The Quietened Dream Palace (Dawn Light Edition)

The Quietened Dream Palace is an exploration of closed down cinemas, including those which have been abandoned, become derelict, reopened as something new or demolished and there is little or no trace of any more. In part it explores the way that peoples’ experiences and memories of such cinemas, the stories told in them and the buildings themselves have now become merely the ghostly spectres of history and memory. Alongside this the album reflects on the opulent historic design lineage of cinemas and the way that closed, abandoned etc cinemas and recollections of them can become faded snapshots of previous eras’ and places’ design and character. It is also an interconnected exploration of how closed down cinemas once summoned the stories of their phantom dream worlds via the conjuring/seancing of celluloid film and its flickering light projections, and how this medium and related analogue projection equipment is largely no longer used, with both them and the accompanying skills of analogue projectionists, along with an associated way of life, increasingly becoming lost to time. The music and accompanying text draws from and intertwines personal and wider cultural and historic memories as it wanders amongst “quietened dream palaces” and the times when they still cast their spell over audiences. ************ 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. ************ The Quietened Dream Palace was planned and a considerable proportion of the related artwork, text and music was created prior to the global events of 2020. Its central themes relating to abandoned etc cinemas were never intended to refer to or interconnect with the need for cinemas to stay closed during 2020 but we understand that the album will potentially, in part, have a different resonance in the new and changed landscape. We wish the UK and overseas cinemas all the best in these challenging times. Here’s to many more years of them transporting audiences via the stories projected and told in them. ************ The Quietened Dream Palace 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.