Available in corporeal form on Audiological Transmissions Artifact #1: Airwaves: Songs From The Sentinels:

ayearinthecountry.bandcamp.com/merch

ayearinthecountry.co.uk/audiogical-transmissions-artifact-1-airwaves-songs-sirens-cd-released-dawn-day-dusk-night-editions/


File under: Year 2 - Audiological Transmissions

ayearinthecountry.co.uk/audiological-tra…es-a-cracked-sky/

Songs from and via the sentinels...

In the first spin-around-the-sun of A Year In The Country when I would visit the places that the silent but chattering sentinels/broadcast towers stood, one of the phrases that would repeatedly occur to me was "the bad wires" - a quote from the 1975 television series The Changes, wherein people have been driven by an unknown force to destroy, hate and fear all electrical and mechanical equipment.

During the series, pylons and overhead electrical cables are known as "the bad wires", the have become folk devil markers in the land and passing under them will cause anxiety and physical distress.

Memories of this series seemed to recur when I visited where the broadcast towers stood, watched and signalled to the world...

...though with these particular sentinels I tended to consider them more as quietly brooding rather than threatening - physically stilled and yet a hive of activity invisible to our conscious senses...



Rebroadcast:

A second year of wanderings...

ayearinthecountry.co.uk/year-2-wanderings-begin/

One of the anomalies of living out amongst the trees and fields is that often some of the places I am most drawn to, where I go to reflect and look out over the land, are often also the places most stamped by our own hands - where broadcast (television, radio, interpersonal and institutional communications?) towers stand.

Spending time amongst these steel structures and their jutting adjuncts connects with something I often think of; that no matter where you should find yourself, whether in the heart of a metropolis or looking out over sprawling fields and land, the air in front of and around you is alive with quite possibly innumerable conversations, stories, broadcasts - invisible to the eye but ever present for the machines we build and buy.

The Airwaves set of audiological constructs are an exploration of those silent but ever chattering towers, their transmissions and sometimes secrets - the songs they weave from their own particular language and emanations.

In amongst the constructs will be scattered signals plucked from the ether - those that have travelled from lands afar, the cryptograms that wander amongst them, fading, tired and garbled messages which have journeyed from nearby or who knows where.

The resulting work, though drawn in part from the beauty and bounty of the landscape wherein these sentinels and senders stand, seems to often summon unbidden some sense of loss, of the ghosts and fractures of that unknown loss; to continue down pathways that began via A Year In The Country’s “journey through and searching for an expression of an underlying unsettledness to the English bucolic countryside dream; an exploration of an otherly pastoralism, the patterns beneath the plough, pylons and amongst the edgelands…”