The Layering (Dawn Light Edition)

Artists

Album Info

Release Date: 2020-09-22

Label: A Year In The Country

The album explores the way that places are literally layered with history, and is an audio slicing through the layers of time. It journeys amongst the stories and characters of these layers, including, amongst other aspects, the structures built, events which took place and different era's technologies and belief systems.

Such layering can go far back into pre-recorded history. Much of the earth is thought to have once been underwater, and it is likely that the majority of cities, towns and villages are built in fomer ocean areas. Current land masses have come to be formed, in part, through a layering of past marine, other life and plants, which in turn are then quarried or mined, subsequently being used to create the infrastructure of contemporary civilisation, and creating something of a cyclical, time-out-of-joint nature to the layers of time.

The layering of time can also take many other forms: modern homes and buildings are often built on top of the remains of previous settlements, which at times are discovered when new building work is carried out; contemporary roads and pathways follow the same routes as ancient roads and trails, which have been travelled down for millennia; often forgotten or abandoned tunnel networks, bunkers, railway lines, telephone exchanges etc lie under cities and towns; active and former mines thread underneath rural areas; churches are built on ancient places of worship, and then in turn are sometimes abandoned themselves, and become the sites for modern day revelries such as gigs, dance music events and so on.

The Layering is a reflection on how these, and other varied strata, are layered on top of one another, and/or sit side-by-side, with some being recorded, while others are forgotten or unknown, becoming part of a hidden or semi-hidden history.

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Hand-finished white/black CD album in textured recycled fold out sleeve with fold-out insert and badge:

1) Custom printed using archival giclée pigment ink.
2) Includes metal badge, secured with removable glue on string bound tag.
3) 1 x folded sheet of accompanying notes, printed on textured laid paper, hand numbered on back.

Limited edition of 208.

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The Layering 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 are a number of books which gather and revise previous writing and artwork from A Year In The Country alongside new journeyings.

The A Year In The Country non-fiction books 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.