A Year In The Country: Lost Transmissions

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.

Auteur

Press quotes on A Year In The Country releases/Stephen Prince: "Author Stephen Prince is a multimedia artist who's been building his own otherworldly visions of Arcadian England under the name A Year In The Country. Both an exploration of a pastoral past and a rumination on a dystopian present, his recordings marry spectral folk to an electronic otherworld, whilst he has written books of non-fiction that investigates the inner-psyche of our collective histories." Thomas Patterson, Shindig! "A Year In The Country has been steadily building up a body of work that presents an alternative view of rural Britain, the project's output is consistently fascinating." Psychogeographic Review "Audio Albion is the latest brilliant release in an ongoing project to map landscape and memory through eerie instrumentals and twisted takes on folk culture." Jude Rogers, The Guardian Press quotes on A Year In The Country: Wandering Through Spectral Fields, also written by Stephen Prince and released as part of the A Year In The Country project: "Stephen Prince's densely packed tome covers everything from folkloric film and literature to electronic music to acid folk to folk horror to the dystopian fiction of John Wyndham and the classic unearthings of Nigel Kneale to the formation of under-the-furrows record labels like Trunk, Ghost Box and Finders Keepers... This incredibly well-researched book, which is obviously written by a man with an enormous passion for this subject, is probably as comprehensive as it is possible to be... Books this culturally valuable don't grow on hedgerows, so make sure you harvest it immediately."Ian White, Starburst "Author Prince has pulled together a mass of material culled not only from the website and its associated albums, but also a great deal more that was written specifically for the book. And the result is spellbinding." Dave Thompson, Goldmine "A new book caught my eye recently - the title A Year In The Country: Wandering Through Spectral Fields, that goes in search of the darker, eerier side of the bucolic countryside dream by looking at films of a certain genre, books, TV series, music; it is great to have this fascinating subject explored so thoroughly and brought together under one title." Verity Sharp, Late Junction, BBC Radio 3 The book was also selected for Electronic Sound magazine's Top Ten books of the year in 2018.