Unearthing Forgotten Horrors - 9th November, Star and Shadow, Newcastle

English Heretic will be performing at "Unearthing Forgotten Horrors" next Saturday, 9th November. Iam very much looking forward to playing in Newcastle. The event has been lovingly curated by Darren Charles and Victor Janos. Alot of work has gone into it, so do coming along if you're able to, this deserves support.

For our part English Heretic will be performing a collision of material from "Anti-Heroes" along with a brand new piece from the forthcoming Mondo Paranoia.

Bringing together rare film screenings of key works from the golden age of UK horror, with an exclusive line up of musicians/bands influenced by them, Unearthing Forgotten Horrors is a celebration of horror in music and film.

Presenting North East (and English) premieres by outsider artists who operate on the occult fringes of the musical underground, Unearthing Forgotten Horrors, draws together a very special bill of eerie drones, psychedelic noise, and classic horror films rarely screened in cinemas featuring:

Black Mountain Transmitter
At an impressionable age Northern Irish musician and visual artist James R. Moore was drawn to a diet of late night TV horror double bills, VHS video nasties with pulsating electronic soundtracks and the Weird Fiction of H P Lovecraft. These influences now pervade the eerie sound world of Black Mountain Transmitter, most notably on cult releases "Black Goat Of The Woods" (2009) and "Playing With Dead Things" (2012), the first two instalments of a loosely themed 'Trilogy of Terror'.

Black Mountain Transmitter albums have been released by US label Auris Apothecary (aurisapothecary.org), Aurora Borealis (aurora-b.com) and Moore's own Lysergic Earwax ( www.lysergicearwax.bandcamp.com ).

Unearthing Forgotten Horrors marks the first live performance of Black Mountain Transmitter in England (and indeed outside the island of Ireland).

English Heretic
English Heretic is a creative occult organisation dedicated to the reification of malefic energy spectres and the adumbration of a modern qliphoth. In operation since 2003 English Heretic has ploughed the topsoil of horror film locations to reveal a delirious substrata of mythic truths. They have reported back their findings through numerous CDs, books, talks and performances of ritual electronics.
https://www.facebook.com/EnglishHereticOfficialOrgan

Culver
Lovers of drone and brain frying noise should need no introduction to Lee Stokoe's prolific Culver project. A member of Skullflower, Inseminoid and Indian Lady, Culver's sound perfects pitch black, tar-thick drones and crushingly heavy soundscapes which are genuinely sinister.

Through many releases, often micro-editions on seriously cool labels, a consistently macabre approach is applied sound and visuals across a mind-boggling body of atmospheric and horror obsessed work.

Psychogeograpical Commission
The Psychogeographical Commission was formed at the start of 2008 to explore the many interfaces between the built environment and the people who inhabit it through d￩rive, magick and sonic experimentation. http://psychcomm.bandcamp.com/

The Dead End Street Band
Drawing influence from the experimental scores to Jon Pertwee era Doctor Who, thirty year old horror soundtracks and with massive splurges of psychedelic noise, The Dead End Street Band pull no punches delivering their scum noise dirge. Fixated on the sleazier end of 70's horror cinema, this elusive three-piece rumble through some genuinely nightmarish soundscapes and hellish synth drones.

Several handmade editions on their own imprints and on Indiana's Occult Supremacy label have seen the band develop from home-made electronica through to pitch black, ultra morbid soundtracks from non-existent scuzzfests found in the darker recesses of underground cinema.
www.facebook.com/scumelectronics

Joseph Curwen
Joseph Curwen makes HP Lovecraft inspired ambient evil drone, based on that weird bit between life and death the day after a big party. All digital noise intended.
https://www.facebook.com/JosephCurwenDrone
http://josephcurwen.bandcamp.com/

The Tempel of Sekhmet
Ooft! Born in the ashes of the first Psychoheliophysics workshops, the subsequent asymmetric awakenings of the Bacchanale Operation and weened on esoteric apophenia. A supergroup of Newcastle//Glasgow//Ipswich-based sunworshipping occultists' suckled by the bitter lactations of M R James, China Mieville, Kaneto Shindo and Jean Painlevé. Spiked with the synaesthetic experimentation of the pre-stalinist soviet union. Developing Solar//Tellurian Circuits to carry out cthonic soil experimentation in search of buried suns and waning solar temples. With the intent to destabilise human neurophysical function over distance. The Tempel of Sekhmet issue a new warning to the curious: unleash your curiosity for all that is eldritch or else die the cold, cold death of doxic submission...
nb. Semantic meltdown may occur when taken in significantly large doses, Tempel of Sekhmet take no responsibility for any sensory or cerebral overload or awakening... Ooft!

Unearthing Forgotten Horrors will feature rare cinema screenings of classic English horror film Blood on Satan's Claw, and Peter Sasdy's masterwork of supernatural television The Stone Tape.

Andy Black Forest (Radio Black Forest) will DJ.

Saturday 9 November from 4.00pm at The Star and Shadow Cinema, Stepney Bank, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Tickets: £9.00 in advance from We Got Tickets: http://www.wegottickets.com/event/230122

The first 50 tickets include an exclusive handmade CDr mixed by Melmoth the Wanderer, featuring all of the artists on the Unearthing Forgotten Horrors bill.

"Anti-Heroes" talk and film 19th October

Talk and film at Volcanic Tongue Store 19th October, 7.00pm

The English Heretic occult roadshow takes to Volcanic Tongue. Expect an evening of revved up readings, films and soundtracks from their new project “Anti-Heroes”: a collision in the suburbs somewhere between the clinics of JG Ballard and the kitsch gnosticism of the Hellfire Club. “Anti-Heroes” is the result of a 5 year investigation into dangerous mangers constellated around the locations of Ballard's Crash, taking in its intersection with the scuzzy cult of Psychomania, suburban warlocks, and host of pop culture chimeras. “Anti-Heroes” also weaves in the poetic paradigm of Robert Graves' White Goddess to reveal its tendrils in the work of Ballard, the lives of tragic figures, and the folk horror of Blood On Satan's Claw.

English Heretic is a creative occult organisation, in operation since 2003. Over 10 years, English Heretic has set out to explore a new approach to ceremonial magic and archetypal psychology inspired by the outre work of Kenneth Grant, James Hillman, situationism and pop culture signifiers. English Heretic attempts to manifest a deliciously troubled soul of our world, through ludic and heuristic engagement with horror film, pulp fiction and the esoteric arts. They have released and reported their findings via numerous books, CDs and events.

More details and directions over at the VT site

Mondo Paranoia: A Medieval History Of The Early 1960s

The next English Heretic release Mondo Paranoia: A Medieval History Of The Early 1960s will explore the thanatological synchronicities of 22nd November 1963: the simultaneous deaths of JFK, Aldous Huxley and C.S. Lewis. Paradoxically 22nd and 23rd November also witnessed the activation of two pop mind bending Pop programs: The Beatles' world conquering second album and the first episode of Dr. Who.

With music constructed from forensic size sampling of JFK's funeral, amplifications from ancient television transmissions, field recordings at the Kennedy memorial at Runnymede and much more, Mondo Paranoia returns in style to the creeping ritual electronics of our first release Curse Of The Conqueror Worm. 

Pop culture considered as a vast necromantic spell book, life as one long katabatic voyage.

– the ideal companion for unraveling the plague of conspiracies that ravage our media landscapes.

Mondo Paranoia will be available as a limited souvenir edition CD and essay, or as a digital download.

***

Excerpt from 'Mondo Paranoia'

Our mythic inner life is the double of our literal life and to bear witness to a myth in reality is to kill that myth and start a new myth cycle.

By definition myth only exists as a metaphor, so when we act out myth and or bear witness to myth, our soul's journey move to another orbit, concentric to our previous trajectory, distilled with the essence of the experience before.

This process of deepening is analogous with the alchemical process and reflects much of the work of archetypal psychology – particularly the dalliance between literalism and “seeing through, or revisioning”.

With the assassination of President Kennedy 50 years ago on the 22nd November 1963, the mythic sphere crashed to earth leaving a debris of mutant pop Gods, fertilising with bizarre flora, our innocent fields, and opening the eyes of our inner cinema to a new reality, where memory could be directly burned upon by mediated experience. The kennedy assassination became the gold standard for studying the phenomenon of flashbulb memories.

The entire planet received news of the king's killing by violent intrusion into their mundane radio programme schedules. Orson Welles' War of the Worlds prank was merely a rehearsal for the shock tactic neural photography of the cataclysmic new bulletin. The power to apply darkroom techniques to the human psyche.

J.G. Ballard in his autobiography Miracles Of Life likened the assassination to the death of the corn king, J.G Frazer's agricultural christ and, like the death of a tribal king JFK's assassination re-energised us all and brought life to the barren meadows.

The high velocity Shakespearean psychodrama in the days following the assassination, the acting out of biblical justice by the killing of Oswald and the gothic state funeral  gave the public their enactment of the crucifixion. The blood on Jackie's Chanel suit a turin shroud for the future. She refused to change her clothing for the swearing in of LBJ stating she wanted the world to see what they had done to Jack. Her only regret was washing the blood off her face.

In 1895, The symbolist poet Alfred Jarry turned the crucifixion upside down by portraying it as the bull sacrifice of Caesar Anti-Christ, a Taurobolium, a blood bath in a cesspit. Replace Jarry's  Pompe Rouget with brain stained upholstery of the back seat of Kennedy's Lincoln convertible. Jarry also identified the doppleganger of myth exposed by bearing witness to such an event and the paradoxical awakening of the soul that had previously slept.

That the assassination of Kennedy was in fact the crucifixion of christ is ancient history, a medieval woodcut from a quaint but tired manuscript, that day when the 1960s will be along time ago is now.

Its Bayeux tapestry has faded.

Psychotic Geography

This weekend 20-22nd sees the 5th conference of Hannah Gilbert and Madeleine Castro's wonderful "Exploring The Extraordinary" event. There are plenty of fascinating talks lined up: Iam particularly looking forward to Mark Valentine discussing book hauntings, and to James Riley exploring William Burroughs' use of the tape recorder as a magical instrument.

My talk is entitled Fiction And Its Double. The title is a homage to Artaud's Theatre And The Double, and I'll be attempting to explain some of the intentions behind the last ten years of psychotic peregrinations and hyperbolic extrapolations. I'll be looking at the synchromysticism of James Shelby Downard as a key conceptual influence, Bob Black's polemic against the leisure complex as the moral molotov cocktail for English Heretic and James Hillman's psychology as a possible therapy for all this psychotic geography. I'll be using the latest project "Anti-Heroes" as a case study.  My argument is that just as Artaud called for theatre to rediscover its proximity to 'another archetypal and dangerous reality', we need to extend this call to arms to the theatre of our realities, and that we can do this by investing in the fictional charging of place, particularly by horror film and dystopian fiction: to up the ante on the civil war of historical sanity; in fact to up the ante on sanity itself.

Autumn Roadshow

A number of gigs and talks coming up this Autumn

* 23rd August  - MotherLive supporting Orryelle Denefestrate Bascule & Akoustic Timbre Frekuency
 details here: https://www.facebook.com/events/487457244658594/

* 20-22nd September - I'll be talking at Exploring The Extraordinary 5
details here: http://etenetwork.weebly.com/fifth-conference.html

* October - with Matt Shaw and John Bowers, venue and date to be confirmed

* 19th October - English Heretic Present "Anti-Heroes" at Volcanic Tongue
details here: http://www.volcanictongue.com/news

* 9th November - Live appearance at "Unearthing Forgotten Horrors" - The Star And Shadow,      Newcastle
details here: http://www.starandshadow.org.uk/on/event/1163

more on each event as they approach.

The Poisoned Chalice

A short post to really thank Gavin Semple for providing inspiration for the track Two Hundred And Forty Hours on our latest release. I read Gavin's excellent booklet on Robert Cochrane a few years back. It's called The Poisoned Chalice and is an incisive and well researched investigation into the end days of the Slough magister. Gavin's also been very helpful and supportive in discussion over this part of the project. Gavin recently pointed out a fascinating synchronicity in the death of Cochrane... Cochrane passed away on 3rd July 1966, after ten days in a coma. On 3rd July 1969 Brian Jones drowned and two years later on the same day, in 1971, Jim Morrison passed away in his bath tub. Of course the chalice in Tarot is synonymous with the cups and water. Perhaps this is the Poisoned Chalice. I made the allusion between Cochrane and Ian Curtis, but these synchronicities make it all the more "oo-ee-oo" to use Ed Sanders' phrase.

You can check out Gavin's blog, which includes a bibliography of his other work and news of a release from his sound project Spectral.

Cheers Gavin!

  
Two Hundred And Forty Hours from English Heretic on Vimeo.

"Anti-Heroes" CD and Book out now.

English Heretic present the results of a five year report, with a portmanteau of Black Plaque commemorations constellated in the suburbs West of London. “Anti-Heroes” excavates the intersection between the clinics of J.G. Ballard and the Hellfire Club's kitsch gnosticism, disinterring the suicide cult of Psychomania and celebrating the nihilism of George Sanders. Conjuring a host of clown demons congregated at the periphery of sanity’s goetic circle, necromancy and pop culture collide in the fast lane to create a casualty list of self-sacrificing warlocks and paranoid would be assassins. Unbuckle your seat belts and experience a near death trip along the luna corridors of Ballard’s Crash, accompanied by a litany of pathological spirits and pulp chimeras, remnants from a yellowing mashup of forensic fiction and cinema grimoires. Apprehend the aesthetic conspiracy of place as we unearth startling evidence of a May-Eve coven near Henley-on-Thames and realise the elements in your psyche that pertain to be poet or blood brother, mother, maid or pucelle.

Commemorating:
Dr Robert Vaughan - Hoodlum Scientist of JG Ballard's Crash
Angel Blake - Child coven leader in Blood On Satan's Claw
George Selwyn - Monk of Medmenham
Ian Ball - Dangerous working class dissenter of Uxbridge
Robert Cochrane - Suicidal witch-cult leader from Slough
George Sanders - Patron Saint of misanthropic cads



8 track CD of feel bad songs to accompany your eternal journey to Tartaus

60 page book, to while away time at the termini of life’s tragedy.

CD Track Listing

1: The Dangerous Gift
2: Hell's Angel Blake
3: Goetia AD 72
4. The Mall Timeslip
5. Heart Burial And Soul
6. Vaughan To Lose
7. Fungi From Suburbs
8. Two Hundred And Forty Hours 

Available at the shop