The M.O.P. Radionic Workshop

A beautiful poster by Baron’s Alex Crispin, for the forthcoming Baron/Raagnagrok gig at Night of the Long Swords 8th Anniversary party.

It’s free, you will want to be there!

As part of the Brighton Fringe Festival, come see The Magician, Rex Ingram’s rarely-seen 1926 silent film so shocking that Aleister Crowley tried to ban it* – a ripping yarn of sorcery and seduction starring the mesmerising Paul Wegener as lecherous occultist Oliver Haddo.

With an introduction by Gary Lachman, and a live soundtrack by the fabulous Ragged Ragtime Band, featuring members of Blondie, Indigo Octagon, Raagnagrok and Time.

* Historical note: OK, this isn’t strictly the case, but it’s sort of true in a round about way…

Click here or below for booking details:

An extended interview with Paul Devereux and Jon Wozencroft about their Landscape & Perception project , for the Bite in The Wire 339. 

The tiny village of Maenclochog in Pembrokeshire, Wales, is an unassuming place, but its name, and its folklore, provide clues to the remarkable landscape that it inhabits. It’s said that alongside Ffynnon Fair, a nearby holy well, were rocks that rang like bells and these may have given the town its name: maen (stone) and clochog (bells). The rocks, the story goes, were broken up by locals who thought that their hollow tones suggested treasure, and in a way they were right.

North east of here atop the Preseli Hills is Carn Menyn, a ridge of dolerite, known as Preseli Bluestone, which forms the basis for neolithic tools found all over the UK. It’s thought that 80 large bluestones from the region once made up two concentric rings of Stonehenge, 200 miles to the east.

Around Carn Menyn are flat, fallen stones – like huge xylophones or, more correctly, lithophones. Grab a smaller rock and start banging on the larger ones and you will discover that these stones, and many others in the area, ring with rich, resonant tones that sound startlingly musical to modern ears. One has to wonder what ears 4300 years ago would have made of them.

It’s a question we can probably never answer, but clues can be found at Landscape And Perception, launched in March of this year by Touch founder and Royal College of Art tutor Jon Wozencroft, and Paul Devereux, author, researcher and editor of archaeological journal Time And Mind. Devereux is a longtime champion of archaeo-acoustics, the study of sound at ancient sites, as part of a wider mission to explore the archaeology of mind. Wozencroft first heard of Devereux’s work in the early 1980s via Chris Watson and Andrew McKenzie of the Hafler Trio, but they wouldn’t meet until 2006. The website is the result of that encounter.

Full interview here

Multiple 16mm film installation by Rose kallal.
Sound by Rose Kallal & Mark Pilkington using modular synthesizers.
Exhibition and performance at The Hidden Noise project space in Glasgow, UK March 23 – April 14 2012.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Researcher Chris Josiffe talks to Mark Pilkington about the strange tale of Gef, the talking mongoose (pictured below) of Cashen Gap on the Isle of Man (above) – a mischievous creature, imp or spirit that moved in with the Irving family in 1931. His antics made him, and them, internationally famous and created an enduring mystery that remains a classic in the annals of forteana.

This programme was originally broadcast as part of the series Strange Attractor on Air, on Resonance 104.4 FM in November 2010.

[Here's a direct link to the Archive.org page.]

And as a bonus, here’s Brian Catling and Tony Grisoni’s brilliant Vanished: A Video Seance (1999), a bold, dramatised retelling of Gef’s story by the spirits of the Irvings themselves:

Following the Austin Osman Spare exhibition at Glasgow’s Hidden Noise gallery comes an exhibition of 16mm films by New York artist and musician Rose Kallal – above you can see her film installation Mobius Coil from 2010 and below, The Middle Pillar from 2008.

I’m excited to be playing live electronics with Rose at the opening event on Friday 23 March from 7pm, and then again at Uncle Chop Chop at Nice n Sleazy at around 11pm. Rose will play drums for the UCC performance.

Rose’s films will be showing until late April at The Hidden Noise gallery, 1st Floor, 24 Hayburn Crescent, Glasgow G11 5AY.

With the news media on high drama alert over impending solar flare activity, it seems as good a time as any to post this video, shot in September 2011, of Raagnagrok Allstars grokking out at the Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club, accompanied by the dazzling Bardo Light Show.

Raagnagrok Allstars are, left to right: Mr Andy Cooke on bass, Mr Paul May on drums, Mr Zali Krishna on eelectric sitar, and Mr Myself, off camera, on eelectronics.

Meanwhile, after seven years in the bardo, the first Raagnagrok album, Man Woman Birth Death Infinity, is finished bar the tweaking, and should make an appearance some time this year….

One of the many highlights of The Wire and Sound & Music’s Off the Page festival this year was the presentation by Andrei Smirnov, director of the Theremin Centre at Moscow State Conservatory.

A preview of his forthcoming book, expanded from a recent exhibition, Smirnov’s talk outlined an early history of electronic music experimentation in Soviet Russia that, until recently, was almost entirely lost.

The 1930s saw the development of a wide range of techniques and technologies that, due to the political upheavals of the time, had been erased by the start of World War II, only to be (partly) re-invented by a second wave of  pioneers in the West, Brits like Tristram Cary and Daphne Oram in the 1950s, and Americans Bob Moog and Don Buchla in the 1960s.

Jaws throughout the auditorium dropped as Smirnov outlined and demonstrated early rhythm machines, sequencers, synthesisers and graphic sound techniques, such as Nikolai Voinov’s Paper Sound system for generating electronic tones and timbres. This is nothing less than a new chapter in the history of electronic music.

The above cartoon, Vor (The Thief), from 1934, employs Voinov’s system for its inventive score, and demonstrates some of the very modern sounds that emerged from these early electronic instruments. I believe that the image below is of one of Voinov’s multi-tracked paper scores.

Smirnov’s book Sound in Z is due from Walther Konig this Spring.

Thanks to Jim ‘Xylitol’ Backhouse for the animation link.

A brief taster of the musical delights in store during my talk at The Wire‘s Off The Page Festival in Whitstable tomorrow evening – dig the music kids!

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

I’ll send a small pressie (UK only I’m afraid) to the first person to identify all eight tracks…

Wednesday 15 February 2012 sees the first live performance of Magick Concrète, at The Old Hairdressers in Glasgow.

Here’s a taste of what you may or may not expect, an as-live recording made over the weekend, slightly trimmed, but otherwise unaltered. In Glasgow I’ll be joined by Drew Mulholland, of Mount Vernon Arts Lab, on guitar and FX, but it’s just me here:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

[...]