The Quietened Village is a study of and reflection on the lost, disappeared and once were homes and hamlets that have wandered off the maps or that have become shells of their former lives and times. The album travels from quietly unsettling electronica and tape manipulation via exploratory folk tales and far distant soundscapes, featuring contributions by Howlround, Polypores, The Rowan Amber Mill (The Book Of The Lost), Cosmic Neigbourhood, Sproatly Smith, The Straw Bear Band (The Owl Service/Rif Mountain), A Year In The Country, Time Attendant, The Soulless Party (Tales From The Black Meadow), David Colohan and Richard Moult (both of United Bible Studies). Inspired in part by images of sections of abandoned, submerged villages and the spires of their places of worship re-appearing from the surfaces of reservoirs and lakes, alongside thoughts of dwellings that have succumbed to the natural erosion of the coastline and have slowly tumbled into the sea. Some of the once were and lost villages which were seedlings for this body of work still stand but their populations are no more, those who lived there evicted at short notice and never to return so that their homes and hearths could be used as training grounds for those who would fight during great conflicts between nations. Such points of reference have been intertwined with possibly more bodeful reasons for this stilling and ending; thoughts of Midwich Cuckoos-esque fictions or dystopic tales told and transmitted in times gone by and imagined/re-imagined in amongst the strands of The Quietened Village. The album is released as part of the A Year In The Country project, a set of year long journeys through and searching for an expression of an underlying unsettledness to the English bucolic countryside dream; an exploration of an otherly pastoralism, a wandering amongst subculture that draws from the undergrowth of the land, the patterns beneath the plough, pylons and amongst the edgelands...