English Tripping

Poster for the Cambridge leg of the English Trip tour

Ahead of tomorrow night's event, here are some links of interest: 

• Tickets and info
• An Augury of Bones: John Doran's notes on the tour so far
• Cambridge 105 Fm interview with English Heretic about The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue

As mentioned in previous posts, I'll be presenting 'Psycho / Geography', a spoken word set with Evie Salmon: 

Psycho / Geography is an experimental lecture for two voices. Using half-remembered anecdotes, strange visuals and the pages of true crime paperbacks James Riley and Evie Salmon will recount a bad trip to through Bradford and the psychic territory of Stephen Griffiths, the Crossbow Cannibal. Based on Riley’s eccentric journeys at the helm of a travelling microcinema, Psycho / Geography is one part travelogue and one part spurious celebration of cult film.

An English Trip

In May I'll be taking part in An English Trip, John Doran's Quietus-backed tour to coincide with the publication of his book A Jolly Lad. I'll be doing a spoken-word set with Evie Salmon based on a road trip to Bradford. It'll be a mix of material from Road Movies and The Bad Trip: part travelogue, part spurious celebration of cult film. A psychogeographic mash-up of half-remembered anecdotes and true-crime paperbacks.   

I've seen John read before and he puts on a good show. The gig has been co-ordinated by English Heretic who will also be performing. Very excited to be part of this....

For venue and ticket information go to the English Trip Facebook page. You can also read a good interview / article with John about the book and the tour over at The Quietus. 

Eerie England

It was good to meet up with the writer Robert Macfarlane earlier in the year to discuss shared points of interest in occulture and the English landscape. I'm happy to see that the conversation and Robert's wider research has yielded The Eeriness of the English Countryside, an evocative article in today's Guardian. Check it out for an interesting take on the territory covered by The Alchemical Landscape. Also, head over to Sound Mirrors for a post about the article that includes fascinating links to Samuel Beckett and Delia Derbyshire.

Alchemical Report

I'm happy to report that last week's symposium, The Alchemical Landscape was a great success. My thanks to all the great speakers who participated and to everyone who came on the day. We had a sell-out crowd and lots of interest which was very encouraging. Obviously there's lots and lots to process but two focal themes that carried resonance for me were: the semiotic implications of imaginal practice and the theoretical overlap between projection and mediation.

It was extremely interesting to listen to the various ways in which the day's speakers figured the relationship between inner and outer landscapes. There was a productive movement away from treating 'reality' and 'imagination' as binaries and an appropriate pressure was placed on the various grammatical conjunctions that structure these links. Phrases like "as if", "either / or", "to be" and "or perhaps" were often unpacked in order to get to the crux of practices as diverse as mythography, crop circles and ritual-based art. Similarly, 'conduit' was a word that came up quite a lot. This offered a certain image of the artist as a mediator between landscape and artistic object. Given the nature of the material discussed what emerged was a kind of dark Wordsworthianism: a heightened sensitivity to the landscape but one suffused with the imagery of horror cinema, death rituals and demonology. At the same, presentations by English Heretic, The Haunted Shoreline and Phil Legard suggested that their acts involved communion with an 'other' or at least involved a level of generative autonomy. Particularly English Heretic's conception of the 'richochet' pointed to the sense that the various acts performed could have something of a life outside their contexts of production.

Mark Fisher's reflections on Patience (After Sebald) (2011) by Grant Gee come to mind here. Writing in Ghosts of My Life (2014), Fisher summarises Richard Mabey's responses to the film:

Sebald used Suffolk as a kind of Rorschach blot, a trigger for associative processes that take flight from the landscape rather than take root in it. In any case, Mabey wanted a confrontation with nature in all its inhuman exteriority. He sounded like a Deleuzean philosopher when he expostulated about the nested heterogeneity and autonomous poetry of micro ecosystems to be found in a cow's hoof print; of how it was necessary to "think like a mountain", and quoted appropriately Virginia Woolf's evocation of a "philosophy and a dreaming land".  

On one side there is the idea of projection, seeing the landscape as a contact surface for pathetic fallacy. On the other there is the sense of parallel sentience and non-human intelligence which may or may not offer a port of entry. Similar issues are at play in Patrick Keiller's Robinson in Ruins (2012). I think further lines of investigation within this field should attempt to specify and theorize this oscillation as it plays out in the works considered, not least because the precise role of the human constitutes a key point of concern when developing an ecologically focused critical discourse.

A futher point of interest linked to the above was the autobiographical focus of the projects under discussion. Many of the papers made productive recourse to personal material and individual experience formed the lynch pin of the discussions. Given the role of mythography, tricksterism and hauntological history that went alongside this personal investment I think there's something worth considering here. Why this recourse to autobiography and why the use of a seemingly autobiographical mode to frame projects which veer so considerably towards the speculative? My initial take connects the approach to notions of home and homelands. Many of the landscapes considered were not just personal but local. The various - often ritualistic - acts outlined at the symposium seem to have been oriented towards establishing a physical and psychic stake in the landscape. With the present economic backdrop maintaining an obsession with property it seemed like the exploration of certain organic and clthonic properties operated as either a riposte to commercial cultivation or an attempt to gain a psychological foothold in the absence of material/economic anchorage.

This is something I've had in mind recently when driving through the priced-out commuter belts of Hertfordshire. When I think about these drive-way villages through the hazy, half-remembered lens of Usborne's image of the English village, they seem significantly more open. Another way of approaching this might be to ask, what is is about the uncanny that makes us feel at home? 

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The symposium was intended as a launchpad for a wider research project and a series of events over the course of the next 12 months. Please check the The Alchemical Landscape website for updates. Use the contact e-mail to get in touch and to be added to the mailing list.

The 1960s at Brunel

Many thanks to Philip Tew and Nick Hubble at the Brunel Centre for Contemporary Writing for setting up the symposium The 1960s: A Decade of Post War Writing. It was good to be involved and to be speaking at the Artaud building. Amongst great papers on New Worlds, B.S. Johnson, Ann Quin and Margaret Drabble by Christopher Daley, Philip Tew, Melanie Seddon and Joseph Darlington, I presented a talk as part of the ongoing Bad Trip series called 'Terminal Data: Moorcock, Ballard and the Fiction of the Decade's End'. The idea was to look at The Final Programme (1968), Crash (1973) and The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) as texts that have been appropriated as catastrophic icons. My starting point was Iain Sinclair's opening statement from his 1999 BFI book on Cronenberg's Crash (1996):

Crash, the novel by J.G. Ballard, appeared in 1973, one of the cultural markers that signalled the end of the 60s. All the elements in the book – characters, landscape and psychopathology – had been drilled and rehearsed through a series of earlier texts, notably The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), where the feral Vaughan first appears.

The argument discussed the signification of "the end of the 60s" and suggested how Moorcock and Ballard's fictions, both essentially mid-decade texts (The Final Programme being written largely in January 1965), deviate from the basic narrative suggested by this trope. This, despite their obvious suggestiveness and symbolic synchronicity with the likes of Altamont and Manson. Some reference was made to Jodorowsky in order to posit the type of metaphorical economy one might wish to apply to Ballard's focus on "hidden logic". 

The Alchemical Landscape

A website relating to The Alchemical Landsape symposium has gone online. Here you can find full programme details plus information relating to the venue and ticket purchase.


http://thealchemicallandscape.blogspot.co.uk/

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.