The Underworld Service

The Underworld Service (2014) is the latest album from English Heretic. Released last year ahead of some welcome re-issues from the project and the upcoming imprint Eighth Climate, Underworld rightly received some great reviews from the likes of Freq and The Quietus. It’s probably the highest profile English Heretic release thus far and works in essence as a summation of the project’s decade-long ‘voyage’. All of the key themes are here: landscape, the occult, the theme of visitation, horror cinema and unconscious geographies. When taken as the follow-up to Anti-Heroes (2013) or seen in the light of Temple of Remembrance (2005) though, The Underworld Service follows a very different tonal path. The package is marked with the same care and sense of immersion that has characterized other English Heretic releases. However, the overall theme of katabasis, (descent, a going down) forms a darker counterpoint to the exploratory trajectories of Anti-Heroes.

Here’s how English Heretic present the album:

"After a decade of toil in the blood drenched, worm eaten, occult battlefields of  Albion, English Heretic takes a well earned holiday... in Hades.  The Underworld Service is a 70 minute radio broadcast from Tartarus, where every song and news report is an intimation of our mortality. The Underworld Service subverts the   culture show format and celebrates the hard hitting documentary format. Scanning a waveband of Corpse Oriented Rock,  Philosophical Stoner, Field Trip Hop, Horror Folk, and Funereal Disco, The Underworld Service is English Heretic’s most death enhancing release to date."

On Anti-Heroes English Heretic channeled the psychopathologies and psycheogeographies of Psychomania (1973), Robert Cochrane and Robert Vaughan. These misanthropes and renegade scientists were narrated as patron saints of the death drive, launching into oblivion with ecstasy and relief. The various synchronicities plotted also outlined a powerful associative zone across the space surveyed by the project. This “lunatic corridor” that is said to move through slough and its environs works appears as a combination of Ballard’s “geography of sensory deprivation” described in Kingdom Come (2006) and the neurological after-effects of the visitations in The Mothman Prophecies (2002).  Despite the negative trajectories plotted, it seemed that Anti-Heroes still positioned itself as part of a visionary tradition. A comparison could be made with the Iain Sinclair / Alan Moore matrix of White Chappell Scarlett Tracings (1987) and From Hell (1999). Each work comprehensively dissects an area to reveal a series of hidden patterns. Whilst the narratives are aggressive in their depicted violence, the conceptual impetus is apocalyptic in the most literal sense: the movement towards an act of revealing.

By focusing less on thanatosis and more on katabasis, (or more specifically ‘sepulculture’), The Underworld Service positions itself very much on the other side of the mirror. Here, death is not (anti) heroic but a phenomenon associated with a set of ritual practices, all of which are seen to have lost their instrumental potency in the mid to late 20^th century. The culture of the late-1960s is a familiar territory for English Heretic, but in The Sacred Geography of British Cinema (2005), the location traces of Michael Reeves’ Witchfinder General (1968) provided a means of charging or “fecundating” the imagination. With The Underworld Service there is the sense that the land and the national culture is so suffused with death (there is a running concern with World in Action and its broadcast sense of eternal war) that it’s excess has outstripped any imaginative capacity to process it. As such, the key film mediated here is Peter Newbrook’s The Asphyx (1972), the grim story of an (inevitably) doomed attempt to capture the spirit of death.  Another scene that springs to mind is the end of Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond (1981). Lost in a seemingly endless underworld, Catriona McColl and David Warbeck “face the sea of darkness” and disappear. Particularly listening to the album’s title track it seems as if The Underworld Service is pitched in a similar terminal zone.  

This is not to say that The Underworld Service falls short of the bar set by other English Heretic releases. On the contrary, I think the focus on katabasis gives the project’s overall emphasis on inner cinema and the validity of individual psychic events something of a critical trajectory. The album is just as hermetic and ‘underground’ (literally and metaphorically) as its predecessors, but it also appears directed towards cultural rather than individual exploration. The England it unfolds is pervaded with death, corporeal and institutional. Horror cinema is presented as an ambivalent axis or crossroads between ‘real world’ atrocities and misdirected moral crusades that aim largely toward the limitation of creative impulses (see: ‘Video Anxieties’). The album works to foreground this, with much of the same attitude and provocation evident in The Plague Yard (1990) Simon Dwyer’s dissection of the culture / counterculture interface in the late 1980s.  What emerges is an encouragement to re-think and re-vivify the mediatory processes linked to death, dying and associated thanoteric forms.  

Road Movies / Screen Media

Last week, as part of the ongoing Road Movies project, I did a talk about Fleapit, cult film and associated ideas at the Screen Media Research Seminar in Cambridge. Abstract below. Thanks to those who came along and thanks to Rhiannon, Emma and Evie for setting it up. 

* 

Road Movies: Projection, DIY Cinema and Cult Film. 

Between 2003 and 2009 I ran a microcinema from the back of my car. The programme offered focused exclusively on works of cult film and ‘para-cinema’ and the screenings were staged in small, ‘unofficial’ venues: cellars, bars, kitchens, classrooms, front rooms and bomb shelters. 

These events began, in part, as acts of practical research into the connection between projection and place: venues were chosen for the purposes of creating something of a dialogue with the film (or more specifically, video) that was shown. Over the course of six years the project grew and assumed an increasingly mobile format. This involved the production of screenings at festivals, raves and academic conferences. Two nationwide tours of the UK were also undertaken which saw screenings mounted in nightclubs, in museums and alongside various live bands. 

A basement show during the 2005 Fleapit tour

In this talk, I will discuss the screening project in more detail and expand upon some of its theoretical aspects. Reference will be made to a wider context of ‘underground’ (sometimes literally underground) film exhibition that the project drew upon and participated in. In keeping with the forms of practice discussed and the approach of the book that the project now feeds into, sections of the talk will be intentionally autobiographical and speculative. One aim will be to map the cultural terrain inhabited by the events considered, a territory in which image projection elides into forms of psychological projection.

Where the Points Converge

Synchronicities are important for John Higgs. In 2000 TC (2014), his book about the band TC Lethbridge, he tells us that the value of "following the synchronicities" (p.49) was one of the many lessons he learnt from Brian Barrit. Barrit was a psychedelic pioneer and author of The Road of Excess (1998). He collaborated with Timothy Leary and is one of the many personalities who move through Robert Anton Wilson’s Cosmic Trigger (1977). Barrit was also a friend of and mentor to the band. As they – Flinton Chalk, Doggen and Kev Bales – improvised in Avebury throughout 1994 Barritt appeared fresh from his absorption in Krautrock and rave and encouraged them to take their music "to Jupiter" (p. 57). 'Appeared' is very much the operative word as according to Bales, he was first introduced to Barritt just as he was reading Cosmic Trigger: "Hi Kev, I’m Brian, I’m in that book, you’ll find me on page 111" (p.56).

2000 TC is full of these weird intersections. It's the story of the band, the story of their album 2000 TC as well as the story of their seemingly endless movement through a sequence of personal, professional and symbolic synchronicities. It starts with the spreading of Leary's ashes in 2006, recounts Chalk's geomantic experiences with Julian Cope in 1992 and charts the development of the group into a series of interconnected musical projects: Brain Donor, The Sons of TC Lethbridge and Spiritualized. The narrative pauses for Barritt’s passing in 2011 and ends with the imminent revival of Robert Anton Wilson by way of Ken Campbell's daughter Daisy Eris, the Cosmic Trigger Festival of November 2014 and the return/arrival of TC Lethbridge as part of that event. Whereas Higgs used synchronicity (particularly in the Jungian sense) as a tool to narrate the events of his previous book, The KLF: Chaos,Magic and the Band Who Burned a Million Quid (2012) in 2000 TC synchronicity is an essential part of the narrative under discussion. In order to understand the full significance of TC Lethbridge appearing at the festival, it's necessary to meditate upon the various connections that constitute the band’s secret career.

It's for this reason that towards the end of the book Higgs tells us the date. He says that he is writing the end of the manuscript on Monday 13^th October 2014, six weeks ahead of the live debut of a band who formed 20 years before. The book is thus revealed as a pre-emptive history of an extensive pre-history that is yet to be public knowledge. Rather than memorializing the band in the wake of a 'legendary' gig, Higgs lays out their narrative so as to prime the approaching concert as something of a charged birth.

Reading the book I was much taken with this covert approach. It seemed that for all Higgs' expressed awkwardness in writing the biography of a band "that no-one has heard of" (p. 108), the unheralded nature of the project was something of a magical act appropriate to the life of the group: a personal act of dedication. Certainly the extremely limited print run of the book (111 copies: no doubt a wink to Barritt's appearance in Wilson) reflects this. Whilst the story recounted connects elements of failure and frustration with the obscurity of TC Lethbridge, what emerges is also the cultish aura of an intentional retreat from view. One gets the sense that - consciously or not - the band chose to be invisible. As such it's unsurprising that the most extensive outline of their history is essentially a privately circulated document. As a comparison, Bill Drummond and Mark Manning’s Bible of Dreams (1992?) comes most readily to mind.[1]

On a more personal note, the specificity of the book’s completion date sparked off a series of my own synchronicities. 13^th October is my birthday and on Monday 13^th October 2014, I received and spent the day reading Higgs' The KLF. The year before I had marked October 13^th 2013 by listening to A Giant (2003) by The Sons of T.C. Lethbridge. A much earlier October 13^th involved an odd experience trying to buy Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space (1997) by Spiritualized. I had ordered the album in a high street record store with the intention of collecting it on the 13^th. I placed the order on the phone but on the day turned up and asked for it at the wrong shop. Here I found that the store did indeed have a copy of Ladies and Gentlemen but it had been ordered and held for someone else. I thought that was the end of it but the guy at the counter then offered to give me the single copy for free on the basis of some arcane record dealer logic I still can't fathom. He said I should have it for nothing because it was over a year since he had first ordered it in for a guy who never turned up to buy it. Apparently the album arrived at his shop on October 13^th 1998 and remained unclaimed, unrequested and unsold until I arrived and asked for it that day, October 13^th 1999. Maybe the other guy bought 'my' copy at the other shop a year earlier. Or something.

The link between TC Lethbridge and Spiritualized is that the latter currently contains two thirds of the former (Doggen and Bales). They joined in 1999 whilst they were still working with Cope in Brain Donor and The Sons of TC Lethbridge. I had gone to see Spiritualized in 2008 in celebration of another personal milestone. Anyone who saw the band on that tour will probably agree that Jason Pierce was mining the most riff-heavy sections of his back catalogue. Sonically it was Spiritualized via Spacemen 3 and Brain Donor and TC Lethbridge. I knew the history of the line-up but I hadn't expected these multiple identities, as it were, to be so evident during the show. Of course, Higgs informs us that it was during the 2008 tour that Doggen re-established his friendship with Chalk and began the long journey towards finally releasing 2000 TC and performing live. They had drifted apart due to their differing creative relationships with Cope in the aftermath of their time in Avebury. However, by 2008 Doggen and Bales were both severing their relationship with 'The Drude' (for good reason: read the book). Point is, the 2008 Spiritualized gigs were very much instances of personal, musical and symbolic transition for all involved. No wonder that it seemed as if three or four different bands were galloping through the songs.[2]

So what? Who cares if I got a book for my birthday and happen to like the same bands that Higgs writes about? A lot of things happened on October 13^th and have happened on October 13^th just as they have done and will do on every other day of the year. This of course is true, but the point of a synchronicity is precisely that there is no definite connection between the ideas, events or actions that are brought together. When Jung speaks about the structure of a synchronicity he does not talk in terms of cause and effect but in terms of an "acausal connecting principle". The significance of a synchronicity is not the actual connection between ideas or events, but the psychic connectivity. When thinking through a synchronicity the question should not be one of rationalization, ('is there an actual connection?') but active speculation, (how and why have these things been connected in this way?) J.G. Ballard put this another way when he denied the possibility of coincidence. There are no coincidences, he said, but instead "deep assignments run through all of our lives". In making these connections between my own reading and record buying I’m not intending to impose upon them a gravitas they clearly do not deserve. However, I am interested in how their recall in the light of reading Higgs might foreground something of a 'deep assignment'.

Everybody endlessly mythologizes the detail of their day-to-day existence. It is purely and simply an existential defense mechanism that helps stave off knowledge of the encroaching void. Looking for points of intersection helps to plot out a narrative and it is this sense of trajectory that constitutes 'purpose'. On this level, the synchrony I felt with The KLF and 2000 TC ultimately helped neutralise a sense of purposelessness.

When reading about Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty on October 13^th 2014, I was struck by the description of the formation of The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu. Higgs tells us that Drummond was visiting his parents on New Year’s Day 1987, having "left the music industry" the previous summer "at the symbolic age of thirty-three and a third". Drummond goes out for walk and upon his return telephones Cauty to announce the start of their "hip-hop group". It’s not clear what precisely happened to Drummond during his walk. He was obviously dissatisfied with solo projects like The Man (1986) and ready to work in the kind of register that Cauty's skills with music technology could facilitate.[3] That said, despite the extension and complexity of that which they go onto do as The JAMs and The KLF, the biographical detail of Drummond’s phone call indicates that they are essentially a response to his arrival at a particularly "totemic age" (p. 93). 

For reasons that should be obvious, I was reading this whilst being uncomfortably aware of my proximity to a comparable totemism. I say "uncomfortable" because I felt that having reached a similar age, I was neither where I wanted to be, nor had I done what I had intended to do. Also, unlike Drummond's instigation of a "revolution in [his] life", I felt that my own opportunities for making such a seismic change had passed. Three months later on January 15^th 2015, I read 2000 TC, having been kindly supplied with a copy by Mark Sampson at Iron Man Records.[4] To learn that Higgs was completing his book just as my black cloud was starting to descend was really quite startling.

2000 TC is essentially the inverse narrative of The KLF. Both stories are connected on the basis of a shared sense of ritual. However that of The KLF is built upon the initial achievement of success. Whatever was signified by that fire in the boathouse at Jura required Drummond and Cauty to have accumulated a million pounds in the first place. By contrast, just as the flames began on 23^rd August 1994, TC Lethbridge were coming to the end of their time in Avebury and about to begin their extended hiatus. According to The KLF, Drummond and Cauty then spent much of their subsequent careers "haunted" by the act and engaged in an attempt to understand it (p.11). According to Higgs, much of Chalk’s involvement with TC Lethbridge was an attempt to creatively process his mystical experiences with Cope in 1992. On this basis, one could say that it failed, and failed just as Drummond and Cauty were beginning to think through their experience. Whereas The Modern Antiquarian (1998) established Cope as one of the contemporary mediators of Lethbridge-type speculation, Chalk's musical project lacked the same exposure, and thus the sense of 'closure' that one might hope to build into any ritualistic act.[5]

That said, I came away from 2000 TC having felt it was a response to The KLF insofar as it privileged the persistence of vision and the importance of personal insight, in excess of the monetized pre-requisite that underpins Drummond and Cauty’s potlatch. Aside from being a great book about male friendship (and the difficulties of creative ego), it also suggests that some projects work in relation to their own specific temporalities rather than the convenience of a given schedule. If it’s not working, it might not be you that’s at fault; it might just not be time for it to work. By that I don’t mean to invoke the language of unfounded self-help, but to point to a different model of success and realization than is currently prioritized in contemporary, (i.e. hyper-accelerated, massively compacted) understandings of achievement. Similarly, in 2000 TC, moreso than in The KLF, Higgs valorises a processional, non-reciprocal sense of success, insofar as an act of personal significance can be perceived as such without the necessity of external validation. Of course, not everyone has the luxury of two decades to devote to a single project, not least one that tries to understand a mind-bending encounter with glowing standing stones.[6] But I took the extractable point as being one that celebrates not the privilege of the 'artistic' psyche but the efficacy of the mind's basic software: the associative, generative and synchronistic faculties of thought, memory and analysis. If you want 'direction' (I'm now saying to myself, having taken the other post-it notes off the mirror) in excess of that which forms the necessary trajectory, there's no need to look ahead, to defer it ahead or to lament its impossibility. Instead, look back into the wake and zero-in on the points of consistency. You've been there before and you'll go there again. There's a line in amongst all that flotsam. Find it.

---

[1] A single copy of Bible of Dreams apparently resides for perusal in The Curfew Tower.

[2] Compare this to the gigs Spiritualized did with the same line-up in support of the album Sweet Heart / Sweet Light (2012). Good but not great. Muted would be the word. Significantly less fire. Maybe Pierce did manage to get Doggen to hold-off on the rock riffs.

[3] Cauty was also the guitarist in Brilliant, the unsuccessful band that Drummond had managed.

[4] The envelope carried a postmark of 12^th January. I received the book on the 14^th. Looking at this from a purely speculative and mythopoetic view, I could regard the fact that the book spent the 13^th of January in transit as somewhat significant. The claims of various mail-artists regarding the 'energy' accumulated by the art object as it physically travels through the postal network spring to mind. I was half expecting to see a Trystero printed on the envelope.   

[5] This forms a key point of the magical discussion in 2000 TC. There’s a particularly good quote from Richard Stanley on page 22. Chalk's involvement with The Modern Antiquarian project is also a key theme of the book and underlies his Avebury experiences. 

[6] Neither does Flinton Chalk by the sounds of it. 2000 TC deals with musicians of limited financial means. The importance of pursuing an idea, despite the glacial pace imposed by other, more pressing requirements seems to be the main point. 

Swarm

I have an article in the new issue of Performance Research, 'On Turbulence'. It's based on the swarm talk I presented last year. I've put my article outline below and you can find more information about the issue here. 

Auguries of Discord: Protest, Activism and the Swarm.

In November 2010 London played host to a series of large-scale student demonstrations against the proposed (and now implemented) increase in tuition fees. At the same time, the south coast of England was subject to a particularly high-rate of murmuration: the wave-like accumulation of starlings in the vicinity of mass roosting sites. Brought into synchronicity by broadcast media, these two events – ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’ – point to the ambiguity and productivity of swarm behaviour.

As a concept, the notion of the swarm posits the seemingly paradoxical state of a singular collective, a constellate identity that exists in a position of homogenous heterogeneity. A swarm is not just a large group of creatures but a mass of individuals who are understood as a collective or a colony; an entity that works within and is constituted by a matrix of feedback and co-ordination. Generally applied to the activity of bees, ‘swarm’ has increasingly come to signify a trans-species form of intelligence and performance. Rather than denoting an insectoid equivalent to ‘flock’ or ‘herd’, the word has assumed significance as a noun and verb that describes “a group of individuals who respond to one another and to their environment in ways that give them the power, as a group, to cope with uncertainty, complexity and change”.[i] This is frequently coupled with a bipolar application that sees the word being used equally to describe an intended subject of control as well as the means of control. The swarm is indicative of both ungovernable, plural excess and invisible, decentralized organization.[ii]

In this article my aim is to investigate the synchronic and homologous connection between non-human and human swarming suggested by the events of November 2010. In offering ‘swarm’ as a concept to analyse protest activity, my intention is not to draw on the metaphorical resonance of the word and thereby engage in associative substitution. Instead, I will argue for the need to understand ‘swarm’ and ‘protest’ as concepts that exist within a metonymic relationship, one that is based on a particular point of connection between the two.

Specifically, if one sees the theatre of protest as a physical manifestation of “protestation”; a complaint, “the formal (written) declaration against a proposal”, then parallels can be established with the collective event that is performed by the swarm. Etymologically, ‘swarm’ relates to the Sanskrit word for “sounds, resounds”. Swarm thus describes the production of noise, hence its common association with the buzz of bees. Murmuration, understood as a form of swarm behaviour maintains this sonic emphasis. The term originally described the spreading of rumour, the continual utterance of low cries and the act of moving one's lips without speaking. Its application to starling movement follows the metaphorical revival of the term by W.H. Auden and Mervyn Peake. [iii]  In each case, then, the swarm is presented as a signifying, communicative entity. Just as the protest wishes to be heard, it is necessary to listen to what the swarm has to say. Drawing upon John Kinsella's notion of poetic activism, I will argue that the development of this connection can assist in defending the disputed efficacy of protest activity.[iv] Similarly, the synchronicity can also be used to foreground and critique the frameworks that obfuscate and neutralise the performative potency of group activism. My overall intention will be to offer the swarm as a primary tool for the navigation and propagation of contemporary turbulence.

 

---

[i] Peter Miller, Smart Swarm (London: Collins, 2010), pp. xvi-xvii.

[ii] For the science fictional flipside of Miller’s systems analysis, see Arthur Herzog, The Swarm (New York: Holt, 1974).

[iii]  Each of these definitions and word histories are taken from the current edition of the Oxford English Dictionary.

[iv] See John Kinsella, ‘Standing Up to Aggressors’, in Activist Poetics: Anarchy in the Avon Valley ed. by Niall Lucy (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press), pp.16-23, p.16.

Reading

I was recently interviewed about the psychological and creative process of reading for CAM magazine. You can read the issue here. Many thanks to Lucy Jolin for getting in touch.

Bad Tripping in Babylon

Many thanks to George Bickers for having me as a guest on Tripping in Babylon last Tuesday night / Wednesday morning. For his fourth programme, George looked at the 'Second Summer of Love': the rave period which symbolically constellates around Manchester's Hacienda. After introducing the theme, George moved onto the link between altered consciousness, psychedelic culture and notions of space. This was the subject of our conversation. You can hear the episode here (scroll down to 'The Hacienda Must be Built').

The interview allowed me to revisit some ideas that came out of the Acid Flashes event at Idea Generation, conceived, written and directed by Evie Salmon.

JR live at Acid Flashes / Idea Generation

Acid Flashes was a spoken word show that Evie produced to coincide with 'ON: Acid House Art and Twenty First Century Psychedelia', an exhibition of images by Luke Insect, Leo Zero and Dave Little. It was great to be involved alongside Malcom Guite and Phil Yarrow. The pieces performed that night were based on writings by Peter Hook, Hakim Bey, Bill Drummond and others. In addition to evoking the ambience of the rave scene, one linking theme was that of space: the manner in which rave activities intersected with urban geographies; the re-purposing of established spaces and the role of rave as a movement against spatial (and social) stratification.

As I discussed with George, I see this aspect of rave culture as signalling a point of departure from some of the general paradigms applied to the mid-to late sixties psychedelic scene. Although 'getting high' was something of a given in each case, I see the spatial co-ordinates of rave as being rather more horizontal as opposed to the verticality of Leary's vision of psychedelia. That's to say, rather than advocating an (essentially untenable) elevation beyond normative boundaries, rave culture occupied, transformed and re-used the existing infrastructure in pursuit of its ends. The whole notion of a warehouse party highlights that, like the early skater scene of the 1970s, the activity was not about finding an elsewhere but more about re-thinking the function of the post-industrial landscape. Inner space explored via a re-calibration of the alienating work space.

Rave's incarnation in Blackburn and Accrington is particularly interesting in this respect. According to the website Hardcorewillneverdie, this took full flight in April 1989:

Tommy Smith and Tony Creft take over the running of the illegal parties around Blackburn after the original organisers are arrested. With convoys of cars all tuned to 102.5FM the parties quickly grow in size and reputation. Almost every week empty buildings in and around the Blackburn area are descended on by thousands of ravers. Sett End, Bubble Factory, Unit 7, Pump Street and many more abandoned buildings,warehouses and even an old abattoir are used for parties over the coming months.

There's a suggestive psychogeography here in which Bey's notion of the temporary autonomous zone appears to be specifically grafted onto spaces of industry and commerce. "Sett End, Bubble Factory, Unit 7, Pump Street" were factory sites, commercial edgelands and container spaces. Some still are , others have ossified into seemingly 'public' retail centres. Either way, such temporary occupation and radical transformation at the level of purpose offers a model of narco-practice that is different to the philosophical utopianism of Leary's Millbrook. On a more speculative note, Sett End and another Blackburn rave site, Kent Street, were also the sites of long-running weekend flea-markets during much of the 1980s and 1990s. 

Sett End Road, Shadsworth, Blackburn (circa 2000)

As the stallholders left Sett End's car park on a Saturday afternoon and drove back through Shadsworth, the rave convey would begin to accumulate in the same spot, waiting for directions to the next occupation, be it warehouse or abattoir. I don't see this as an opposition. Instead it seems to me that two homologous economies - both autonomous and independent - used this isolated pub as their base of operations. The fluidity of these activities is a key part of their operations, but there may also be something about the particularity of the sites that also serve to attract such nomadism. Peter Ackroyd talks about certain parts of London (i.e. Clerkenwell) as spaces that maintain their own time zones. When plotting the countercultural map of the north, one might have to account for a similar sense of separation, a distinction borne out of the covert and plural use of certain continually resonant locations. 

*

Much of the history of rave in Blackburn, Altham and the North West is covered in Piers Sanderson's documentary High on Hope. Take a look at the film's website for news of screenings and release dates.

Bad Tripping

It's been a good couple of weeks for events and occurrences linked to the ongoing Bad Trip project. First, last Saturday saw the English Heretic / Exploring the Extraordinary event Weekend Otherworld. As noted in a previous post, I spoke about Performance and the manner in which magickal language has been used as a means of describing its cult status. This fits into the project because not only is Performance a classic cul-de-sac movie but its been co-opted and examined by a wide range of writers who have read the film as a terminal index for the decade: Zachery Lazar, Chris Petit, Alan Moore, Iain Sinclair. The last two are particularly interesting because Performance works - alongside Mike Hodges' Get Carter (1971) as the primary cosm for Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: 1969. Mid-way through, Sinclair 'materializes' as Norton, his space-bound time traveller from Slow Chocolate Autopsy (1997). Speaking in perfect Sinclair-argot, Norton speaks of Performance as "occult celluloid", dangerous material that's "liable to flare up". Certainly, the idea of Performance as being materially connected to 'dangerous' forces works as a key signpost for the way in which I see certain cultural artefacts from the late-1960s as having accumulated a persistent resonance. My point was that this aura relates to the manner in which such texts intersect on the basis of a shared contextual significance rather than a specifically thematic consistency. Questions after the talk brought up Frank Howard's The Other Side of Madness (1970). On reflection, I think the negative spider-web seen during that film's credit sequence offers a good way of mapping this material: a network of links that doesn't support a 'centre', but a constant process of proliferation. I was pleased to find that this take intersected in various ways with some of the other papers from the event, particularly Evie Salmon's brilliant take on 'the geographic turn' in art and film, Hannah Gilbert's thoughts on horror and anthropology and Andy Sharp's idea of the 'poetic conspiracy'.

On Tuesday night there was a very interesting discussion of the project on George's Bickers' excellent radio show Tripping in Babylon. The show is a brilliant discussion of psychedelia and narco-culture that features sharp eyed cultural analysis from George interspersed with some great music. George is doing a fabulous job in curating his shows and they're all well worth a listen. During Tuesday's broadcast he very kindly referred to previous lectures and public events I've done as part of the Bad Trip project. It was good to know that it has been of use to his work. Listening to TiB is like being guided through a fascinating, ongoing essay. The whole format seems like a really interesting way to develop and disseminate research. Check it out!