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Monday 15 December 2008

The very witching hour...

Resonance FM are broadcasting an interview with English Heretic, conducted by Will Stone, at midnight 15/16th December.

Details from Resonance schedule:

00:00
The Hour Of The Apocalypse
WhenTue, 16 December, 00:00 – 01:00
DescriptionThe Hour Of The Apocalypse English Heretic: Musician and researcher, Dr. Alain Champagne, discusses his efforts to commemorate England's notable historical people and places of sorcery, esotericism and witchcraft with Black Plaques, based on the English Heritage Blue Plaque.

www.myspace.com/thehouroftheapocalypse
http://resonancefm.com/schedule

Thursday 20 November 2008

Dayglo dreams

I have set up a new blog called Dayglo dreams.

The idea is document dreams of a “day-glo” nature. By that I mean, pop-culture influenced, non-anxiety dreams - no exam failure dreams, unless the dream is using pop culture imagery . These will be categorised and tagged in such a way as to emphasise our internal post-modern iconography - films, pop stars, brand names, tv programmes. The aim is to show, or at least document the prevalence of a new form of psychic currency in our subconscious imagery , as delineated by the likes of artist Jim Shaw (”Dreamt Of Drawings”, “Dream Objects”) and W.S Burroughs ( “My Education: Book Of Dreams”).

In conscious homage to Jim Shaw and Oulipo, I would like to extend entries to be represented in different media - music, painting, collage, film etc.

The blog hopes to create a forum whereby the nocturnal pop flotsam, can be categorised and re-worked to create some sense of a collective post modern soul.

Another aim is to tackle the unsatisfactory nature of those dictionary of dreams type book you often find in charity shops. Indeed there is much of the charity shop of the night about the dreams I am interesting in documenting. It might be that the visions of John Waters, George Kuchar and Jim Shaw are closer than we think and would like to think in documenting the modern psyche's alchemical mud. Our dreams are not populated by the Gods of Greece but by two-bit actors and self-publicising tv anchormen... Their monikers might be transitory but it is quite often all our modern soul has to work with.

In this respect I am encouraging folk to submit dreams they may feel represent this predicament, so we can also identify a hierarchy based on this trashy currency and create a taxomony that provides meaning and raw material for creativity.

Thursday 13 November 2008

Live In Leeds

A few photos from English Heretic's night of ritual electronics at the Termite club (Packhorse - October 19th). A good night by all accounts, with great support from Shemboid And Human Combustion Engine. Great hosts courtesy of Mel and Phil. Photos by Mel.




Oh Whistle And I'll Come To You



Altar of the Ritual Electronic Musician

Open The Mithraic Stargate!


Calling the spirits of The Tuba Veneris



Monday 27 October 2008

English Heretic Collection Part 2

Out now! The second exciting issue of The English Heretic Collection.


On August 12th 1944, Joseph Kennedy Jnr, brother of JFK was killed in a suicidal bombing mission over Blythburgh in Suffolk. Centuries earlier, almost to the day, a demon dog appeared in the same skies over the church, ransacking the nave and scorching its door. Following an obsessive path from our earlier investigations into the angeology of war, English Heretic achieve rapport with the revenant of the airman and conduct a series of operations to uncover its imaginal resonances and finally exorcise the troubled soul of Joseph Kennedy. Our research is presented in a 16 page colour magazine and a 30 minute CD taking field recordings from the abandoned air field in Norfolk from which Kennedy's fatal flight took off.




CD Track Listing
1] Theme From 'The Predictors'
2] Invocation Of Golohab
3] In This The Cruelest Month
4] The Exorcism Of Joe Kennedy

Available from The English Heretic souvenir shop - cost £8.00 including P&P.

Saturday 27 September 2008

English Heretic In Leeds!

The kind folk of the Termite Club are hosting a rare outing for English Heretic. We'll be playing our set of Ritual Electronics On Sunday October 19th, at the Packhorse in Leeds. Support is from SHEMBOID and HUMANCOMBUSTIONENGINE. Phil and I, will also be spinning track for our library of Musique Occulte. For more details see the flyer below:


Thursday 14 August 2008

Fleurs Du Mal

Corpse flower draws admirers
"A giant specimen of the world's biggest, smelliest flower has bloomed - and is drawing crowds despite its "rotting flesh" aroma.

The rare titan arum, known as the corpse flower due to its revolting smell, is drawing admirers to the multi-environment Eden Project near St Austell, Cornwall.

The ponging plant is in Malaysia area in Eden's Rainforest Biome - the biggest greenhouse in the world"

from MSN - what is it with MSN and its current weird story kink!

Thursday 17 July 2008

Final Churches Of The Northolt Apocalypse

Work has started on a Black Plaque for Robert Vaughan, anti-hero of JG Ballard's Crash. When English Heretic started one of its intentions was to commemorate psychopaths. Of course, the aim was never so obvious as to glorify serial killers in the tired tradition of industrial culture, but to draw attention to the archetype of the psychopath, the immutable weird of the nightmare. There is no better example in modern fiction than Ballard's hoodlum scientist, fallen TV angel of the M4 corridor.

As part of the project a sister blog has been set up:
The Hoodlum Scientist's Fieldbook

Though the idea of a Black Plaque for Vaughan was seeded at the beginning of English Heretic, much of the recent impetus and structure for the research has been inspired by the wonderful Ballard related blogs and articles constructed by Simon Sellars at Ballardian, Nina at Infinite Thought, and Owen at Sit Down Man, you're a bloody tragedy.

The first location research centres around Northolt in Middlesex, which Ballard's genius somehow manages to transform into the erotic suburb of a Paul Delvaux painting. The following entry is a personal rendering of Northolt through English Heretic's Ubu absurd lens...the usual obsessions: toponymic conspiracy; Osirian descent, urban Fulcanellian hermeticism...

In carrying out these researches I would love to hear and have join in, collaborators who share an interest and passion for Ballard. The project is a conscious homage to the great man himself.



Beyond Petroleum

The BP garage on the High Street of Northolt Village stands opposite the church. Much like the Christian churches that usurped the ground of older pagan sites of worship, it's refreshing to see the secular solar cult of Oil taking over. It is Sunday and inevitably the church is empty and there are queues at the diesel fonts. The BP motif strangely invokes Sol Invictus.

British Petroleum changed its name to BP in 2000, and introduced a new corporate slogan: “Beyond Petroleum”. It replaced its “Green Shield” logo with the helios symbol, a green and yellow sunflower pattern. These changes were intended to highlight the company’s interest in alternative and environmentally friendly fuels...

Of course the cult of Sol Invictus is associated with the sun god Heliogabalus who worshipped the black stone at Emesa a clear indication as to the corporation's carboniferous idolatry.

I would suggest the real intention of the new logo was to subliminally replace the cross in the subconscious mind of its devotees, that this is the place to seek sanctuary. Secondly given the martial nature of Sol Invictus, it was also to continue but render more subtle the link between war and oil. The shield was too crude a symbol of its true modus operandum.

I am fairly sure that when the rapture does descend, the populace will be flocking to the day-glo BP cathedral for their last hope of redemption rather than to the drab church across the road with its tired fears and proverbs.

Police Head Quarters: Hazardous Waters

“At the Northolt police pound I showed my pass to the guard, custodian of this museum of wrecks. I hesitated there, like a husband collecting his wife from the depot of a strange and perverse dream. Some twenty or so crashed vehicles were parked in the sunlight against the rear wall of an abandoned cinema. At the far end of the asphalt yard was a truck whose entire driving cabin had been crushed, as if the dimensions of space had abruptly contracted around the body of the driver”. - JG Ballard, Crash, Chapter 7



Metropolitan Police, Working for a safer London - CLOSED: the ultimate redundant gesture of our fearless crime fighters. Interestingly, on the High Street outside the tube entrance, there are two large banners attached to the street lamps: one warning “knives ruin lives” and the other warning potential burglars of the use of smart water as a detection tool. Now that the police station is abandoned, the car park inside would make an excellent venue for an outside concert. Savage Republic I recall played a gig in such a space.



In Crash, the police pound backs onto a derelict cinema. There is no sign of the cinema, merely wasteland. Perhaps in juxtaposing the station with the screen, Ballard was prophetically realising that crime fighting would be eventually relegated to a series of ad campaigns.




There is something rather Dr. Who like about the abandoned police station made all the more pronounced by the Chemical Hazard sign on the door. What alien toxin forced the constabulary to flee their headquarters at Northolt? Perhaps the smart water gained an intelligence of its own, replicated with the RNA of its host thief to create a super breed of luminous villain, impregnable to the vain pursuits of the hapless Bobbies of Northolt Police Station.


The Gospel According To David Francis, Used Car Salesman




Echoing Will Self’s platitudinous novel ‘Dave’, there is something quite salvational about the used car lot next to the police station. In previewing Northolt on Google Earth prior to visiting the place I had assumed the car lot was the police pound. Perhaps in a way it is. Dave’s tacky ads seem blissfully in tune with the current Kali-Yuga of the Credit Crunch. “Having difficulty with Finance” has the ring of “Jesus Saves” posters you get outside urban churches.




The cars in the afternoon light look that school of dead dolphins duped into Falmouth bay by Naval sonar or so the conspiracy went.

The British Cerberus

“We left the overpass and moved down a concrete road through west Northolt, a residential suburb of the airport. Single-storey houses stood in small gardens separated by wire fences. The area was inhabited by junior airline personnel, car-park attendants, waitresses and ex-stewardesses. Many of them were shift-workers, sleeping through the afternoon and evening, and the windows were curtained as we wheeled through the empty streets.” - JGB Crash, Chapter 9.





In framing this apparently monumentally dull photograph I wanted to slightly over saturate the scene reminiscent of the bleeding colours of a Parrian postcard. Ballard in Crash talks about the residents of Northolt being mainly Heathrow airport staff, so I thought it to appropriate to capture their habitat. Clearly something has escaped the quarantine of good taste and taken guard outside. A British Cerberus complete with dog collar, a Gothic monstrosity, curiously xenophobic, I was reticent about getting to close to it for fear its owner might bite.

Subway Of Calvary



At the entrance to the subway, a white shroud lays discarded or perhaps waiting a future occupant. I couldn't tell whether it was a shell suit or a forensic officer’s apron. Whatever the material, though I felt I should take it as an offering, a uniform for future ritual use, I also felt too frightened to touch it: as if it was impregnated with supernatural vril, that would transform me into a messiah of the underpass or more worryingly the pharmakos of an urban Masonic sacrifice. In true Shelby-Downard fashion the proximity of railway line and the police station combine to create that world-as-chessboard paranoia of Kill King 33.

Of the colour white Fulcanelli writes:
“The bienheureux (the blessed ones) – those who have been reborn and washed in the blood of the lamb – are always represented with white garments.. In Egypt, the shades were similarly dressed in white. Ptah, the Regenerator, was also clad in white, in order to show the new birth of the Pure Ones or the White Ones. The Cathars, a sect to which the Bianchi of Florence belonged, were the Pure Ones...”

It's interesting to see how people now scoff at white tracksuits as the garments of the underclass... but I think of Joseph and Mary and Godard's depiction of the virgin working part time at a gas station in “Je Vous Salue Marie”, a truly Ballardian rendering of that post-modern stele: the petrol pump.

Demon Traps


The garages remind me of the terraced streets of tombs at Montmartre Cemetery. This is where I expect the souls of the inhabitants of Northolt reside. In fact these aren’t really garages but elaborate spirit traps, demon bowls, and canari. What amorphous and autopsied Roswellian specimens are contained within? I now suspect the Turin shroud at the entrance to the subway to be the shed skin of one such inhabitant: the fluorescent and criminal mutation that escaped Quatermass style from the Police Headquarters.

Thursday 10 July 2008

Ghost Slug

Echoing Dr Who's "The Green Death":

Ghost Slug found in Cardiff
A carnivorous slug which sucks worms in "like spaghetti" has been found in British gardens for the first time, biologists said.

The Ghost Slug, which has never been seen before in Europe, has turned up in a garden in Cardiff and nearby Caerphilly to the amazement of experts.

A similar type of creature - which is completely white and without eyes - is normally found in Turkey and Georgia.

Monday 23 June 2008

Inconstant SHELLowness leads to Evil

Mad Max II comes to the UK.... It was bound to happen...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/7469216.stm

Farmer's wife dies in diesel raid
A farmer's wife has died and her son left badly injured after a raider tried to steal fuel at a County Durham farm.

Police said William and Rosemary Dove spotted a man taking diesel from a pump at East House farm in Bishop Middleham, on Sunday night.

Mrs Dove, 68, collapsed and died shortly after making a 999 call to alert police to the raid.

Her son, James, suffered a broken hip and head injuries after being clipped by the thief's getaway vehicle.

He was taken to the University Hospital of North Tees, where his injuries are described as non-life threatening.

Saturday 21 June 2008

The Blade Of My Sensibilities

A while back, I fed the "Heuristic England" blog through a Markov Chain Language Generator. I was very pleasantly surprised by the results. The sentences appeared to manifest the germ of a hallucinatory reality that pointed out to myself at least personal truths but with the furniture of english heretic subject matter. In other words a hint of a personal mythos, encapsulating the imagistic totems of my external pre-occupations. In fact one of the most esoteric aims of English Heretic was exactly this. It's also been my intention to develop a creative mythos from English Heretic... the web site being a demonstration of an heuristic and emerging system, from which to launch a platform of hermetic fiction. The results of the Markov Chain experiment seem to bear witness to that intention. Whilst they might appear somewhat ellipitical, the following examples to me feel very significant and represent a set of results I intend to mine, exhaustively. As I alluded to, in the recent online interview at musique machine, they perhaps represent the instruction manuals for the furniture of my future imagination:


The family, I found out from polite if somewhat diversionary conversation, came to the french windows and opened them to the ground and hand cuffed, my wife rushed into our attic study.

It was Wyard who was attempting to embroil himself a fantasy of discovery of the coven's woodland procession.

With his last strength Wyard fell into the room from some ante chamber within the predicted parameters of the woman at the achingly timeless hamlet of Bix Bottom

Back in the afternoon, he noticed the movements of brutal murder, a ceremonial nature and the nihilistic abyss of the right foot

I decided I would use the May Day Bank Holiday weekend to visit Medmenham abbey and the clock against the marble mantelpiece.

Neglecting to properly dry out the tape, Wyard carelessly hacked at the boundaries of an aristocratic Satanist, Johnny Alucard.

Bush choreographed the film's most chilling moment arguably being the emergence of the town's future petty criminals

A low budget cult film from 1969, called "Blood On Satan's Claw, by an anomic gang of sociopaths led by Neal Collins' sibling.

Mostly his findings consisted of no more than a trivial detritus jettisoned from the film set intent on preventing me from carrying out my researches

Neglecting to properly dry out the tape, Wyard carelessly hacked at the centre of the online community

Two youths were being hauled violently from their stolen vehicle by a feeling of foolishness

Revolted and yet with a laurel of blossom: “the film's most chilling moment arguably being the emergence of the less desirable catchments”, my wife yelped excitedly

Within the forum, a clique of buffs had formed who were especially interested in the rotting remains of a neurotic past, washed upon the rippled beach of his more extrovert self, lurking on the sofa, his adolescence, the clouds would reverse at speed across the lawn.

Perhaps she was correct: maybe the church had been somewhat under whelmed by the cult

As I drove the short distance to a cliff edge

He like to imagine this cargo to be the assets of some grand conspiracy.

The meaningless of his more extrovert self, lurking on the 1960s into the unbearable light and the ruins of St. Bartolph's church

Close behind the ageing brown leather sofa on which stood an Art Nouveau clock


The maiden is forced to consummate a mock marriage, with a laurel of blossom: the film's one highlight: a classic calling down of count Dracula in the desert by Satan

For years he had ostensibly offered his hand in perspective.

A curious phenomenon: Wyard had a wooden veneer of the film

Seemingly suspicious of my adventure, I feel it is probably worth mentioning the rough outline of the room.

They were no longer basking sky ships, but penumbral watchers, monolithic guardians at the damp cellulose, the blade of his sensibilities reflected in a pathological reclusiveness, an English hikikomori.

Thursday 19 June 2008

Lavenham: The Medieval Disneyworld

Lavenham, much loved site of Heresy, famous for the witch burning scene in Reeves' Witchfinder General has been rebranded.... Personally I'd love it to become a medieval Disneyworld and would gladly volunteer to take part in the parade ... as Matthew Hopkins...


From Msn News:

"Planners rapped over cottage shade
Planners who ruled part of a white cottage should be painted pink have been accused of creating a "medieval Disneyworld" in a picturesque village.

Holly Bellingham was told the current shade of her five-bedroom grade one listed home in Lavenham, Suffolk breached planning rules.

Now she has been ordered to paint part of the property pink to comply with regulations"

Thursday 1 May 2008

Medieval Ontology Today: Garden Of Earthly Delights

I often find the comments on The Sun's message board contain interesting religious and apocalyptic visions.... the following Boschean images are snippets from a recent headline item, which I suspect readers will have no difficulty guessing..

1]This evil monster should be stoned to death, hung and left to swing or better still thrown to the tigers/lions and torn apart. He deserves to suffer after what he has done.

2]This guy's pure evil!!!! He even looks like Sadam!

3]I hope that when the time comes for him to die and he meets his
maker I hope he is cast into an eternity of hell and damnation.

4]This is the kind of sex fiend who should automatically be castrated as part of his sentence.

So constructing a narrative from the imagery:

we have...a criminal is cast into a pit of damnation. A giant knife first cuts off his testicles, he is then tied to a post stoned and hanged. He is then taken down and thrown to an arena of lions and tigers which tear him apart. another one is cast into the pit, he looks exactly like the last.. this cycle goes on forever.

I suspect most of the commentators are not familiar with Bosch, though they do manage to create a vista that impressively recapitulates his "Garden of Earthly Delights"

The American writer Peter S. Beagle describes Bosch's painting as 'an erotic derangement that turns us all into voyeurs, as a place filled with the intoxicating air of perfect liberty', which i think has interesting correspondences with the news item these commentators are grasping at providing justice for. The endless diagrams of the cellar architecture look like DIY manuals, for future interior designers intent on creating their own place filled with the intoxicating air of perfect libertinism...

Sunday 13 April 2008

About time too the c**nts


thus was the comment by the bald headed, cockney gangster standing in the middle of the Carpenter's Arms following English Heretic's unwitting literal invocation of the lines "Silence, silence, the living God beyond decay..." as their amps blew half way through opening the Mithraic Stargate. Undeterred by the disdain of the hackneyed henchman, English Heretic will be venturing North this weekend to play at the wonderful termite festival in Leeds. We will be performing our ritual electronics on Sunday 20th April at the Hyde Park Picture House.

Tuesday 1 April 2008

The future furniture of my imagination

For those interested, there is an interview with English Heretic over at Musique Machine conducted by Roger Batty.
Read here



Dr Champagne holds forth from his think tank.

Thursday 6 March 2008

The London Tauroctony


As part of the opening of the "New Dark Age" art show curated by Dean Kenning at Hats Plus, English Heretic will be performing a set of ritual electronics on March 20th at The Carpenter's Arms, Kings Cross Road, Kings Cross London. A celebration of the Mithraic festival of the Taurobolium, the order of service is (provisionally):

*Kings Cross Black Magick Night
*Black Venus In Furs (A setting to ritual electronic rock of The Tuba Veneris)
*The Mystic Art, Anthem of English Heretic
*Prise Open The Mithraic Sarcophagus (A rendering of the Mithraic Liturgy)
*Taurobolium AD 2008

English Heretic for this ceremony will be:
Dr. Alain Champagne - guitar, electronics, gong and vocals
Sebastian Copely-Syle - guitar,flute,singing bowl and vocals
This event is ticket only, and performance will start at 10.30pm. If you are interested in attending contact The English Heretic box office at