the analysis made. It is apparent that these pieces were originally made for a blog-post format and not for publication in a book. It was an interesting read, especially when the chapter was focused on a piece of media I had already considered, but probably needed a few tweaks and edits to its format and content in order to be fully accessible for newcomers to the subject.
June 16, 2021
Although Prince’s choice of topics and enthusiasm for the subject is commendable, this collection would have appreciated a decent editor. Each chapter/piece works well as stand-alone blog post but there is a lot repetition and recycling of ideas for it to work as a book. There’s a good 200 page anthology here amongst this near 350 page tome.
Some of the ideas and analysis are a little sixth form at times and there are some glaring omissions, (Trembling Bells, Wolf People, My Life In The Bush of Ghosts, Julian Cope, Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood, Alan Garner’s more recent @Thursbitch) and an over reliance on some references (Wicker Man, Electric Eden, Gather in The Mushrooms, Ghost Box to name a few…).
That said, it has brought together, and pointed me in the direction of, some stuff, mostly films, that I wouldn’t have discovered otherwise.
Some of the ideas and analysis are a little sixth form at times and there are some glaring omissions, (Trembling Bells, Wolf People, My Life In The Bush of Ghosts, Julian Cope, Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood, Alan Garner’s more recent @Thursbitch) and an over reliance on some references (Wicker Man, Electric Eden, Gather in The Mushrooms, Ghost Box to name a few…).
That said, it has brought together, and pointed me in the direction of, some stuff, mostly films, that I wouldn’t have discovered otherwise.
February 1, 2019
Intriguing book. Full of comments about the half-remembered or falsely remembered past which we carry around from childhood. Various cultish films, books, TV programmes, pieces of music, even disused bunkers are discussed and analysed. I'm not sure why these things still have appeal, but I was drawn in.
April 16, 2021
A near perfect book upon the subject of yesteryear. It took me down memory lane about certain tv children programs and movies. Large pieces upon The Wicker Man we're brilliant. The pieces on music have got me jumping onto Spotify to find them. The best band mentions has to be The Advisory Circle. Love their albums, has a real 70's vibe to it.
November 25, 2018
I bought this because it covered so many other topics that interested me. By the time I reached the end, that list was approximately three times as long as when I started.
May 12, 2019
Hauntology, eldritch, folk - repeat ad nauseam. Should have just gone and read more Mark Fisher...
November 25, 2024
More an encyclopaedia of hauntology than a critical work as such - but already introduced me to plenty of new texts under that theme and will no doubt be a useful reference in years to come!
October 3, 2018
Several years ago (roughly around 2007-2013) a small group of (usually) British bloggers were devoted to a particular take on Derrida's concept of hauntology. Theirs was a particularly niche interest (probably even for Brits), but their posts were often interesting, sometimes quite delightful, and they had a way of evoking a particular nostalgia for those who were young anywhere between the late 1960s and the very early 1980s. Their deep dives were into British pop culture of that time, but even if you were American and had only a limited familiarity at best with the books and toys and tv serials they were discussing, their blogs could still be absorbing and quite enjoyable. And thanks to YouTube, it was sometimes possible to find that BBC serial a blogger might be reminiscing about: "The Children of Green Knowe," "The Owl Service," "The Stone Tape," the fourth and last "Quatermass" series of 1979, or the series of dramatizations of works by M. R. James called "A Ghost Story for Christmas." (I'm not sure any of these ever made it to the States, so my main point of reference for this sort of thing from my own childhood were those particular serials from '70s era Doctor Who that veered into the especially weird or unusual. If you were lucky your PBS station would show DW back in the early to mid-'80s during the less-watched parts of their weekly schedule.)
A frequent point made by these bloggers was how profoundly weird and even unsettling the content of the BBC could be back then, particularly in programs intended for children. The more one read their blogs the easier it became to understand where creators like Warren Ellis and Grant Morrison may have found their earliest inspirations and acquired their sensibilities. (Ellis in particular has long acknowledged this community of the hauntologically inclined.)
All of which is to say, A Year in the Country captures the absorbing and enjoyable essence of one of those very few blogs that continues to delve into this sort of thing. Of course, being a collection of blog posts, the content here is often repetitive, so it's not something to try reading straight through. Better to treat it as a second or third book, something to dip into while taking a break from the main book you're reading--much like how you would have read it as a blog. As I write this, Prince has been revisiting each of the chapters of the book on his blog and providing
the photographs that he would have liked to include in it. But the book is still very much worth having because the web has proven to be all too ephemeral, and this is a rare opportunity to preserve a very particular kind of nostalgia in the safe harbor of your book shelf.
Not for everyone, but if you're a particular kind of Gen Xer, this book may really be for you.
A frequent point made by these bloggers was how profoundly weird and even unsettling the content of the BBC could be back then, particularly in programs intended for children. The more one read their blogs the easier it became to understand where creators like Warren Ellis and Grant Morrison may have found their earliest inspirations and acquired their sensibilities. (Ellis in particular has long acknowledged this community of the hauntologically inclined.)
All of which is to say, A Year in the Country captures the absorbing and enjoyable essence of one of those very few blogs that continues to delve into this sort of thing. Of course, being a collection of blog posts, the content here is often repetitive, so it's not something to try reading straight through. Better to treat it as a second or third book, something to dip into while taking a break from the main book you're reading--much like how you would have read it as a blog. As I write this, Prince has been revisiting each of the chapters of the book on his blog and providing
the photographs that he would have liked to include in it. But the book is still very much worth having because the web has proven to be all too ephemeral, and this is a rare opportunity to preserve a very particular kind of nostalgia in the safe harbor of your book shelf.
Not for everyone, but if you're a particular kind of Gen Xer, this book may really be for you.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews