Energise That Melancholy! 2012 - 2013 Events, Releases and Projects

A brief update on forthcoming events, releases and related projects in the Calendar, an energised melancholic start to 2013!

* Thursday 13th December 2012, at Power Lunches in Dalston , supporting Mithras with our pals Mark and Zali's Raagnargrok

* 12th January 2013 - English Heretic present Black Harvest, at Our Black Heart in Camden With Support from Mithras and DJs.

A bleak new year ceremony, coinciding with the plough workers Straw Bear festival. This event also serves as a launch night  for the next single again titled Black Harvest. A pessimistic road trip, taking in corpse paths and the sacrificial king's Journada Del Muerto; the new single recites Rune poems from Danby church in Yorkshire where the lychgate seers would watch at the porch for the procession of the future dead. In our context the voyant's watch is a socio-political occult metaphor for a darkening land riven by psychic malaise. The single is also a Harbinger for the 2013 research project "Wish You Were Heretic".

We will also be premiering exclusive footage taken from the 2011 Straw Bear Festival at Whittlesea shot by English Heretic, a sombre and sunset procession.

* 17th February 2013 - English Heretic present "The Apartment Trilogy" at The Old Hairdresser's in Glasgow. 

We are delighted to be heading to Scotland for our first performance there. Taking place during the Glasgow film festival, "The Apartment Trilogy" is a creative magical investigation into Roman Polanski's three interior studies from Repulsion via Rosemary's Baby to The Tenant. Could it be that the first two films in the series inadvertently or presciently precipitated the murder of Sharon Tate in brutal melange of these films?

And was The Tenant Polanski's admission, unconscious or otherwise of his role and guilt in the celluloid prophecies of his earlier films. Taking props from Thurloes Beauty parlour in South Kensington, London, the actual location of the hairdressers in Repulsion, we will reconstruct an inner cinema of Catherine Deneuve's psychotic breakdown at the venue of the Old Hairdresser's in Glasgow.

A second set of performances by The Blue True and further acts to be confirmed will soundtrack key scenes from "Rosemary's Baby". The event will culminate with a showing of "The Tenant", Polanski's self starring paranoid masterpiece.

Releases and projects.

* Anti-Heroes CD/LP and Booklet is nearing completion and we are aiming for an Easter release.

Track Listing:

1] A Touch of Brimstone (for Peter Wyngarde)

2] Their Satanic Majesties In Jest (for Dick Bush)

3] Hell's Angel Blake (For Angel Blake)

4] Vaughan To Lose (for Dr. Christopher Evans)

5] Mallian Time Slip (for Ian Ball)

6] Riding Free (for George Selwyn)

7] 240 Hours (for Robert Cochrane)

* Magick-Concrete - The Invisible Canon (after Penderecki's Threnody for the victims of Hiroshima).

A major work by Magick-Concrete will see the light of day in 2013, we hope. Involving music, visuals and sculpture. We are also pitching for presentations and installations, so if the synopsis below interests you, please get in touch.

The Invisible Canon is a complex audio visual and linguistic word play taking its moniker from Penderecki's Threnody For The Victims of Hiroshima.

A layer of Penderecki's harrowing apocalyptic soundtrack includes a series of 36 voices termed "an Invisible Canon". Magick Concrete honour Penderecki's piece with a song for the Kwannon, the Buddhist Goddess of compassion, "she who hears the cries of the world", and "a perceiver of the voices of those in need of help". Magick Concrete will attempt to realise these cries using the prima mater of sound recordings taken from Hiroshima in Summer of 2012. The peace bell, the sound of cicadas and crows, the raw material, augmented with traditional orchestral instruments. The Peace museum at Hiroshima displays a photograph taken by  Yoshito Mastushige at 11am on the morning of 6th August 1945. It shows a scene of haunting desolation but is given an extra poignancy by the fact that the resulting picture is stained by the photographer's tears which he states covered the lens. The visual component of the piece will be a series of  images of Hiroshima peace park and displays of bomb destroyed Buddhist statues. The images will be treated with body humours - blood, sweat and tears. The photographs and sounds recorded by Magick Concrete this summer on a Canon digital camera. The camera company Canon took their name from Kwannon, the self same Buddhist Goddess who hears the cries of the world. The original company logo for Canon depicts the Goddess. Voice elements  include a poem by Hara Tamiki "In the fire, a telegraph pole".  Tamiki was a living victim of Hiroshima who committed suicide in 1951 on learning he was suffering from terminal sickness caused by the bomb.

- the development of the concept owes its inspiration to conversations with Dr. Hannah Gilbert.