The album is an exploration of abandoned and derelict industry, infrastructure, technology and equipment that once upon a time helped to create, connect and sustain society.
It wanders amongst deserted factories, discarded machinery, closed mines, mills and kilns and their echoes and remains; taking a moment or two to reflect on these once busy, functioning centres of activity and the sometimes sheer scale or amount of effort and human endeavour that was required to create and operate such structures and machines, many of which are now just left to fade away.
The CD and Bandcamp download include accompanying notes on the tracks by the contributors.
The Quietened Mechanisms is released as part of the A Year In The Country project, a set of year long journeys through spectral fields; cyclical explorations of an otherly pastoralism, the further reaches of folk culture and the spectral parallel worlds of hauntology - 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.
Accompanying the music releases is a book called A Year In The Country: Wandering Through Spectral Fields which gathers and revises previous writing from A Year In The Country alongside new journeyings.
The book and the written posts on the site are intended to draw together and connect layered and, at times, semi-hidden cultural pathways and signposts, journeying from acid folk to edgelands via electronic music innovators and pioneers, folkloric film and photography, dreams of lost futures and misremembered televisual tales and transmissions.
"...the first book of it's kind to catalogue all these disparate strands, many of which cross over time and space to influence one another." DJ Food
"...an essential field guide to a distinct aesthetic that remains loosely defined, like a fluttering night moth that would die if pinned down."
Ben Graham, Shindig!
On A Year In The Country and its previous music releases:
"A Year In The Country quietly go about their business releasing beautifully packaged music that is influenced by folk, electronica, drone as well as by landscape, time and place... each have themes running through them, tying the music together and seemingly telling a story as they unfold." Terrascope
"…another exquisitely packaged affair… murky and ominous as befits the guiding thematic: places that are spectrally imprinted with past conflicts and struggles... a conceptual compilation of excellently eerie electronic music..." Simon Reynolds, author of Retromania and Energy Flash
“A Year In The Country… operating like some sinister rustic arts and crafts movement manifesting online via a Wi-Fi connected scrying mirror... an almanac of unearthly sonics to tide you through the winter nights." Shindig!
"...a response to British folk traditions that acknowledges the history without seeming beholden to it." John Coulthart, Feuilleton
www.ayearinthecountry.co.uk
released October 2, 2018