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.
As with the structure of the A Year In The Country project as a whole, which this book is part of, is inspired by the passing of time and the cyclical nature of the years, and so, as with hours in the day, the book includes 24 chapters.
About A Year In The Country
A Year In The Country: Other Worlds is released as part of the A Year In The Country project which via the posts on its website, music and book releases has carried out a set of year long explorations of an otherly pastoralism; the flipside of bucolic dreams, the further reaches of folk music and culture, work that draws inspiration from the hidden and underlying tales of the land and where such things meet and intertwine with the lost futures, spectral histories and parallel worlds of what has come to be known as hauntology.
Previous albums have focused on themes including abandoned villages, the flashpoints of history and conflict in the landscape, derelict Cold War infrastructure, ancient trees and their passage through time, the faded dreams of the space race, deserted industry and echoes of tales from woodland folklore. Alongside work by Stephen Prince, they have featured contributions by Pulselovers, Sproatly Smith, The Séance (Pete Wiggs of Saint Etienne and James Papademetrie), Widow’s Weeds, The Heartwood Institute, Depatterning, Howlround, Field Lines Cartographer, Dominic Cooper (The Owl Service/The Straw Bear Band), Keith Seatman, Grey Frequency, Time Attendant, The Rowan Amber Mill, Sharron Kraus, Listening Center, Polypores, Lutine, Vic Mars, The Soulless Party and Assembled Minds.
The project was created in 2014 by Stephen Prince and the roots of its inspiration can be found in part amongst a childhood spent in the shadow of the Cold War, alongside him discovering and becoming intrigued by the fringes of science fiction and related dystopian tales at a young age, while also living amongst and next to the British countryside, overlooked edgelands and abandoned and contemporary defence infrastructure and equipment. This mixture of a pastoral playground, a world on the edge and fantastic fictions proved to be a heady mix for the dreamscapes of a young mind, all of which would be some of the initial seedlings that would lead one day to the creation and ongoing themes of A Year In The Country.
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❉ ‘A Year In The Country: Other Worlds’, 9 July 2025. Author, artwork and design: Stephen Prince. 253 pages. Paperback and ebook available from Amazon UK, Amazon US and their various other worldwide sites and also from Lulu.
❉ News source: A Year In The Country.
❉ We Are Cult is not responsible for the content of this news release.
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