The Corn Mother: Night Wraiths (Nightfall Edition)

The Corn Mother: Night Wraiths is a further exploration of the world, stories and dreamscapes of an imaginary near-mythical film, which first began on an album called The Corn Mother which was released in 2018. The Corn Mother: Night Wraiths album, is both a soundtrack to accompany The Corn Mother novella, written by Stephen Prince and released in 2020, and a standalone piece of work. The novella and albums are explorations and relections “of the whispers that tumble forth from the corn mother’s kingdom”. A place and story where fact, fiction, reality and dreams blur into one: 1878: A villager is forced to flee from her home after rumours begin that she has cursed the crops. Her vengeful spirit, known as the corn mother, is said to visit those responsible in the night, bringing ill fortune and an all-encompassing sense of guilt. 1982: A film called The Corn Mother begins to be made. Although the plot is fictional, it closely resembles the story of the fleeing villager. The film is completed but never released, with all known copies disappearing after its production company collapses. 1984: A lifelong quest begins to find the near-mythical film. 2020: All mentions of The Corn Mother begin to disappear from the world, calling into question if the film ever existed. * * * * * Hand-finished boxset contains: album on all black CD, 1 x sheet of accompanying notes, 2 x prints, 4 x stickers and 4 x badges: 1) Cover, notes and prints custom printed using archival giclée pigment ink. 2) Contained in a matchbox style sliding two-part rigid matt card box with cover print. 3) Fully black CD (black on top, black on playable side). 4) 1 x folded sheets of accompanying notes, printed on textured laid paper - hand numbered and signed on back. 5) 2 x smaller badges, 2 x larger badges. 6) 1 x smaller round sticker, 2 x larger round stickers, 1 x landscape sticker. 7) 2 x prints on textured fine art cotton rag paper. * * * * * As with the A Year in the Country project as a whole, which they are released as part of, the book and album's structure are inspired by the cycle of the year. Following the number of seasons, the book is split into four sections; it has 52 chapters (which could also be considered scenes or episodes), the same number as there are weeks in the year; relating to the number of days in a non-leap year, each chapter’s text contains no more than 365 words; and as there are days in a week, the album has seven tracks. The A Year in the Country project began in 2014, and is a set of year-long journeys though the undercurrents and flipsides of bucolic dreams; it is a wandering amongst subculture that draws from the further reaches of folk culture, the hidden and underlying tales of the land and where they meet and intertwine with the spectral histories of what has come to be known as hauntology. 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 and book releases. * * * * * "After the first The Corn Mother album was released I would find myself still thinking about the story of this 'imaginary film', wondering what had happened to particular characters connected to it and so on. It felt like a story that was unfinished and which continues to echo off into the dreamscapes of imagination. Those ongoing echoes resulted in The Corn Mother novella and The Corn Mother: Night Wraiths album." Stephen Prince * * * * * Stephen Prince also records and releases under the name A Year In The Country.