Set among the cultural hinterlands of wyrd, otherly pastoral, folk, psychedelic and hauntological culture, The Shildam Hall Tapes novella follows the journey of a song through time: one that appears to bring disarray to all who hear it. Is this coincidence or something more?
1799: A young woman who lives at the Shildam Hall country mansion writes a lament for a lover she can never be with, and locks it away forever.
1840: The song is discovered by one of her relatives and begins a journey through time. It entrances those who hear it, but does it also lead to their potential demise?
1969: A film set among the decadent milieu of late 1960s counterculture commences production at Shildam Hall, before collapsing amidst potential scandal after the song is rediscovered.
2004: A recording of the song is stumbled upon but all who listen to it seem to disappear...
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The novella's structure is inspired by the cycle of the year. Following the number of seasons, it is split into four sections; it has 52 chapters the same number as there are weeks in the year; and as there are days in the year, each chapter’s text contains no more than 365 words.
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The novella is a further exploration of an imaginary abandoned film that first began on an album called The Shildam Hall Tapes released in 2018, which featured music by Sproatly Smith, Gavino Morretti, Field Lines Cartographer, Vic Mars, Circle/Temple, A Year In The Country, The Heartwood Instititute, David Colohan, Listening Center and Pulselovers.
It is accompanied by the release of an album called The Shildam Hall Tapes: The Falling Reverse, recorded by Stephen Prince, which is both a soundtrack to accompany the novella and also a self-contained piece of work set amongst the fragmentary memories and dreamscapes of The Shildam Hall Tapes.
All of the above albums and novella can be listened to and read as standalone pieces of work. They also interconnect with the story and world of the near-mythical imaginary lost folkloric fever dream film The Corn Mother, which was explored in the 2020 novella The Corn Mother and album The Corn Mother: Night Wraiths, both of which were written and recorded by Stephen Prince; and also the 2018 album The Corn Mother, which included work by a number of those performers mentioned above alongside others including Depatterning and Widow's Weeds.
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These various albums and novellas are released as part of the A Year In The Country project that Stephen Prince began in 2014, which via the posts on its website, music and book releases has carried out a set of year long explorations of otherly pastoralism: the flipside of bucolic dreams, the further reaches of folk music and culture, work that draws inspiration from the underlying tales of the land and where such things meet and intertwine with the lost futures, spectral histories and parallel worlds of what has come to be known as hauntology.
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"The Corn Mother is a fascinating and truly inventive novella... This is an original and significant piece of work, not only in its novel, singular and successful approach to folk horror and 'imaginary' films but in the creation of its own self referencing folklore." Grey Malkin, published via both Folk Horror Revival and Moof
"The Corn Mother is a gripping read, and cleverly told, with pop-culture references and current affairs of the time seamlessly interwoven with the fictional story." Kim Harten, Bliss Aquamarine
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"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 investigate the inner-psyche of our collective histories." Thomas Patterson, Shindig!
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