Occultural Creatures Vol.I - Black Dog Traditions of England

• 12” LP featuring acousmatic sound compositions, site-specific field-recordings and original audio of local storytellers spinning out black dog yarns.
• DVD containing a 12-minute, 16mm film by David Chatton Barker, hand-treated using haunted materials and distressed in rust, accompanied by a special mix of the project’s audio.
• Full-colour, 80-page book by Ian Humberstone, containing original articles focussed on each tale covered by the project, as well as photography taken on-site during fieldwork.
• Risograph posters of Dob Park Lodge and Troller’s Gill—locations featured in the project.
• Postcard and download code.
• All contents captured in an embossed, hand-numbered and hand-stamped box.
• Edition of 500 with the first 100 copies containing an additional cassette version of the project audio.

Black Dog Traditions of England tells the tales of eight spectre-hounds in an expansive, multi-disciplinary box-set. It is the product of extensive fieldwork conducted by Ian and David throughout 2015, as well as Ian’s own researches into black dog folklore dating back to 2007.

The LP features acousmatic sound compositions, site-specific field-recordings and original audio of local storytellers spinning out their black dog yarns. The hand-treated and rust-degraded film contained on the DVD incorporates materials gathered in the field, such as ashes from the fireplace at Dob Park Lodge and scorched waterweed from Troller’s Gill. The project book is notable in its own right—a detailed, original study tracing the history of each black dog story from its earliest textual source to the present day. The book also includes a map and full-colour photographs from the project’s many expeditions. An embossed, hand-numbered and hand-stamped box holds the contents firm.

The box-set is a reliquary of objects, stories and sounds centuries, if not millennia, in the making. These are resonances of the never-was: artworks informed by those long-forgotten who, out lurking in the half-light of a country lane, saw shapes somehow darker than the surrounding night that preyed upon their idle minds.

Read more here.