A Year In The Country: Lost Transmissions: Dystopic Visions, Alternate Realities, Paranormal Quests and Exploratory Electronica

By Stephen Prince

Lost Transmissions weaves amongst brambled pathways to take in the haunted soundscapes of electronica, the rise of the occult in the 1970s, cinema and television’s dystopian dreamscapes and hauntological work which creates and gives a glimpse into parallel worlds. It is a recording of a personal journey that delves amongst both the esoteric fringes and mainstream of culture, and which at times holds a shadowed scrying mirror up to the modern world and some of its ills, while also reflecting visions of a hopeful future in its depths.

Alongside other experimenters in electronic sound the book explores Boards of Canada’s invoking of “the past inside the present”; Paul Weller’s visiting of Ghost Box Records’ elsewhere universe; work by Cosey Fanni Tutti, Hannah Peel and the reformed Radiophonic Workshop, and their collaborations across time with electronic music pioneer Delia Derbyshire; Dominik Scherrer and Natasha Khan’s summoning of “pastoral spook” via a hidden language of angels; and takes a trip in the company of fairground and rural ghosts conjured up on records released by Castles in Space.

Alongside these it examines the paranormal and “worlds beyond” via the semi-lost supernatural-orientated television series Leap in the Dark which included work by Alan Garner and David Rudkin, Sharron Kraus’ contemporary investigations into the preternatural and the conjuring of modern-day phantasms in Luciana Haill’s artwork.

The book also includes an intertwined consideration of the “deluxe dystopias” that can be found in films such as Rollerball and Andrew Niccol’s Gattaca and prescient views of the future’s past & media collusion in film and television including Nigel Kneale’s work and the overlooked corners of science fiction.

• Language: English
• Publisher: A Year In The Country
• Release date: Jun 29, 2023
• ISBN: 9781916095281

Book preview

A Year In The Country: Lost Transmissions

Dystopic Visions, Alternate Realities, Paranormal Quests and Exploratory Electronica

Stephen Prince

A Year In The Country

Copyright © 2023 Stephen Prince

ISBN: 9781916095281

All rights reserved.  No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic,  mechanical,  photocopying,  recording or otherwise) without permission from the publishers.

www.ayearinthecountry.co.uk

Copyright Stephen Prince,  2023

The right of Stephen Prince to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright,  Designs & Patent Act 1988.

Edited by Suzy Prince

Cover image and typesetting by

A Year In The Country/Stephen Prince.

Other A Year In The Country work by by Stephen Prince:

Non-fiction books:

A Year In The Country: Wandering Through Spectral Fields

A Year In The Country: Straying From The Pathways

A Year In The Country: Cathode Ray And Celluloid Hinterlands

Novellas:

The Corn Mother

The Shildam Hall Tapes

Artwork book:

A Year In The Country: The Marks Upon The Land

Albums:

The Corn Mother: Night Wraiths

The Shildam Hall Tapes: The Falling Reverse

Albums and EPs (working as A Year In The Country):

Airwaves: Songs From The Sentinels

No More Unto The Dance

Undercurrents

The Darkened Chamber

Introduction

I

f I sit down and think about it, part of my job, or my version of my job, as a writer of non-fiction, is to highlight and connect often quite disparate seeming areas of culture. I don’t have all the answers, and I can’t always provide easy-to-walk-through pathways from one to the other, but hopefully by bringing them together I can help to guide both myself and others on a journey of exploration and provide signposts or starting points for wandering through the spectral fields of interconnected bountiful cultural pastures.

And that’s what the A Year In The Country non-fiction books and posts on the project’s site are at their heart: journeys of exploration, of seeking and hopefully finding.

Along which lines…

In 2019 I began to write and edit a book, but it resisted me at every step. Not the writing, I did a fair bit of that, but it didn’t seem to want to go out into the world. I created the cover design which featured semi-hidden radio broadcast towers swirling in cloud, and eventually after several years the title became Lost Transmissions and it became this book.

Why Lost Transmissions? I think in part this is because for quite a while it was a form of lost transmission: one that had been recorded but never broadcast, but also because in some ways it connected to a central tenet of hauntology, that of a yearning for lost progressive futures. But just as with this book and its transmissions, hopefully they aren’t so much lost as merely having had their broadcast dates postponed.

And while this introduction may make it seem that Lost Transmissions is perhaps more overtly political when compared with previous A Year In The Country non-fiction books etc, the book as a whole is not intended to be an overly prescriptive or a diatribe-like exercise in stand-taking, but rather has been created and is a reflection on, and again an exploration of, areas of culture which are related to its central themes.

Although it’s not the subject of the first chapter, when I was writing the book the core or starting point of it was a film called Death Watch. It’s a fairly obscure, and not all that easy to watch in the UK, dystopic science fiction film from 1980, set in a future where death from disease no longer exists.

By the time 2020 rolled around it didn’t seem like the time to be basing a book around a story where deadly disease no longer existed. If you’re reading this in the future, I shall let the history books tell you why that might be the case. If you lived through that time, you will probably know why I reached that conclusion…

But really, Death Watch is not a film about disease, so much as one about media corruption, unaccountability and amorality in its chasing of ratings and novel content. For some reason, and I can’t begin to imagine why (!), that seems somewhat appropriate and prescient for today. Again, if you’re reading this in the future… (repeat as above).

This film was also part of a wider strand of culture I kept finding myself returning to, which was dystopic visions of society in film and television. For a while it also didn’t seem appropriate to be writing about such dystopic etc films, but now it does, in particular because they are often reflections, explorations and extrapolations of real-world problems and worries both in and with society, and through these aspects they can often provide a place in which to consider and analyse such things.

A particular area of such films etc that I kept finding myself drawn to was what I think of as deluxe dystopias: stories and imagined worlds where the populace has access to advanced technology and all kinds of material comforts, but there is something rotten, crumbling or off-kilter at the heart of society.

Hmmm, well, to repeat myself, if you’ve lived through these times, you may well know why writing about such things seems appropriate in 2023.

Accompanying this, the book in part focuses on one of the core areas that I have explored as part of A Year In The Country, which are cultural versions of alternate realities or parallel worlds and creative projects that explore and create such things, which in turn is one of the defining characteristics and central to much of hauntological-orientated work.

As with dystopic fictions, such alternate realities are often spaces where we can explore, yearn, mourn and wish for a different way of being, a different outcome and so forth and often with much of the related work that I’m drawn to there is, at the very least, an underlying seam of progressive thinking that looks and hopes for the best in and for humanity, the past and the future.

This in turn connects with the exploratory electronica theme of the book, the roots of much of which, directly or indirectly, can be traced back to the innovative and pioneering work in electronic sound and music which was carried out by Delia Derbyshire and others who were members of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.

In part, what such people and their work did was imagine new worlds and in turn new soundscapes for those worlds and to my mind that is something that electronica in all its forms still often does and allows for. And that’s an important part of humanity’s journey; we are creatures of imagination, the storytelling animal and the stories we tell and listen to are often places where we can consider, and perhaps gestate, new ideas and ways of being. Reflecting that I cast the net fairly wide in terms of electronica to include work that isn’t strictly electronica but for which the use, exploration and twisting of electronic sound is not the only aspect but which is a fundamental part of it.

All of this brings me to another theme of the book, which is an exploration of the paranormal, or that which is beyond the realms of conventional scientific and at times societal belief.

At times when society goes out of kilter and people feel threatened or vulnerable, historically it can be seen that they often turn to fringe ideas and beliefs. As I discuss in Chapter 1, this was particularly so in the 1970s in Britain and other parts of the West when there was an extended period of economic, political and social conflict and strife which was accompanied by an upsurge of interest in the occult, the preter- and supernatural and so on. This could be seen as having both interconnections with, and also being notably different to, an increase in people being drawn to fringe ideas etc today, where sections of Western society selectively reject certain aspects of science, medicine etc and subscribe and adhere to what others may well consider to be outlandish conspiracy-like views of such things.

The paranormal is explored in another core or central piece of writing in this book, that for a long time kept resisting being sent out into the world, which is the chapter on the television series Leap in the Dark, broadcast in Britain between 1973 and 1980, and which was centred around the aforementioned upsurge of interests.

At the time of writing, this was only ever broadcast once in Britain and has not had an official home release in any other form, but some of the episodes have been unofficially distributed via online public access video platforms. These aspects connect it to the shadowed undergrowth and semi-hidden areas of film and television that I wrote about in the 2022 book A Year In The Country: Cathode Ray and Celluloid Hinterlands and with that in mind and as a form of bridging between that book and this, the chapter on the series is the first one in this book.

This and other discussions on the paranormal and related topics in the book aren’t intended as expressions of a partisan position, belief or non-belief in such matters. Instead, they are an open-minded exploration of them, and in turn an exploration of culture which approached such areas with an open mind and a willingness to both enter into a dialogue with, and to consider opposing opinions and beliefs to your own, or at least ones which you’re undecided about: a form of hopeful alternate mirror for our own times perhaps.

I trust you enjoy tuning in to the lost transmissions in the book, and that they in turn help you to travel on your own journey of discovery. It’s a big old world and dreamscape out there and there’s space enough for all in it.

Stephen Prince (2nd May 2023)

Notes on the Text

F

ollowing the cyclical, annual nature of A Year In The Country and the passing of time, as with the seasons in a year, the book is centred around four main themes: dystopic visions, alternate realities, paranormal quests and exploratory electronica. It can be read in a conventional start to finish manner; however, each chapter can also be read as an individual, standalone article. In keeping with this – and also reflecting the recurring and interwoven exploration of particular themes and reference points within the wider A Year In The Country project – certain observations, theories, quotes, definitions and reference points recur throughout the book. In addition, there is also some intertwining with themes explored in the previous A Year In The Country non-fiction books.

Where appropriate, the year of release of films, books and albums is included each time they initially appear in a section or chapter.

Preface: A Definition of Hauntology its Recurring Themes and Intertwining with Otherly Folk and the Creation of a Rural and Urban Wyrd Cultural Landscape

O

ne of the recurring themes of this book and the A Year In The Country project as a whole is a consideration of hauntology. This is a relatively niche cultural phrase and area of work that not all readers will necessarily know of, and so, below is a definition or overview of hauntology.

Although it is hard to precisely define what hauntology is, it has come to be used as a way of identifying particular strands of music and cultural tendencies. As a cultural category, it is fluid and not strictly delineated and rather than being a well-defined genre is more a way of identifying work which explores and utilises certain kinds of atmospheres, themes, characteristics and source material, some of which are listed below:

1. Music and culture that draws from and examines a sense of loss, yearning or nostalgia for a post-war utopian, progressive, modernist future that was never quite reached, which is often accompanied by a sense of lingering Cold War dread.

2. A tendency to see some kind of unsettledness and hidden layers of meaning in previous decades’ public information films, TV idents and young adult-orientated British television drama programmes, from the late 1960s until approximately the early 1980s, which had surprisingly complex and/or dark themes and atmospheres, particularly considered their intended audience. This includes the likes of The Owl Service (1969-1970), Children of the Stones (1977) and The Changes (1975).

3. Graphic design and a particular kind of more-often-than-not electronic, often analogue synthesiser-based and/or previous period-orientated music that references and reinterprets some forms of older culture and related artifacts, often focusing on the period from approximately the mid-1960s to 1979 (or at times the early 1980s)¹ and generally of British origin. Such reference points include previous decades’ library music (i.e. music created for industry use in films, television, adverts etc rather than for public sale); the electronic music innovations of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop; educational materials and book cover artwork including period school textbooks; Pelican non-fiction titles which tended to have a distinctive aesthetic that combined functionality and a sense of idealism; and the stark sometimes seemingly almost accidentally darkly-hued designs of the Penguin Modern Poets books of the 1960s and 70s, which often featured minimalist, heavily-posterised images of nature.

4. A reimagining and misremembering of the above, and other, sources to create forms of music and culture that seem familiar, comforting and also often unsettling and not a little eerie; work that is accompanied by a sense of being haunted by spectres of its, and our, cultural past, to loosely paraphrase philosopherJacques Derrida who coined the phrase and created the original concept of hauntology.²

5. The use and foregrounding of recording medium noise and imperfections, such as the crackle and hiss of vinyl, tape wobble and so on that calls attention to the decaying nature of older analogue mediums and which can be used to create a sense of time out of joint and edge memories of previous eras.

6. The drawing together and utilising of the above elements to conjure a sense of an often strange, parallel or imagined world, or Midwichian³ Britain.

Hauntology is often, but not exclusively, used to refer to British culture and music, and it is thought to have been first used in relation to this by the writers Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds to describe a loose cultural grouping of music and attendant culture which began to coalesce in the UK around the early-mid-2000s.

As a loose cultural category, hauntology has retained a fair degree of cultural and aesthetic diversity that takes in the eldritch educationalism of some Ghost Box Records’ releases, the playful psychedelic whimsy and breakbeats of Blank Workshop/Moon Wiring Club and the darkly humorous reinterpretations of period official warning posters of Scarfolk amongst others.

The term has also been used more widely to describe the likes of American hypnagogic pop and Italian Occult Psychedelia: musical categories which also reimagine and create spectral echoes of the past, but which tend to utilise as their source material or inspiration, different areas and sometimes eras of culture.

Alongside this, the term the haunted generation has also increasingly been used to describe those who create or explore hauntological orientated culture, and also people who grew up when many of hauntology’s reference point touchstones – unsettling television programmes etc – were first broadcast, often during the Cold War etc, and therefore had first-hand experience of them as they happened, as it were and potentially were left haunted by them. The term was coined by broadcaster, writer and performer Bob Fischer and first came to prominence in 2017 when he used it as the title for a cover article on hauntology which he wrote for Fortean Times magazine and it was also used as the name of his subsequent regular column in it and his website, both of which focus on, amongst other interconnected areas, hauntological culture.

A further recurring theme in this book and the A Year In The Country project as a whole is what may initially appear to be a curious and disparate occurrence, and which it may be helpful to add some background and explanation to: the ways in which in several areas of music and culture – such as folk music and rural and folkloric-orientated work of the underground, acid, psych, exploratory and wyrd variety (all of which I refer to via the shorthand of otherly folk below and elsewhere in the book I at points utilise otherly pastoral to describe) – has come to share common ground with hauntological work, in particular synthesised electronica with a leftfield hauntological character.

This is an area of culture where the use, appreciation and romance of often older electronic music technologies, reference points and inspirations segues and intertwines with the more bucolic wanderings and landscapes of otherly folk. This has become a part of the cultural landscape, which in the words of author, artist, musician and curator Kristen Gallerneaux, is:

planted permanently somewhere between the history of the first transistor, the paranormal, and nature-driven worlds of the folkloric...

On the surface, such otherly folk and spectral electronic musical and cultural forms are very disparate, and yet both have come to explore and share similar landscapes. What may be one of the underlying linking points with both otherly folk and hauntology is a yearning for lost utopias. Thus, in more otherly folk-orientated culture this is possibly related to a yearning for lost (possibly imagined or only hoped for) Arcadian idylls, whilst in hauntological culture, it may be connected to the previously mentioned yearning for lost progressive post-war futures that never fully came to fruition.

Both of these intertwined areas of music and culture have revered relics; for otherly folk etc work these may include those from that lost idyll which are spectrally imprinted with some form of loss, such as, in the words of Rob Young, old buildings, texts, songs, etc, [which] are like talismans to be treasured, as a connective chain to the past.⁴

Hauntological talismans may also include items from those referred to above: TV idents from previous decades, public information films and television series from the late 1960s to late 1970s which have gained unsettledness and hidden layers of meaning with the passing of time, alongside the likes of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and Brutalist architecture, and which also are considered to contain spectral echoes in reference to the aforementioned lost progressive futures.

These two strands of otherly folk and hauntological work and culture may appear at first to be cultural cuckoos in the same nest and/or strange bedfellows. However, they have come to be seen as fellow travellers who rather than being divided by differing surface aesthetics are drawn together by a similarly exploratory and often visionary or utopian spirit, and which respectively shadow and inform one another’s journeys within an alternative cultural landscape.

This cultural intertwining and grouping does not have an overarching name but increasingly wyrd is one that has come to be associated with it, often being used not as a genre name but rather as a way of describing and denoting it and the atmospheres and characteristics of related work.

Interconnected with which, wyrd is a word that has deep-lying roots and varied meanings stretching back through the centuries:

"‘Wyrd’ is the oldest spelling of the Anglo-Saxon spelling of ‘weird’, in Old English – recorded instances dating back to c.888, including instances in Beowulf c.1000... The earliest uses of ‘wyrd’ in Old English describe agencies of fate and destiny (relating to the consequences of one’s actions) or powers of foresight with magical or legendary elements. Later definitions... from the 1800s suggest ‘a supernatural or marvellous occurrence or tale’... (Quoted from Why Wyrd? Why folklore, Why now?", Diane Rodgers, Screening the Unreal, University of Brighton, 4th July 2018.)

Often the word wyrd is used in the context of otherly folk and hauntology to imply an eldritch, uncanny, weird, eerie or unsettling sense of rural and folk-orientated culture, but it could be used – and is at points in this book – to refer to a wider-reaching exploration in culture of a sense of mystery and hidden layers to things in a world that tends to be inclined towards having and wanting everything rationally, scientifically and empirically explained. At the same time wyrd culture does not necessarily involve a rejection or reaction against scientific etc viewpoints, but rather can embrace and sit alongside them. Nor is it a straightforward acceptance of the otherworldly, preter- or supernatural but rather often reflects a fascination and being drawn to the idea of such things, rather than the actuality of them.⁵

Although the use of wyrd often refers to rural and related folk-orientated culture, this is not exclusively so and it can also be used to refer to urban-related culture etc, or, to use a phrase coined by writer and filmmaker Adam Scovell, urban wyrd; work that