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An exhaustive investigation of the case of Gef, a "talking mongoose" or "man-weasel," who appeared to a family living on the Isle of Man.

The first in-depth biographical study of the British surrealist and occultist Ithell Colquhoun,This book offers the first in-depth biographical study of the British surrealist and occultist Ithell Colquhoun, situating her art within the magical contexts that shaped her imaginative life and work. After decades of neglect, Colquhoun's unique vision and hermetic life have become an object of great renewed interest, both for artists and for historians of magic. Although her paintings are represented in such major collections as Tate Britain and the National Portrait Gallery, Colquhoun's rejection of both avant-garde and occult orthodoxies resulted in a life of relative obscurity. Her visual and written works have only recently received adequate recognition as a precursor to contemporary experiments in magical autobiography and esoteric feminism.After rejecting the hectic social expectations and magical orthodoxies of London's art and occult scenes, Colquhoun pursued a life of dedicated spiritual and artistic enquiry embodied in her retreat to Cornwall. Genius of the Fern Loved Gully balances engaging biography with art historical erudition and critical insight into the magical systems that underscored her art and writing.

A memoir by a member of the Incredible String Band that charts a journey from hippie utopia to post-Woodstock implosion.Between 1967 and 1971 Rose Simpson lived with the Incredible String Band (Mike Heron, Robin Williamson and Licorice McKechnie), morphing from English student to West Coast hippie and, finally, bassist in leathers. The band's image adorned psychedelic posters and its music was the theme song for an alternative lifestyle. Rose and partner Mike Heron believed in, and lived, a naive vision of utopia in Scotland. But they were also a band on tour, enjoying the thrills of that life. They were at the center of "Swinging London” and at the Chelsea Hotel with Andy Warhol's superstars. They shared stages with rock idols and played at Woodstock in 1969. Rose and fellow ISB member Licorice were hippie pin-ups, while Heron and Robin Williamson the seers and prophets of a new world.Through a haze of incense and marijuana, they played out their Arcadian dreams on stages brilliant with the colors of clothes, light-shows, rugs, cushions, and exotic instruments. Like most utopias, the ISB's imploded. Never seeing herself as a professional musician, Rose retained an outsider's detachment even while living the life of a hippie chick. Her memoir gives a voice to those flower-wreathed girls whose photographs have become symbols of the psychedelic sixties.

An account of the English rock band Hawkwind shows them to be one of the most innovative and culturally significant bands of the 1970s.Fifty years on from when it first formed, the English rock band Hawkwind continues to inspire devotion from fans around the world. Its influence reaches across the spectrum of alternative music, from psychedelia, prog, and punk, through industrial, electronica, and stoner rock. Hawkwind has been variously, if erroneously, positioned as the heir to both Pink Floyd and the Velvet Underground, and as Britain's answer to the Grateful Dead and Krautrock. It has defined a genre—space rock—while operating on a frequency that's uniquely its own.Hawkwind offered a form of radical escapism and an alternative account of a strange new world for a generation of young people growing up on a planet that seemed to be teetering on the brink of destruction, under threat from economic meltdown, industrial unrest, and political polarization. While other commentators confidently asserted that the countercultural experiment of the 1960s was over, Hawkwind took the underground to the provinces and beyond. In Days of the Underground, Joe Banks repositions Hawkwind as one of the most innovative and culturally significant bands of the 1970s. It's not an easy task. As with many bands of this era, a lazy narrative has built up around Hawkwind that doesn't do justice to the breadth of its ambition and achievements. Banks gives the lie to the popular perception of Hawkwind as one long lysergic soap opera; with Days of the Underground, he shows us just how revolutionary Hawkwind was.

An exploration of the emergence of a new psychedelic spirituality in the work of Philip K. Dick, Terence McKenna, and Robert Anton Wilson.

Works by the polymathic French author Victor Segalen, including a previously untranslated essay, a novel, and a libretto.Victor Segalen (1878-1919) had one of France's most curious literary careers, applying his imagination to musicology, ethnography, exploration, medicine, synesthetics, Chinese history, and the occult. This collection gathers together his previously untranslated essay "Synesthestics and the Symbolist School” and his novel In A Sound World, a work of fantasy concerning an inventor lost in his own immersive harmonic space. Segalen's medical training (he had a career as a ship's doctor) inspired an interest in the link between the prevailing Symbolism of the time and synesthesia, the condition whereby one sense affects the perception of another.This edition also includes an essay by the musician and cultural historian David Toop that explores the historical context of Segalen's ideas. Also included is Segalen's libretto for Orpheus Rex, a collaboration with the composer Claude Debussy, which he would use as an opportunity for further explorations of his synesthetic concepts. This book makes available all three texts for the first time in English.

The first anthology on animal music and communication, with contributions from leading scientists, researchers and musicians.

120 vivid "exquisite corpse" drawings made by the outrageous artist, performer, and designer Leigh Bowery with friends and collaborators during the 1980s and 1990s.In the wild years of the 1980s and early 1990s, when central London was a clubbers’ paradise, a circle of young, queer friends, including the celebrated Australian designer, performer, musician, and provocateur Leigh Bowery and his Minty bandmates would get together at Richard Torry's Soho flat before hitting the town.To pass the time, the troupe would sometimes make “exquisite corpses,” employing a technique popular with the Surrealists to create collaboratively-drawn compound images of often outrageous characters.The 120 images collected here, assembled from the Richard Torry archive, showcase the acerbic wit, lysergic absurdity, and sometimes cruel gaze of the young friends, while presenting an exaggerated snapshot of the era’s styles, fashions, and obsessions.

Essays that trace connections between the work of Turner Prize-winning artist Tai Shani and the intellectual legacy of Charles Jencks, one of postmodernism’s most playful architectural thinkers.In this newly edited collection of essays, leading writers trace connections between the unique work of Turner Prize-winning multi-media artist Tain Shani, and the intellectual legacy of Charles Jencks, one of postmodernism’s most playful architectural thinkers. Catalysed by Shani’s exhibition The World To Me Was A Secret: Caesious, Zinnober, Celadon, And Virescent, developed for The Cosmic House in 2024, this far-reaching book draws upon the various mythologies metabolised by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. A surrealist exquisite corpse made real, the writings gathered here reanimate Frankenstein’s Monster within Jencks’ definition of Ad-Hocism, whereby the use of materials and objects for unintended purposes, might yield surreal results.  A collaboration between The Cosmic House and Strange Attractor Press, Cosmic Caesious, Cosmic Zinnober, Cosmic Celadon, Cosmic Virescent includes newly commissioned works by Anne Boyer, Annabel Frearson, Emily LaBarge, Bassem Saad, and Taylor Le Melle that explore themes of anthropomorphism, the tangled legacies of surrealism, and the Promethean impulse. The book also includes a foreword by Eszter Steierhoffer, Director of The Jencks Foundation, and an introduction and original text by artist Tai Shani.

The third and final volume of Ken Hollings' personal reflections on Trash Aesthetics. In Paradise, Hollings tells the story of three kings who squandered everything they had in a grandiose spectacle of waste. King Ludwig II of Bavaria, "King of Rock 'n' Roll" Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson, the "King of Pop," all shared the same doomed innocence. Their lives and early deaths were connected through individual displays of unfettered extravagance that brought them to the very edge of ruin. Each of them lived out their personal ideals of beauty and pleasure--even after the money was gone. In his reworking of Dante Alighieri's Paradiso, Hollings presents Heaven as a place of rebellious, but tragic, self-indulgence. As he notes in his introduction: "You have to be in Heaven to see Hell."

An innovate counter-history that places the liquid light show at the heart of a new understanding of experimental audio-visual art in the 1960s. Throughout the 1960s the liquid light show was the quintessential mode of countercultural expression: live, interactive, collaborative, acid-bright, and ephemeral. Flowering in coffee bars and discotheques, they quickly became synonymous with the wildest excesses of psychedelic art and popular music. But light shows also crucially inspired avant-garde artists and filmmakers to experiment with the performative elements of projection, taking film projection--along with hand-painted glass slides, colored inks, bodily fluids--outside of its traditional site of exhibition, and onto walls, inflatables, and skin. Sensual Laboratories traces the influence of light shows into the worlds of underground film and expanded cinema, exploring how these luminous attractions fundamentally altered perceptions surrounding the event of projection. Tackling a long-neglected subject with a broad and bracing comprehension of inter-media influence, this important book illuminates the vital yet long-occluded role that light shows played in the development of experimental art throughout the 1960s and beyond.

A collection of essays, fictions, and interviews exploring the weird temporalities of finance and catastrophe. Once, financial practitioners plied a hybrid trade as hydrologists, star-gazers, and weather-watchers who sought to discover the natural laws of value and exchange as they did the divine order of an unchanging nature. Today, corporate firms hire trend forecasters and scenario planners to play out strategic fictions in virtual worlds. Hurricane insurance markets simulate a turbulent climate to offer investment instruments to hedge against the risks of the stock market. And for financial astrologers operating in the city of London, celestial motions provide a cosmic map that orients the mood of terrestrial markets. Bringing together artists, researchers, and interstitial practitioners, Catastrophe Time! pays attention to the conditions of speculative knowledge on an increasingly volatile planet. Traversing a gray zone between rigorous research and operative science fictions, its contributors question how practices of speculation may transform, undermine, and at times exceed, the worlds they set out to model. Edited by artist Gary Zhexi Zhang, Catastrophe Time! explores the power of temporal technologies whether currencies, conspiracies, or simulation models to shape reality through fiction. By bringing together researchers and writers working at the boundaries of temporal practices, including Diann Bauer, Philip Grant, Bahar Noorizadeh, Habib William Kherbek, Klara Kofen, Kei Kreutler, Suhail Malik, Bassem Saad and Gordon Woo, this urgent volume seeks to make sense of the unraveling times in which we live.

"He walked into the turbulent super market. There were people everywhere. His eyes swept over the shelves and stabilised on a large stack of Pepsi-colas. He could almost experience the cool fizzy liquid descending his parched throat." Written by June-Alison Gibbons when she was only 16, The Pepsi Cola Addict is considered one of the great works of twentieth-century outsider literature. More than just a literary curiosity, however, this tale of a teenager whose passion for a well-known cola drink threatens to ruin his life is the uniquely vivid expression of a young woman trying to make sense of the confusing, often brutal world in which she found herself. Published in 1982 by a vanity press who took 800 pounds from its young author and gave her only a single book in return, it's thought that fewer than ten original copies still exist in the world. Shortly after its publication, June-Alison and her sister Jennifer would become infamous as "The Silent Twins" and find themselves cruelly incarcerated for over a decade in Broadmoor Hospital. This author-approved edition makes June-Alison Gibbon's remarkable vision available for the first time."--Provided by publisher.

The first full-color monograph on the work of acclaimed graphic artist Arik Roper. Arik Roper's vibrant psychedelic illustration and painting springs from the depths of a fertile imagination, invoking psychedelic visions, ancient dreams, and idyllic natural environments. Since the 1990s, his creations have appeared on rock and metal album covers of such bands as The Black Crowes, Sleep, Earth, Sunn O))) and OM, screen-printed posters, in books and magazines, animations, game designs, and beyond. Vision of the Hawk collects an epic selection of his art for the first time in a single volume, alongside unpublished material and sketches, and texts by Roper describing his creative process, as well as by some of his many collaborators including authors Erik Davis, Peter Bebergal, and Jay Babcock, as well as musicians Stephen O'Malley (Sunn O)))), Al Cisneros (Sleep, Om), and Matt Pike (Sleep, High on Fire).--mit.press.edu.

"While working as a photographer's model, gallery usher, and exotic dancer, Dorothy "Max" Prior witnessed the births of Adam and the Ants, The Monochrome Set, The Sex Pistols, and Throbbing Gristle, as well as drumming in her own cult band Rema Rema and recording with Industrial Records. Her exuberant commentaries, each presented as a stand-alone episode, illustrate the multilayered nature of the London music, art, and fashion worlds of the late 1970s, and the overlap between the early punk scene with the city's rapidly evolving club and queer cultures."--Provided by publisher.

A forensic investigation into a single LP: Dr. John, the night tripper's Gris-gris.Two-Headed Doctor is a forensic investigation into a single LP: Dr. John, the night tripper's Gris-gris. Though released in 1968 to poor sales and a minimum of critical attention, Gris-gris has accumulated legendary status over subsequent decades for its strangeness, hybridity, and innovative production. It formed the launch pad for Dr. John's image and lengthy career and the ghostly presence of its so-called voodoo atmosphere hovers over numerous cover versions, samples, and re-invocations. Despite the respect given to the record, its making is shrouded in mystery, misunderstandings, and false conclusions. The persona of Dr. John, loosely based on dubious literary accounts of a notorious voodooist and freed slave, a nineteenth-century New Orleans resident known as Doctor John, provided Malcolm "Mac" Rebennack with a lifelong mask through which to transform himself from session musician in order to construct a solo career. Somewhere between puzzle, experimental rhythm, blues disguised as rock, and elaborate hoax, Gris-gris was a collaborative project between Rebennack and producer/arranger Harold Battiste (at the time musical director for Sonny & Cher). A few brief sessions held at Gold Star Studios in Los Angeles brought together many of New Orleans' finest musicians, including Shirley Goodman, John Boudreaux, Plas Johnson, Jessie Hill, Ernest McLean, and Tami Lynn. Along with their complex histories, the cast of characters implicated in the story includes Ornette Coleman, Lafcadio Hearn, Zora Neale Hurston, Cher, Sonny Bono, Sam Cooke, Ishmael Reed, Black Herman, Prince La La, and many others. The story details in discursive style the historical context of the music, how it came together, its literary sources, production and arrangements, and the nature of the recording studio as dream state, but also examines as a disturbing undercurrent the volatile issue of race in twentieth-century music, the way in which it doomed relationships and ambitious projects, exploited great talents, and distorted the cultural landscape.

The history of India’s first electronic music studio founded in 1969 at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad by David Tudor.Subcontinental Synthesis explores the history of India’s first electronic music studio, founded in 1969 at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad with the support of the composer David Tudor. The essays and writings unravel the narrative and context surrounding the studio as well as the work of the Indian composers who created groundbreaking recordings during its four years of activity. The texts reflect on the role of electronic music within a post-independence India, considering its interconnections with experimental design, radical pedagogies, and the international avant-garde, as well as the encircling conditions of Western ideological soft power within the global expansion of Modernism.ContributorsGeeta Dayal, Alannah Chance, Matt Williams, Shilpa Das, Jinraj Joshipura, You Nakai, Rahila Haque, and Paul Purgas

A wide-ranging collection of interviews, anecdotes, essays, and ephemera concerning one of the most enigmatic bands to emerge from the 1960s hippy scene."Encyclopaedic in scope, passionate in tone, this book is a minotaur's labyrinth of information about one of the most remarkable groups in 20th century music. Be glad, for everything you need to know is here." (Rob Young, The Wire)First published in 2003 and long out of print, Be Glad For The Song Has No Ending: An Incredible String Band Compendium is the definitive book about the ISB. Containing a wealth of interviews, essays, and ephemera from the band's brief but tangled history, this new revised and expanded edition includes two new pieces by ISB member Rose Simpson on Witchseason Productions’ idiosyncratic offices and on recording with the ISB in the Sound Techniques studio, as well as interviews with Neil Tennant of Pet Shop Boys, folk musician Alasdair Roberts, and Ossian Brown of Coil and Cyclobe.Contributors include Rowan Williamson (former Archbishop of Canterbury), ISB manager and producer Joe Boyd, Andy Roberts, Billy Connolly, and Raymond Greenoaken.

A picture book to be shared and savored by both children and adults: a journey into a wondrous world colored by the stories we might choose to tell about it.A full moon after a wasp attack, poppies from a train, panning for gold in the River Cesecito, a bountiful pumpkin harvest . . . . Postcards for Mia is a joyful collection of hand-drawn and -painted postcards sent by anthropologist Michael Taussig to his granddaughter, Mia. From airports in New York to cemeteries in Colombia, confrontations with wild boars to conversations with well-dressed koalas, Postcards for Mia is a picture book to be shared and savored by both children and adults, a journey into a wondrous world colored by the stories we might choose to tell about it. Anthropologist Michael Taussig is renowned for his visionary explorations of color, magic, and myth, founded upon over forty years’ experience with communities in Colombia and Venezuela as well as research visits to Palestine, Kurdish Syria, Kabul, Alice Springs, Sydney, Venice, and Paris. This, his first fully illustrated picture book, provides a remarkably personal insight into Taussig’s unique way of seeing and responding to the world. Drawing observation and reverie into vibrant and humorous acts of vivid storytelling, this delightful scrapbook documents the warmth and excitement of an inter-generational exchange, inspired by the simple pleasure of recounting the excitement of one’s travels.

The first unabridged English translation of a classic work on dreams by an author regarded as the father of lucid dreaming.First published anonymously in 1867, Dreams and How to Guide Them is the lost classic of lucid dreaming—that is, the art of becoming aware that one is dreaming and then continuing to dream, whether to fly, have erotic encounters, or just explore the dream world further. It has long been a rare and legendary work. Freud knew of it, but never managed to find a copy, and surrealist André Breton begins his own book The Communicating Vessels by discussing it This is the first complete English translation—there was a heavily abridged edition in 1982, much-loved and also rare—and it is now published to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Hervey de Saint-Denys. This new edition is edited and introduced by Phil Baker, who traces the author’s life and connects his work with Tibetan Buddhist dream practices, and surrealism, as well as to more recent research in lucid dreaming.

The first walking guide to London’s role in the evolution of horror cinema, inspired by the city’s dark histories and labyrinthine architectures.Death Lines is the first walking guide to London’s role in the evolution of horror cinema, inspired by the city’s dark histories, labyrinthine architectures, atmospheric streetscapes, and uncanny denizens. Its eight walks lead you on a series of richly researched yet undeniably chilling tours through Chelsea, Notting Hill, Westminster, Bloomsbury, Covent Garden, and the East End, along the haunted banks of the river Thames, and down into the depths of the London Underground railway. Each tour weaves together London’s stories and takes the reader to magnificent, eerie, and sometimes disconcertingly ordinary corners of the city, unearthing the literature, legends, and history behind classics like Peeping Tom and An American Werewolf in London, and lesser-known works such as mind-control melodrama The Sorcerers; Gorgo, Britain’s answer to Godzilla; tube terror Death Line; and Bela Lugosi's mesmeric vehicle The Dark Eyes of London. Tinged with humor, social critique, and more than a few scares, Death Lines delights in revealing the hidden and often surprising relationship between the city and the dark cinematic visions it has evoked. Whether read on the streets or from the comfort of the grave, Death Lines is a treat for all cinephiles, horror fans, and lovers of London lore.

Core members of the legendary British experimental band Coil tell its story in the present-tense, as events unfold across their twenty-year history.Between 1983 and 2004 the legendary British experimental band Coil established themselves as shape-shifting doyens of esoteric music whose influence has grown spectacularly in the years since their untimely end. With music that could be dark, queer, and difficult, but often retained a warped pop sensibility, Coil’s albums were multi-faceted repositories of esoteric knowledge, lysergic wisdom and acerbic humor. In Everything Keeps Dissolving, core members John Balance and Peter Christopherson tell Coil’s story in the present-tense, and from their personal perspectives, as events unfold across their twenty-year history. Accompanied by their various collaborators, Coil describe the fertile eruption of ideas, inspirations, and stray tangents that informed their lyrical and musical visions—as well as those dead paths and castoff concepts that didn’t take root. No only a worm’s eye view of Coil, these interviews provide insight into the late twentieth century’s evolving British cultural underground as channeled through two of its most astutely mercurial minds.

A series of essays modeled on the Purgatory of Dante Alighieri—personal reflections, historical incidents, and unexpected mythological correspondences.“The obsession with Beauty and Virtue must inevitably bring Trash into existence. Trash offers a way of lifting their curse; it marks the end of all such fatal enchantments.” In this sequel to 2020’s Inferno, Hollings shifts his attention away from America in the Age of Pop to take a close look at European decadence and decay at the end of the nineteenth century. Purgatory follows the twin fates of Hallward and Hancock as they are drawn, like so many artists before them, towards the city of Paris. It was here that exiled Swedish playwright August Strindberg struggled to turn iron and carbon into gold, while the aesthete Sâr Péladan staged his sumptuous Salons de la Rose+Croix. Over a series of thirty-three essays directly modeled on the Purgatory of Dante Alighieri, personal reflections, historical incidents, and unexpected mythological correspondences are combined to uncover a restless underground labyrinth of alchemists, poets, painters, and philosophers. Together, their combined influence would shape not only the events of May ’68 but the emergence of a uniquely European form of Trash cinema devoted exclusively to beauty, sex, and despair. To celebrate the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death, Ken Hollings offers the reader a radical retelling of the middle part of the Divine Comedy. Hell may be a tough act to follow—but, as Volume Two of the Trash Project reveals, Purgatory can be just as weird and dangerous.

A series of painterly and poetic considerations on a feminized history of the rye fungus Ergot, the chemical basis of LSD from the author of Our Fatal Magic.From the cellular to the galactic, via Paleolithic cave markings to the trace impressions left by drone photography on our mind’s eye, incorporating dancing plagues, communist psychedelic witches, hyper-sexual fungi, chthonic descents, and skyward ascents, The Neon Hieroglyph weaves together a series of painterly and poetic considerations on a feminized history of the rye fungus Ergot, the chemical basis of LSD. The Neon Hieroglyph constructs a house of lyrical reflections for our ghosts to inhabit, a place where the gothic and the hallucinatory collide, where gothic affect and fractal dread form a mausoleum for psychedelic specters. And also the Sun! The Sun is a ghost that haunts the night! Framed with new essays by artist and writer Caspar Heinemann and anthropologist Amy Hale, Tai Shani’s The Neon Hieroglyph continues a journey into the post-patriarchal fictions that animated her first collection Our Fatal Magic.

The real history of the covey of attention-artists who call themselves "The Birds."A great deal of uncertainty--and even some genuine confusion--surrounds the origin, evolution, and activities of the so-called Avis Tertia or "Order of the Third Bird." Sensational accounts of this "attentional cult" emphasize histrionic rituals, tragic trance-addictions, and the covert dissemination of obscurantist ontologies of the art object. Hieratic, ecstatic, and endlessly evasive, the Order attracts sensual misfits and cabalistic aesthetes--both to its ranks, and to its scholarship.In recent years, however, the revisionist work of the research collective ESTAR(SER) has done much to clear the air, bringing archival precision to the history of this covey of attention-artists who call themselves "The Birds." Gathering the best articles of the last twenty years of The Proceedings of ESTAR(SER), this volume represents a landmark in the history of aesthetic practices, and will be a point of departure for future work wading the muddy marshes at the limits of historicism.

Texts explore the multifaceted conceptual practice of the artist Ilana Halperin.Ilana Halperin (b.1973) is an artist who shares her birthday with an Icelandic volcano. Working through the aesthetics of geology since the late 1990s, her multifaceted, conceptual practice unearths the intimate poetics of rocks, minerals, and body stones. Halperin''s fieldwork has led her from erupting volcanoes in Hawaii to petrifying caves in France and geothermal springs in Japan. Felt Events surveys the last two decades of Halperin''s output (1999-2020), representing a mid-career moment of reflection.Felt Events includes critical and experimental writing from international curators, Lisa Le Feuvre and Naoko Mabon, art historians Andrew Patrizio and Dominic Paterson, anthropologist Jerry Zee, and writer Nicola White. It also offers examples of Halperin''s performance lectures, some of which appear in print for the first time. This collection introduces Halperin''s work to new generations of artists, writers, and environmental activists--those who will shape the critical landscapes of the twenty-first century.

A work that combines biography and pyschogeography to trace Aleister Crowley''s life in London."I dreamed I was paying a visit to London," Aleister Crowley wrote in Italy, continuing, "It was a vivid, long, coherent, detailed affair of several days, with so much incident that it would make a good-sized volume." Crowley had a love-hate relationship with London, but the city was where he spent much of his adult life, and it was the capital of the culture that created him: Crowley was a post-decadent with deviant Victorian roots in the cultural ferment of the 1890s and the magical revival of the Golden Dawn. Not a walking guide, although many routes could be pieced together from its pages, this is a biography by sites. A fusion of life-writing with psychogeography, steeped in London''s social history from Victoria to the Blitz, it draws extensively on unpublished material and offers an exceptionally intimate picture of the Great Beast. We follow Crowley as he searches for prostitutes in Hyde Park and Pimlico, drinks absinthe and eats Chinese food in Soho, and find himself down on his luck in Paddington Green--and never quite losing sight of the illumination that drove him: "the abiding rapture," he wrote in his diary, "which makes a ''bus in the street sound like an angel choir!"