On Monday, May 12th, The Quietus will be teaming up with Faber Social to present a night of music, words and film exploring the British uncanny and modern occult in relation to our history, culture, landscape and society. This will take place at the Heavenly Social on Little Portland Street, London, with a bill of fare that will run a little something like the below, and you can buy tickets here. Doors will be at 19:00 and the evening begins at 19:30 sharp.
Mark Pilkington discusses England’s Hidden Reverse
Mark Pilkington of the Strange Attractor Press discusses the occult investigations of the English post-punk and industrial music scenes. Strange Attractor is currently preparing to publish an updated reissue of England’s Hidden Reverse, David Keenan’s history of Coil, Current 93 and Nurse With Wound, and the British esoteric, sexual, and musical underground of the 1980s and 1990s.
Mark Pilkington is a writer, musician and broadcaster whose most recent book, Mirage Men is a quest for the truth behind human sightings of UFOs, and the possible role of US intelligence agencies in creating and manipulating them as a means to conceal the testing of secret technologies. More information on Strange Attractor can be found here.
Derek Jarman’s A Journey To Avebury (1971)
We’re grateful to the estate of Derek Jarman for their permission to screen Journey To Avebury, the filmmaker’s 1971 short that acts as a bridge between his work as painter and director. Journey To Avebury sees Jarman’s Super 8 footage of the English rural landscape around the Neolithic henge bathed in a chemical yellow glow, a hallucinogenic or apocalyptic vision that seems to sit outside time. Read a Michael Bracewell essay on Magic and Modernity in British Art, featuring A Journey To Avebury at the TATE website here.
English Heretic
English Heretic will present a narrative of its commemoration of the bizarre kidnap attempt on Princess Anne in 1974, by Ian Ball. The talk will be interspersed with live remixes of extracts from the Black Plaque recordings released in April 2011, which was assembled from Ball’s explanation of the crime, news reports and royal wedding music. English Heretic will also discuss recent research linking the kidnap attempt with actions of the Symbionese Liberation army to reveal a delirious conspiracy firmly set in the parallax world of early 70s neuropolitics.
English Heretic is the moniker of multimedia artist Andy Sharp. In operation since 2003, English Heretic subverts geography and history to present a conspiratorial otherworld, drawing inspiration from speculative fiction, horror film, and situationism and releasing its findings via numerous books, CDs, talks and performances. A current preoccupation of the project is the creation of concrete irrational documentaries, with the aim of recasting the hard-hitting reportage of 70s TV in a magical light.
Sean Bonney
Coming on like a spittle flicking cross between LeRoi Jones and John Dee, Sean Bonney is one of the only political poets in England who truly deserves the title. The word ‘poetry’ doesn’t do justice to his outpourings. These are howled screeds, mantras for the dispossessed, curses scratched into the bus stop paintwork by an artist who knows how to wield the hammer and the scalpel with an equally devastating effect.
Sean Bonney’s books include Happiness, The Commons and Document: Poems, Diagrams, Manifestos. His work has been translated into several languages, and he has performed it at occupations, on demonstrations, in the back-rooms of pubs, in seminar rooms, on picket lines and at international poetry festivals. He lives in Walthamstow, East London. Visit his blog here.
John Doran – Staring At The Sea
Quietus Editor John Doran’s reading details a trip to spend the weekend at Dungeness in a 1980s German camper van in an ill-starred attempt to give up drinking. Due to overwhelming popular demand (three emails, one facebook post and a vague request from his mother), John Doran is publishing his first book via Strange Attractor Press at the end of 2014. The volume, adapted from his long running MENK column for VICE, concerns the author’s attempts to deal with alcoholism, enthusiasm for narcotics, mental health issues and a tendency toward bleakness in order to become a better father to his young son and less of a meff. To read more MENK, go here
Grumbling Fur Simulacrum System
Grumbling Fur are the duo of Daniel O’Sullivan and Alexander Tucker. Their second album of otherworldly pop, Glynnaestra, was The Quietus’ favourite album of 2013, and was largely written in recorded in the North London house owned by former member of Coil, and partner of Jhon Balance, Ian Johnstone. Having recently completed their forthcoming third album, Tucker and O’Sullivan promise "a DJ set – heavy on re-processing. Curdled Moon’s Milk." Read our interview with Grumbling Fur here.
