HAUNT Manchester, Flange Circus and MASSMcr Present:

RURAL EERIE: Exploring the Strange Countryside through Sounds and Words

Date: Saturday 19th October 2019

Time: 7.30pm (doors), 8pm start – 10pm

Location: The Peer Hat, 14-16 Faraday St, Manchester

Tickets: £5 in advance or £6 on the door. Available here!

Organised by Emily Oldfield and Dr Julian Holloway

The countryside: a place of tranquillity, less compromised by modern life, harmonious communities, innocence and safety. This much is the rural idyll. Yet the rural is also the unknown rustling in the hedgerow as the country lane is travelled at night. It’s the half-seen shapes and shadows in the woodland and copse; the desolate hill side, the treacherous rocky crag, the lone leafless tree atop the knoll. It’s the place where supposed closely-knit social ties become like suffocating and impenetrable knotweed to the outsider, the incomer, the blow-in. It’s those rural places and spaces that host their own ghosts of occluded pasts and forgotten, unfamiliar practices.

Beyond the supposed rural idyll malevolent forces work, uncanny sensations prowl and the eerie is always lurking.

Rural Eerie seeks to explore this countryside through music, sound, spoken word, poetry and visuals. It hopes to bring to the surface different ruralities – real, half-remembered, imagined – and makes us think again about the countryside.

Manchester experimental and electronic outfit Flange Circus will soundtrack the evening, providing soundscapes for writers and poets including:

• Sarah Hymas (writer and poet),
• Emily Oldfield (writer and poet at MMU and Louder Than War),
• Andrew Michael Hurley (novelist and winner of Costa First Novel Award 2015 for his book The Loney),
• Mark Pajak (writer and poet at the Manchester Writing School),
• Helen Darby (writer and poet at MMU),
• Richard Skelton (writer, poet and musician; Corbel Stone Press).

This event is part of the 7th annual Gothic Manchester Festival which is themed on 'Gothic Times'. This year the festival will span the whole of October with a whole range of events exploring the Gothic throughout time for you to get involved in.

The Manchester Gothic Festival is organised by the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University. Find out more details and our full events schedule on our website: mmu.ac.uk/english/gothic-studies/gothic-manchester-festival/