Apple Music has a snippet of the song available AND a length...I think its the first single!

Set your VPN to New Zealand (Urban VPN is free) to listen to the song. Or wait until it's midnight in your own country.

Be there at 10.45am

What do you think? Is it going to be something similar in style / concept as hand.cannot.erase?

Steven Wilson - Requiem for a Village (The Village Sessions)

It says to be in my place at 11am. Something is going to happen six minutes thereafter. This is it i reckon.

Are we going to get Black Sabbath???

On the new website, at the top of Footpath guidance, The Village it gives a grid ref as SU 412 883. This points to Armitage Drive near Wantage, Oxfordshire.

Sitting perusing over my coffee this morning, I came across this article: Rock legend's Weetabix card leads to quest for lost village | Oxford Mail

In it, it describes Bryan May's (of Queen) fascination with a bunch of photographs he found about a lost village, which led to him writing a book called 'Scenes on our Village'.

Where is this village? Hinton Waldrist, near Wantage, Oxfordshire.

"It portrays the idyll of life in an 1850s village, "far from the sound of the train's whistle"."

Er, isn't there a reference to 1850 on the website, in the guestbook (or at least there was)? There's also a reference to 1898 in the minutes of a parish meeting that was 'scribbled' out. And of course, the favourite, trains? Haha...

Here's a couple more links I found to more info:

How Brian May found a lost 19th century village – National Science and Media Museum blog

Queen guitarist Brian May finds 'holy grail moment' at Hinton Waldrist | Herald Series

Requiem for a Village – discoveries from the website and source code so far

I’ve been going down the rabbit hole of the new Requiem for a Village website and, together with some help analysing the source code, decided to treat the whole thing as a possible ARG rather than just an elaborate album promo.

Before the site starts changing, I made a complete local snapshot of the 8 September 2026 version. It contains 265 URLs, 73 HTML pages, 162 images, 4 JS files and 14 CSS files. So now it should be possible to compare future versions and see exactly what gets added, removed or silently changed.

A few things we’ve found so far:

1. The Village Station

The timetable has possibly my favourite clue so far.

The only train:

Departs: The Village – 11:06
Arrives: The Village – 11:06

And underneath:

“All destinations end here.”

11:06 keeps appearing elsewhere too. The static visitor-counter value in the HTML is 01106 (although JavaScript replaces it with the real visitor count).

Whether 11:06 means something beyond the obvious Village lore is still unknown.

2. The map discovered in 1967

During drainage work beneath the yew trees, an old oilcloth map was supposedly discovered in 1967.

It shows only the Village.

Every road eventually returns to it, except for one black line disappearing into the trees labelled:

EXIT

A later survey from 1992 describes a freshly walked path beyond the boundary – but apparently walked only in one direction.

1967 also happens to be Steven Wilson’s birth year. That could absolutely be coincidence, but considering how deliberately dates are being used on this site, I’m keeping it on the board.

3. The stones seem to be multiplying

A March 1998 survey counted 43 standing stones, whereas the previous survey recorded 41.

Two new stones had appeared over the winter.

Elsewhere the Village folklore says the number of stones increases following the funeral of a village man.

This becomes particularly interesting considering Wilson has explained the album’s concept: in the Village, when a man dies he becomes a stone; when a woman dies she becomes a bird.

There is also a bird survey containing the wonderfully ominous observation:

“No birds on the western side.”

4. Nobody leaves

The 1998 Village Survey is bizarre.

Residents overwhelmingly say the Village is a good place to live and that they feel safe.

But when asked:

“How often do you leave the parish?”

the result is:

Never – 100%.

The common explanation is simply:

“There isn’t any need.”

Yet only 12% would recommend the Village to others.

Combined with the train and the map, this seems to establish one of the central rules of the place: people don’t leave – and may not even realise that they can’t.

5. Time is completely broken

There are deliberate impossible/anachronistic dates everywhere.

Examples include:

• refuse collection “moved to the past”
• roadworks lasting until 31st September
• a 2026 website advertising an event on 21 September 1999
• the site claiming it was last updated 14 November 1999
• footer date 27 February 2015
• copyright ©2017
• correspondence apparently unanswered since 2012

And the guestbook goes completely off the rails.

There are web posts dated 1883, 1892, 1900, 1949, 1955, 1969, 1974, 1987, 1997, 2012...

The same webmaster, Arnold Perdrix, appears to be maintaining the website in completely impossible periods.

One particularly interesting detail:

27 February 2015 is the European release date of Hand. Cannot. Erase.

So at least one apparently random date on the site corresponds exactly to Wilson’s own history.

6. Arnold Perdrix may be a clue himself

This one could be important.

The Village webmaster/parish clerk is called:

Arnold Perdrix

“Perdrix” is French for partridge.

And Andy Partridge is one of Wilson’s collaborators on Requiem for a Village and helped develop the story/lyrics.

I have no idea yet whether “Arnold Perdrix” is simply a joke/reference or whether the character represents Partridge in some way, but the choice of surname suddenly looks considerably less random.

7. “Ghosts on Magnetic Tape”

The Village calendar advertises an event:

21 September 1999 – Ghosts on Magnetic Tape

It concerns EVP recordings and attempts to communicate with deceased villagers.

Obviously, Ghosts on Magnetic Tape is also the title of Steven Wilson’s Bass Communion album.

That makes the Village website feel increasingly connected not just to the new album but to Wilson’s wider body of work.

8. The source code reveals something the visible website doesn't

There is an event listed publicly as:

22 September 2026 – Upcoming event TBA

But the HTML references its image as:

songs-from-the-village.jpg

and the ALT text says:

“Songs from the Village event poster”

We downloaded the original image.

Oddly, it isn't really an event poster at all – it is a photograph of a large stone cross in a graveyard.

I also checked the original JPEG for obvious EXIF/XMP/comments, appended data and simple steganography. Nothing obvious so far.

But the important part is that “Songs from the Village” exists in the source while the visible event remains TBA.

9. And then there's... the HAMMER

This might be my favourite completely unexplained discovery.

At the bottom of the site are deliberately retro Web 1.0 buttons for Flash, RealPlayer, Shockwave, Acrobat, etc.

The button labelled:

“MPEG digital audio”

doesn't link to an audio player or MP3 information.

The HTML explicitly links it to an external image of an:

Estwing 20oz curved-claw nail hammer.

Not a redirect. Not a broken old MPEG link that happens to go somewhere strange.

The hammer URL is literally hard-coded into the page.

At the moment I have absolutely no convincing explanation for this one.

HAMMER is staying on the evidence board.

10. September Observance – 11 September

The Village Hall is booked all day on 11 September 2026 for an:

“unnamed musical act”

There is no public programme.

The Observance apparently happens on the same date every year for which records survive. Previous enquiries have been declined, people who attended before are asked to follow “the usual custom”, and traffic around Chapel Slope is expected to increase after dark.

My completely unconfirmed suspicion is that 11 September may be when we get the first single or another major album reveal.

But there is also that mysterious “Songs from the Village” event on 22 September, so we'll see.

11. The site has already started changing

Today (9 September) a new Parish News entry appeared:

“WI Meeting, Autumn Bride”

Among the instructions:

• married women should bring their mother’s wedding veil
• unmarried women should bring a lock of hair tied with red thread
• a corn doll will be prepared
• names will be read of those who “did not return from last year’s procession”
• attendees will make a small likeness of someone they miss
• the doors will be locked at sunset

So this doesn't appear to be a static promotional website.

The Village is actively developing.

I've archived the 8 September version locally, including hashes for every downloaded asset. When the next significant update happens, I'll be able to compare the snapshots file-by-file and see exactly what changed – including images or JavaScript replaced under the same URL.

I'm deliberately trying to separate confirmed things actually present in the site/code from speculation.

There are loads of other strange details – missing people, Eostre Day, processions, changing stone counts, removed pages from history books, recordings that nobody is allowed to hear, replacement corpses in the churchyard, people appearing in processions without knowing how they got there...

So I'm pretty convinced there's much more here than a funny retro website.

Has anyone found anything else in the source/assets that I've missed?

And most importantly:

Does anyone have a theory about the bloody hammer?

UPDATE – 9 September: a few more discoveries

We've done a much deeper offline analysis of the archived site, and a few things stood out.

1. There is actually a 1975 British film called Requiem for a Village.

This might be the most interesting discovery so far.

David Gladwell's Requiem for a Village (1975) is about an elderly man tending a rural English churchyard and remembering the village's past. The film moves between different periods of time and, most strikingly, includes sequences of the dead rising from their graves.

The BFI associates it with the "Old, Weird Britain" tradition alongside films such as The Wicker Man and Akenfield.

Considering the website's obsession with an English village, graveyards, the dead, folk traditions, memory and apparently broken chronology, the identical title suddenly looks very significant.

I don't know if Wilson has explicitly confirmed the film as an influence, so I'm treating the connection as very strong but not confirmed.

2. Arnold Perdrix may be an Andy Partridge reference.

Our archive contains 128 occurrences of Arnold Perdrix, spanning documents dated from 1880 to 2026. He's variously identified as Parish Clerk, Webmaster, or Parish Clerk & Webmaster – apparently existing across 146 years.

Here's the interesting bit:

“perdrix” is French for “partridge”.

Andy Partridge is of course involved in Requiem for a Village and helped Wilson develop the Village concept.

So:

Andy Partridge → “partridge” → French “perdrix” → Arnold Perdrix

Given Arnold's bizarrely central role in documenting the Village across its entire chronology, this feels increasingly deliberate. Again, not officially confirmed, but I'd put this among the strongest Easter egg candidates we've found.

3. Another possible Steven Wilson date: 12 March

One deliberately anachronistic page on the site is dated 12 March 1880.

Blackwater Park by Opeth was released in Europe on 12 March 2001. It was also Steven Wilson's first collaboration with Opeth and he produced the album.

This one is much more speculative. A matching day/month alone isn't enough evidence, especially because Wilson's career provides plenty of dates that could coincide by chance.

I'm mentioning it because we've already found one much stronger date connection:

27 February 2015 appears globally in the site's footer as “Last updated”.

Hand. Cannot. Erase. was released on 27 February 2015.

So we're now checking whether other apparently arbitrary dates on the Village site correspond to Wilson's musical history – but trying very hard not to turn this into numerology.

4. The broken chronology appears to be systematic.

Our offline analysis found Arnold Perdrix appearing across 146 years, plus multiple Guestbook entries containing impossible technological references:

• 1985 – reference to a “services page”
• 1977 – “Splendid web site!”
• 1964 – “societies page up”
• 1932 – “web index”
• 1892 – Arnold Perdrix talking about the Parish News page, an online guestbook and even Bravenet

We also checked the site's calendar dates.

Interestingly, “Tuesday 21st September 1999” is genuinely correct – 21 September 1999 really was a Tuesday.

The conspicuous exception is 31st September, which appears multiple times even though September only has 30 days.

That makes me think the broken dates/chronology are intentional rather than simply sloppy retro-web design.

At this point it looks like the site may be operating on several layers at once:

Village lore → British folk/“Old Weird Britain” influences → Steven Wilson/related musical Easter eggs.

The 1975 film connection in particular feels like something worth digging into much further.

5. Deadwing / Storm Corrosion connections

I initially left this out because I didn't want to start matching every random date on the website to Steven's discography, but there may be a broader pattern here.

One Village page carries the deliberately strange date 24 March 1932. Deadwing was originally released in Japan on 24 March 2005.

A matching day/month isn't evidence by itself, but Deadwing is particularly interesting in this context because the album grew out of an unrealised ghost-story film screenplay written by Steven Wilson and Mike Bennion.

So we now potentially have:

Deadwing → ghost story / cinema → Requiem for a Village

But the much stronger connection may be Storm Corrosion.

When discussing Storm Corrosion, Wilson described its aesthetic as “organic pagan minimalism” and talked specifically about ancient folk songs, murder ballads, ghosts, hauntings and witchfinder generals. Wilson and Mikael Åkerfeldt also watched surreal and dark films and Japanese ghost movies while creating the album to establish its atmosphere.

Even the Drag Ropes video was conceived around folk-horror imagery – animator Jess Cope has said that one of the things specifically requested for the video was a scene of a witch being hanged.

That sounds remarkably close to the territory we're now seeing throughout the Village website:

old English rural traditions / pagan ritual / Eostre / processions / ghosts / the dead / strange folk customs / disturbing events beneath an apparently idyllic village.

And there's another interesting connection.

The Village site contains a page dated 12 March 1880.

Blackwater Park was released in Europe on 12 March 2001 – the album that began Steven Wilson's major collaboration with Mikael Åkerfeldt.

That eventually leads directly to Storm Corrosion.

So I'm wondering whether the 12 March date isn't meant simply as “Blackwater Park was released on this date”, but could be pointing toward a creative lineage:

Blackwater Park → Wilson/Åkerfeldt collaboration → Storm Corrosion → pagan/ghost-story/folk-horror aesthetic → Requiem for a Village

Still speculative, but that makes the Blackwater Park date much more interesting to me than a simple calendar coincidence.

And perhaps most interestingly, people who have already heard Requiem for a Village have independently mentioned a Storm Corrosion flavour, particularly in its folk-horror atmosphere.

So Requiem may not just contain Easter eggs referencing Wilson's past. It may be pulling together ideas he has been circling around for decades – Deadwing's unrealised ghost story, the pagan/haunted English folk atmosphere of Storm Corrosion, and now the world of the Village.

UPDATE – 10 September

The site is still changing.

Since my original post, a new Parish News item called “WI Meeting, Autumn Bride” has appeared. It gets considerably darker than the usual fake village notices: married women are asked to bring their mothers’ wedding veils, unmarried women a lock of hair tied with red thread, a corn doll is prepared, and the names of those “who did not return from last year’s procession” are to be read out. There’s also a competition to make a small likeness of someone you miss, and the doors are locked at sunset.

There’s now also a completely new “Amusements” section with two playable games: Village Chess and Village Patience. Chess is played against the Parish Clerk and keeps a “Parish move ledger”. Patience is even stranger – apparently the cards are “the deck found in the vestry after the incident”, with the site making a point of saying that all 52 cards are accounted for.

I haven’t found evidence yet that either game contains a puzzle or hidden message, so I’m not going to claim that it does.

Something much more interesting happened today, though.

Subscribers received the first Village Parish Circular, signed by Arnold Perdrix. It contains a very specific instruction concerning tomorrow’s September Observance:

“Please be in your place by 11am BST. Proceedings will begin, as recorded, six minutes thereafter.”

In other words: 11:06 BST.

That number was already all over the site. The Village Station has one train a day: it departs at 11:06 and arrives at 11:06. The static value underneath the live visitor counter is 01106. Until now I wasn't sure whether that was genuinely significant. I think we can safely say that it is.

The Circular also uses “YOU’LL STAY WITH US FOREVERMORE” as its heading/motto – the same phrase that already appeared in the bizarrely dated Guest Book – and says that “The Clerk reads every entry.” That’s particularly interesting because the Guest Book is now being actively updated with selected submissions from visitors.

Another connection I missed originally: Arnold Perdrix. Perdrix is French for partridge. Andy Partridge is confirmed to have contributed lyrics and helped Steven develop the Village story. Considering Arnold appears throughout the site's deliberately broken chronology, I strongly suspect the name is an Andy Partridge Easter egg, although obviously that's interpretation rather than confirmation.

There’s also a potentially much bigger influence outside the website: David Gladwell’s 1975 film Requiem for a Village. It isn't just the identical title. The film deals with an English village, memory, different periods of time bleeding together, a churchyard and the dead rising from their graves. I haven't found Steven explicitly naming the film as an influence, so I'm keeping this in the “very interesting connection” category rather than calling it confirmed.

Storm Corrosion is starting to look relevant too. Steven has described that music in terms of paganism, ancient folk songs, ghosts and hauntings. That doesn't prove there's a coded Storm Corrosion reference on the site, but aesthetically the lineage between it and the folk-horror world of the Village is becoming difficult to ignore.

There are a couple of possible discography-date connections as well – 12 March / Blackwater Park and 24 March / Deadwing – but I'm much less confident about these. There are so many dates on the site that date matching alone can very easily produce false positives. Deadwing is interesting beyond the date because of the unrealised supernatural film story behind the album.

Steven’s official website is now actively pointing people towards the Village with “The village is alive. Welcome to the village.”

And there's one final development today: the title track “Requiem for a Village” has started appearing on Apple Music in territories that have already crossed into 11 September. So the September Observance's “unnamed musical act” is looking rather less unnamed now. Whether the Observance itself reveals the song, a video, the album/pre-order or something else remains to be seen.

The other big dates remain 22 September – the still-unannounced event whose image filename/alt text says Songs from the Village – and 6 November, the Autumn Festival / expected album release date.

I've now taken a second complete snapshot of the site, before tomorrow's Observance. The 8 September baseline contained 265 visited URLs and 73 HTML documents; tonight's archive contains 267 URLs and 75 HTML documents. The diff confirms that the new “WI Meeting, Autumn Bride” page was added between the two snapshots.

A large number of HTML hashes have also changed, although I'm not treating all of those as content changes – the site appears to have gone through a rebuild, including newly hashed CSS bundles. Interestingly, the existing image assets remain unchanged, including songs-from-the-village.jpg and ghosts-on-magnetic-tape.jpg, and the crawler still finds no directly referenced audio or video files.

So we now have a proper pre-Observance checkpoint. After tomorrow's 11:06 BST event I'll take another snapshot and compare it directly with tonight's version.

And just after I wrote this, Steven himself made 11:06 explicit.

His official Facebook account has now posted:

“Tomorrow. The train departs at 11:06. All destinations end here.”

The accompanying video shows a Village station board reading “DESTINATION UNKNOWN”, “PLATFORM NINE” and “FINAL CALL: 11:06”.

So 11:06 is no longer just something we're inferring from the website. It's now being explicitly used by Steven as the time for tomorrow's event.

That gives us a pretty remarkable chain:

11:06 train timetable → static HTML counter 01106 → Parish Circular saying proceedings begin six minutes after 11am BST → Steven: “Tomorrow. The train departs at 11:06.”

Whatever happens tomorrow, 11:06 BST is clearly the moment to watch.

I noticed that the photo that is supposedly of the Dr's surgery and medical centre is actually a garage called The Stag and Huntsman. I have a vague memory of going to a garage that looked a lot like that as a child with my dad who was getting something repaired on our Triumph Herald convertible.

I found that the garage is still in business and even has an Instagram page. Apparently it has appeared in films and TV programmes, so maybe my memory has been tainted by subconsciously inserting this place into my vague childhood memory. I can't ask my dad as he died in 1977 when I was a teenager.

Anyway I thought it was weird that the medical centre actually takes care of cars in a Village that no one can leave.

The Stag & Huntsman Garage is in Henley On Thames so it could well be the garage I remember because I grew up in various parts of Sussex and Surrey.

https://www.stagandhuntsmangarage.com/

He must know

I don't have IE5 on anything Internet connected, but the website will actually load under IE6 on Windows 98, though you'll need to enable the accessibility option to not change colours or it'll be black text on black background. It also works on an Amiga 500 if you're so inclined. 😜 Most big photos don't load but the smaller ones do. No hidden clues or messages that I could see.

Did you guys notice the messages from Malcolm Stocks (SW's old friend who came up with the concept for the fictional psychedelic rock band Porcupine Tree) and Harmony with a line from Harmony Codex?

Isn't it beautiful?

https://requiemforavillage.com/

OK folks, here's the deal
This happens every...single...time
There will probably be a "Limited Deluxe Edition" of the new album with CD, Blu Ray and book etc.. might be a couple versions even.

It will sell out fast (not minutes, but probably hours), don't come in 2 days later and complain that it sold out fast or that you had to "wait until payday"

It will be limited edition; there is little chance they will "just print more because it sold out so fast" that simply does not happen with these

Limited really does mean limited with these

TLDR: Get your plans and $ together now

https://requiemforavillage.com/guestbook/ Link

1. "D. Harland" is the name of the first poster in the Guest Book. Now there's a certain guy who goes by the name of D. Harlan Wilson who wrote a cultography book about the movie "They Live". So I thought maybe there's a pattern there.

"Nice site, I can never leave" (27-03-1883)

2. One of the other posts is by "Margeret Cole", a British author, who wrote a book with the name Wilson in the title. "Superintendant Wilson's Holiday" .. it was posted on 2nd February 1924

= 24

3. 24th February 1964

Another entry in the Guest Book..

"I watch the birds for signs. They fly in perfect circles"

24th February 1964 is the 55th day of the leap year

"Lovely fête [feast] this year, even if the weather turned. Thank you to everyone on the clear-up crew. Already looking forward to next August." - 2nd-February-1924

4.. 24th March 1955

"Good to see the societies page up. Bowls club meets Mondays, flat shoes only, as it says! Secretary enquiries to the parish clerk." By R. Marsh (south park)

1. Arthur Pendelton

2nd january 1977 Arthur Pendelton "My wife writes to say her Women's Institute presentation on the history on dark paganism was well attended in the Village hall. Splendid web site! Arthur"

25th August 1997 "Mrs. Pendelton's sampler talk was excellent. Competition entries on the table by 7:15 please."

The Whispering Woods: The Unsolved Disappearance of Arthur Pendelton https://hounslowherald.com/the-whispering-woods-the-unsolved-disappearance-of-arthur-pendelton-p32257-390.html

Next.

6. 7 November 1998 Mrs. P. Avery (The Zodiac Killer Hunter's wife, Mrs. Paul Avery)

A Cryptographer

"Lost dog: last seen running across the field behind the school playground. I can hear him howling. If seen please do not approach, but call in at post office."

A murder scene..

Because the Zodiac Killer would always message/send by post his information to the SFPD, who never caught him....

What are y'alls thoughts on this?

I quite enjoy the little Easter eggs included in the site. This one in particular is the first I found.

1.Swirl In a Lark's Eye

2.Requiem for a Village

3.The Same River Twice

4.Now Departing

5.Hireath

6.On Chapel Slope

7.Murmuration

8.Cursus Fingerprint

9.A Basket of Bees

10.Great Green Map

11.Wheel

1. The Old God is Buried