Ever since the accidental discovery of whale song in 1967, the idea of complex animal sentience has been gaining strength within the scientific community. A growing number of researchers and academics
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 journ
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 mythologica
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 Godzi
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
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
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
An expanded edition of the classic exploration of the English esoteric musical underground―with the first biography of Coil, Current 93, and Nurse With Wound.This newly expanded edition of England's Hidden Reverse, the classic exploration of the English esoteric musical underground that includes the first, and only, biographies of Coil, Current 93, and Nurse With Wound, is based on exclusive interviews and unprecedented access to all three bands’ personal archives. Together, these genre-defying bands and their circles represent the English underground in all its cultural, artistic, and sexual variety. Over four decades, the three intertwined groups have maintained a symbiotic, yet uneasy, relationship with the mainstream of popular culture, even as their music, beliefs, and practices have repelled them from it. Theirs was a clandestine scene whose work accents the many occulted peculiarities of Englishness that flow through generations of outsiders, channeling personalities as diverse
