"enough is as good as a feast" (interview on reissue-gigantism + nostalgia-wallowing audio greed aka the atemporal all your can eat buffet)

 did an interview with a Swiss journo, no idea if he used the quotes... here they are (waste not want not as me old mum likes to say... another maxim of her's appears later)

- Since we buy these CD boxes with all the extra tracks but rarely listen to those because there was a reason at the time to not publish them my question is: Do you see the power of the fetish at work here?

I don't know if it's as psychologically complex as fetishism, it's more simple greed - you've consumed the major works by the artist you love, and maybe all the stuff released in their lifetime, and you think, I want to keep consuming. I want to keep eating this good stuff, and maybe even the less good stuff will still have some flavour, some nutritious value. So you convince yourself that all these unreleased tracks - the alternate takes, the demos, the live versions, the tracks that the artist didn't consider good enough to release at the time - that these are worth listening to. And there is a psychology of consumerism where it is enjoyable to spend money - so these repackagings are excuses to get the credit card out. 

There is a great English expression, a sort of maxim: "Enough is as good as a feast". It's the kind of thing my mum would say, basic common sense wisdom. What it means is that once your belly is full - there is little further to be gained from eating anymore. The satiation point should be your stopping point, regardless of all the tasty looking things arrayed on the table. It doesn't quite apply to music, because it's not a physiological appetite. But if you think about in those terms, you might decide "actually the Beatles put out in their lifetime all these great albums, and non-album singles with awesome B-sides like "Rain" and "I'm Down" and so forth.  That really ought to be enough for anyone. Why not stick at that - however many hours of consummate brilliance that all adds up to?  Why feel like you need to hear the alternate versions of tracks whose definitive form was achieved and released? All the prototypes for "Strawberry Fields Forever"."  In other artforms, only scholars have interested in the draft versions that authors wrote of novels, or all the things they cut out and discarded. Only a very few cineaste fiends want to see the Director's Cut of movies, or the out-takes and bonus bits on the second disc of the DVD or Blue-Ray. In music, though, there seems to be a larger appetite for all this extraneous material. 

- The sixties still cast a spell over our present, especially music-wise, why? Because of the baby-boomers who have money to spend - or because the music was better at the time?

I think there is a romance of the early days of something - when it is emerging. The Sixties was a tremendous surge of innovation in songwriting, lyrics, guitar playing, what could be done in the recording studio,  even what could be achieved in terms of live performance and amplification. There's was incredibly rapid evolution, and a lot of people trying things for the first time - like the Beatles and Byrds with their Indian music experiments. But mostly the music revolution seemed to be in synch with a larger revolution. People talked about the Movement, or the Underground, or simply the Revolution - and music was right in the centre of things but so were a bunch of other things. It was like a pan-cultural surge of innovation and transgression and emancipation. It matters to the baby boomers who can remember it, but it also has a powerful pull on the imagination of subsequent generations. Even as I was into punk and postpunk, I was fascinated by the Sixties and read books about it and listened to the records. I am technically a babyboomer by age - born 1963, the last year before the cut-off point. But really my generation is the next one, Generation X. And the 1960s seemed to me not a discredited thing but really the previous great revolutionary phase that punk and rave and shoegaze all had some kind of relationship with.

- „We will never agree as we agreed on Elvis“, Lester Bangs famously wrote in his obituary of the king. Don’t you feel as a writer about music that the fragmentation of the genre in the age of YouTube will make the narrative more difficult, even obsolete?

It makes it more difficult but also more urgent and essential. You can enjoy music from the past without any sense of history, but if you want to understand it, you need a sense of chronology and of context. 

What has gone - and what young people can't understand - is the idea of adversarial energy in pop culture. The idea that being into punk meant rejecting progressive rock and Steely Dan sophisto-rock - it doesn't compute for them, these kind of schisms and divides. Streaming culture and the internet culture has eroded this idea. You can be into anything, you don't have to take sides. People still have things by which identity formation takes place, but music is not really part of that process. You can be into punk and alternative type rock, but also into rap, but also into dance music - all at the same time. . It's all there for the feasting on.

Spam Risk / Scam Risk

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This scam-spam was probably generated by AI but I would really like to believe a human was clueless enough to describe Radio 4 to me, a British born person, as "a Hot Adult Contemporary station"

Hauntology Parish Newsletter - "Feint May" Edition: Kilkenny Electroacoustic Research Laboratory; Boards of Canada; Keith Seatman; Fil OK / We're in the Water; Naomi Elizabeth; Haunted Generation; A Year in the Country

 Goodness, but it's been glorious out there in the parish lately.

The combination of all that heavy rain earlier in the year - and the spell of cloudless skies and midsummer heat in late April -  resulted in a virulent verdancy I've never seen before.

What did the poet say? 

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

    It will flame out, like shining from shook foil

Dancersend was incandescent last week.

And then, the other day, driving past the station and through those four or five fields of rape (such an unfortunate name) I was floored, overawed, by the flaming fluorescence of yellow stretching out in every direction as far as the eye could see. 

A vibrancy of hue I've never seen before. 

This photo - of a different field, at a less bright time of day -  doesn't nearly do it justice. 

And of course the bluebell woods -  again, so hard to capture on camera, the gaseousness of that peak-bloom purple haze.  

But I've gushed about this time of year in England before. 

So - even though the birdsong is our surroundsound symphony these days - we turn now to musical happenings of note in the parish.

From our Emerald Isle twin town Kilkenny, something really special:

Kilkenny Electroacoustic Research Laboratory Anthology Vol. 3 - The Stray Sod.

The latest - and last - installment of the compilation series documenting this Irish institution for electronic music composers active in the 1970s and 1980s.  

But what a way to go out - it's a gorgeously varied selection of pieces, ranging from miniature electronic radio-plays to tone poems woven out of chimes and drones to dulcet folk songs.

You can buy it here either as a digital download or as a compact disc that comes with a beautifully illustrated and intricately informative 70-page book about the Kilkenny Electroacoustic Research Laboratory's history,  a pull-out A3 poster of the Ireland Pavilion Expo '74, a Radagast's Allotment Macpaint design by Johnny Donnelly, and a special thank you letter from the Label Director.

Release irrationale:

In this third, and final, volume of the Kilkenny Electroacoustic Research Laboratory Anthology, we focus on several disparate yet conceptually linked topics, many of which connect to the Kiely cousins, Owen and Tom, who have been briefly mentioned in previous volumes. The first half of the book focuses largely on the foundations which led to the events of the second half. The second half of the book will focus largely on the arts, crafts and lifestyle collective founded by the Kielys, Radagast’s Allotment.

In our first chapter we cover the creation and publication of the 1971 children’s book and accompanying audio cassette Upon the Air. Written and produced by Gerry Duggan and Jacinta Delaney and illustrated by the renowned Irish equine artist Johnny ‘Ding Dong’ Donnelly, Upon the Air, was the first and only children’s book made in the lab. It was intended to disseminate Delaney’s early-years sound studies research to a wider audience, though was a commercial failure.

The second chapter of the book covers an ill-fated, government funded, immersive art installation which had been planned for the Irish pavilion at the 1974 World’s Expo in Spokane, Washington, U.S.A. In this chapter we cover the development of the installation, which was a collaboration between K.E.R.L. founding member, Eoghan Comerford and the Dublin-based artist duo Beamish and Watson. We also explore the government in-fighting which led to the ultimate failure of the project.

Chapter three documents the musical works of the Kilkenny folklorist and composer Maeve Scully (1947-2011), her connection to the Radagast’s Allotment and K.E.R.L., and the rediscovery of her work by a younger generation of composers, musicians and improvisers throughout the world. Maeve would go on to become a key member in Radagast’s Allotment and would frequently make use of the facilities in the Electroacoustic Lab to realise her ‘Mayday Dew’ series of compositions.

The radio adaptation of T.V. Delaney’s, post-apocalyptic ecological science fiction novel The Capsules of Posterity – The Aurochs, is the topic of our fourth chapter. Initially published in ’76 by Tamhóg Press, the book was adapted into a radio play by Antrim Productions and K.E.R.L. It was produced by Tony Quinn, Tom Kiely and Eoghan Comerford and broadcast in 1981. The production process of this adaptation is often cited as the origin for the ideas which later became the formalised Radagast’s Allotment.

At this halfway point of the book, we have included several pages from the first edition of the Radagast’s Allotment Almanac, which came out in the summer of ’85 and was designed by Johnny Donnelly using MacPaint. It gives an insight into the activities and interests of the group, which we will then explore in the second half of the book.

Next, we have an interview which I conducted in a pub in London with the Radagast’s Allotment founding member, Owen Kiely, last year, where we talked at length about Dian Cécht and his band after Dian Cécht, The Triskelion. Owen does not suffer fools lightly, though we have printed the interview in full as it gives an insight into the culture and condition which led up the founding and eventual collapse of Radagast’s Allotment and the Kilkenny Electroacoustic Research Laboratory.

In chapter six we cover the activities of the Radagast’s Allotment, an arts, crafts and lifestyle organisation described by Hannah Sheppard-Noonan, in her book Bards, Binaural Beats, and Borderline Personality Disorder – Mental Illness in a Rural Arts Community as showing ‘all the signs of being a new religious movement, though lacked anyone with basic, never mind effective, organisational skills, which fundamentally prevented the group from fully actualising into a cult.’

Socracht Rothlach, which was a collaboration between one of the guitarists from The Triskelion, Stevie Larkin, and the K.E.R.L. member Packie Bolger, is the topic of chapter seven. The release was the second in K.E.R.L.’s Relaxation Series and was, like most things released by the lab, a commercial failure. In the chapter we cover the process of making the album, its musical qualities and the life and death of Stevie Larkin.

Our final chapter is about Tom Kiely and his group The Small Green Hand, who had splintered off from Radagast’s Allotment in the mid-80s, and who, inspired by Italian Futurists and the Viennese Actionists, attempted to poison a significant amount of the Kilkenny public in an attempt to ‘herald a new Irish techno-feudal utopia.’

Vivere Solem Et Oppositum,

Neil P. Quigley

April ‘26

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The Kilkenny release has understandably and deservedly overshadowed everything else going at the moment.

But I do want to shine a spotlight on some other parish activities that may have escaped your notice.

For instance, those secretive brothers behind Boards of Canada have been shyly, slyly, hinting at a forthcoming release, their first in an absolute age. 

It would be a shame if they were so coy about it that Inferno didn't get the attention it probably merits. 

Fresh from their epic BoC treatise "Corduroy Psychedelia", Split Infinities has another essay that interpretatively irradiates BoC's teaser releases so far: Boards of Canada’s ‘Prophecy at 1420 MHz’: Spinoza, Bataille, Nasr, and the Aesthetics of Prophetic Transmission -

Susurrations of Cosmic Consciousness or Notes Toward a Hydrogen Communism

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Talking of things getting overlooked... I fear that I missed the Keith Seatman album, owing to the long gap since the last newsletter - Counting To Ten Then Back Again came out in February and now there is a remix of a track off the LP, "Clip Clop", done by Simon Heartfield. 

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Conversely, I am a little early in drawing your attention to a new album by Fil OK, titled The Belltower, and out in June.

Well, not really early, actually -  as it is part 2 of a trilogy of LPs released this year, with The Steeple already out and hearable here, and the final installment, The Dome, due in the autumn. 

The trilogy is under Fil's alter-ego We're in the Water and it's sweetly spooky electro-pop in the vicinity of John Foxx and the Belbury Circle 

Naturally, I'm all in favor of ecclesiastical electronica. 

Although going by the release-rationale, this second installment of the trilogy is less about the ethereal and spiritual and more about the corporeal:

"The concept of the album is how our bodies constantly guide us: through instinct and movement we are attracted to pleasure, beauty, nourishment, relief, connection and survival, and intuitively away from pain, discomfort, danger, excess and the grotesque. These impulses can be gentle or relentless, welcome or intrusive. We call them needs, instincts, desires – but, at their core, they are simply the language of the organism itself. To live is to inhabit this system: to navigate and direct a restless, vivid machine of nerves and muscles as it carries us forward through life....  Where The Steeple leaned into cerebral electronic textures, The Belltower brings guitars and beats into sharper focus, emphasizing the resonance and vibration of bells and twanging guitar refrains on tracks like "Nothing Is Certain But Death", "The Headaches" and "Not Sleepy", as well as rhythm and distortion on "Not Quite Naked" and "Storm Before The Calm" – the latter a dark electro murder ballad inspired by David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. Lyrically, the new album explores a range of bodily states and experiences - waking, breathing, seeing, identifying, enjoying, suffering, escaping, fornicating, violating, dying and the peculiar theatre of cohabiting... 

"The three new works planned for this year each interpret the lyrics and music of the songs literally as architectural spaces, placing them conceptually in these three grand, holy places of worship, celebration and contemplation.

"Whereas The Steeple imagined the mind as a place of elevation and introspection, The Belltower represents the body - vibrating in visceral resonance - tunes and rhythms designed to make the blood flow and the body move."

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Talking of "sweetly spooky" - not really hauntology, and not a new release, but newly nailed to my brain - is year-abroad student Naomi Elizabeth, currently studying Instagrammatology at Pendley  Manor Arts Institute, but I for one think she should go back to making tunes like these...

Wet Leg goes hyperpop

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Bob Fischer's latest Haunted Generation column has a bunch of haunty activity, names mostly unfamiliar to me. Like this fine fellow

and this atmospheric, shortwave radio inspired audio-drama 

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The supernaturally prolific Stephen Prince of A Year in the Country has yet another book out  (how does he do it?! Surely he is now in double figures? My refractory period for a new all-new tome seems to be a decade!).

Ghost Signals: The Shadowlands Of British Analogue Television 1968-1995

Full information about its scope and contents, and how to buy it, is at the A Year in the Country blog. 

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A Year in the Country brings us back to where we started - the English countryside, succulently ablaze this month, a vernal inferno

And for all this, nature is never spent;

    There lives the dearest freshness deep down things

Corduroy Psychedelia

Interesting piece at Split Infinities on a band that is getting talked about at the moment but written before all the are-they-or-aren't-they buzz 

"Amid the mid-morning lull between morning cartoons and the much preferable after-school block, sick-at-home American schoolchildren of the late 20th century had one reliable standby to keep them company while their parents were at work: PBS, the United States’ Public Broadcasting Service. For us in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley, in the shadow of Bethlehem Steel, PBS was broadcast on channel eight—and the amber glow of an uprighted infinity symbol on the Zenith signaled the opening of a narrow passage: a reprieve from illness, from the cacophony of regular TV, and from the low static of domestic anxiety. What would become a personal, if not a faintly secretive, convalescent ritual, I would later discover was an experience quietly shared by many of us.

For those of us abandoned to our sick beds, afternoon hours spent with the dial locked on PBS piled up: Sesame Street.... Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, The Electric Company, Vegetable Soup, 3-2-1 Contact, Reading Rainbow, stodgy imported BBC programming, reheated documentary series from the early 70s like Civilisation (1969) and The Ascent of Man (1973), campy prepubescent passion plays fit for school assemblies, and avant-garde short films repurposed as children’s entertainment. Among the latter, none better exemplifies the category than “Geometry of Circles” (1979)—animator Cathryn Aison’s hypnotic series of shifting, rainbow-colored geometric forms set to a pulsing minimalist score by Philip Glass, originally commissioned for Sesame Street as a vehicle for teaching spatial logic." 

"... The atmosphere of PBS’s 70s and 80s heyday had its material correlate in corduroy’s contemporaneous rise. Worn soft with use and democratic in appeal—cutting across class, age, and social register without representing any of them—corduroy was the fabric of the reading rug, of fort building, puddle stomping, and world exploring. PBS offered a similarly unglamorous intimacy, an experience that sat close to the skin"

If the concept of "PBS Unconscious" doesn't clue you in then maybe these pix will 

  

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Great mix by DJ Food aka Kevin Foakes weaving together BoC and their source material + lodestar coordinates 

retrowar

"And yet here we are, lurching toward a new version of a familiar catastrophe, suffering from some national form of neurotic repetition compulsion. “This is like the horrible, lame-dad cover band version of the worst of American foreign policy,” said Matt Duss, executive vice president of the Center for International Policy."