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-transmission-3​​52-airwaves-night-mesh

…although often not overtly alluded to, some of the underlying stories/patterns of the first cycle of A Year In The Country wandered out from the ripples, reverberations and duality of a childhood spent in part in both explorative bucolic bliss in the English countryside, while also living in/becoming aware of the shadow of the Cold War…

In many ways that year long cycle helped to lay to rest many of such spectres (at least on a personal level) but I find as I work on, their echoes and/or an associated “underlying unsettledness to the English bucolic countryside dream” return unbidden and that particularly seems to be the case with the Airwaves set of audiological transmissions.

As a child, one of the main tellers/bogeymen of such Cold War dread was the documentary-esque drama Threads which told of life in Britain after a near-end-of-days attack.

Threads took its name from the connections and lines of communication in human society and their breaking by storms of our own devising.

The word itself, threads, implies the fragility of those lines and the ease with which they can be broken.

Airwaves focuses on one of the points of connection in amongst those threads; these stilled, quietly brooding sentinels and senders are part of a gossamer network, both corporeal and those less tangible, carrying on their shoulders the weight and responsibilities of passing forward those innumerable stories; of joy, day-to-day life, institutional watchfulness, our entertainments or in conclusion harbingers of those storms sent from our own hands…


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…”