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

 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. 

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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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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."

Borges to death

Reading Charlie Warzel's piece at  The Atlantic about "monitoring the situation" - and specifically about a website that turns your screen into a situation room, with multiple ever-changing data feeds on the war and its economic repercussions  - I thought of two prophetic bits of writing:

Baudrillard, in "The Ecstasy of Communication", 1982,  on how the modern domestic space is effectively a kind of orbital satellite plugged into telematic streams of data:

Bravo, and Jean B probably could have - should have? - retired after writing this essay, everything that later came is just embellishment.

But even more amazingly prophetic is this short story by Borges from 1949, "The Aleph"

"I picture him in his study, as though in the watchtower of a great city, surrounded by telephones, telegraphs, phonographs, the latest in radio-telephone and motion-picture and magic-lantern equipment, and glossaries and calendars and timetables and bulletins… This twentieth century of ours had upended the fable of Muhammad and the mountain--mountains nowadays did in fact come to the modern Muhammad"

"The Aleph" culminates in the character's access to an experience of absolute data-saturation and overwhelming omniscience, what another initiate describes as "the only place on earth where all places are — seen from every angle, each standing clear, without any confusion or blending." 

Today's plugged-in consciousness seems to be trending towards a paradoxical state that fuses total anxiety and total boredom - instability and inertia.. 

You might wonder, as Warzel does in his own very-well-worth reading piece, if it is deliberately designed to paralyse - the besieged attention just gives up... the phrase he uses is "attentional death". 

Indeed it's a kind of saturation bombing in itself.

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The Warzel piece is titled: One Situation After Another

The dek goes as follows: Doomscrolling is over. Now, everyone is “monitoring the situation.”

The piece starts: 

"From the comfort of my desk, I can see it all. A series of webcam feeds show me the sun setting over Tel Aviv and southern Lebanon. A map of the world, flecked with red dots, indicates that most of Europe and the Middle East are on “high alert.” I toggle a button on the map’s control panel, and the globe is instantly latticed with the locations of undersea fiber-optic cables. Below the map, a live feed of Bloomberg TV is running with the chyron Oil Extends Rout on Stockpile Talks. I scroll down and am greeted by walls of headlines, grouped into categories such as “World News” and “Intel Feed.” A “country instability” meter clocks Iran at 100 percent, while a different widget informs me that the world’s “strategic risk overview” remains “stable” at 50, whatever that means.

"I am looking at World Monitor, a website that turns any browser into a makeshift situation room, and I love it. Built to look like a cross between a Bloomberg terminal and a big screen at U.S. Strategic Command, the site aims to display as much information about world events as possible in an assortment of real-time feeds. This is information overload presented as intelligence.

"World Monitor was built over a single weekend in January by Elie Habib, an engineer based in the United Arab Emirates whose day job is as CEO of Anghami, one of the Middle East’s largest music-streaming services. “I wanted to extract the signal from the noise,” he told me recently. But what he really built, by his own admission, is a noise machine. Right now, the site pulls in more than 100 different streams of data, including stock prices, prediction markets, satellite movements, weather alerts, major-airport flight data, fire outbreaks, and the operational status of cloud services such as Cloudflare and AWS. The information is all real, but what exactly a person ought to do with it is unclear."

Warzel writes about the swarm of memes about World Monitor and the phrase "monitoring the situation":

"Ours is a culture that has developed an insatiable need for instant information on all things at all times. Of course, we all live in saturated information environments, powered by constant connectivity and on-demand-answer services—Google, Wikipedia, chatbots. But I’ve also come to see all of this as a defense mechanism in an era of real chaos, when overlapping crises and technologies make the world feel unknowable and hyperreal.

"The abiding feeling of 2026 is that too many consequential things are happening too fast for most people to follow, let alone understand....  Monitoring is a reasonable response to all of this: It seems to offer a sense of agency....  

Paradoxically, though - 

"The effect is not necessarily that you feel more informed; if you’re anything like me, you probably feel alienated, if not worse. Those who have chosen to try to keep up with the news cycle in 2026 are awareing themselves to death, as the writer Geoff George put it.

"The situation brings to mind yet another grotesque online phenomenon: “gooning.” For the blessedly unaware, gooning is when maladjusted young men consume immense, overstimulating amounts of pornography and masturbate for hours on end to reach some kind of transcendent release.... 

The pay-off

"Total bombardment is partly a surrender to the internet and its logic and algorithms—a kind of attentional death in which a person is no longer overwhelmed because they have given up. You could also see it as an attempt to hold their footing as the zone floods with shit. Because everything is happening too much, too fast. More.

There is a cost to all of this—a flattening of every event, feeling, and piece of art, commerce, joy, and suffering into the same atomic unit of attention, all of them easily replaced by what comes next. The worst, most shameless people in the world already understand this and use that cold logic to their advantage. You do not need to justify a war if you believe that, ultimately, people will lose interest in it and move on to the next outrage.

I have suggested in the past that our information ecosystem is broken. But I now suspect that’s wrong: This is how it is meant to work. These online products sustain themselves by making us dependent on the content that makes us feel powerless and miserable. Where does this all lead? To further exploitation? To some kind of informational oblivion? Or will there be a breaking point, a moment when the addled masses reject the logic and speed of our information environment? I can’t say—but I’m monitoring the situation."

Or as Baudrillard himself climaxes: 

In Baudrillard's schema, the stage (scene of drama, passion, selfhood) is opposed to the screen (which is ob-scene, a cold space of infinite loss, infinite contamination) 

Perhaps then the metaphors that I track at the other place, obsessively, to do with political theater.... our punditocracy's endless tropes of anti-theatricality (showbiz, spectacle, TV reruns, etc)... these are in fact out of date...   they don't really have a purchase on reality, which is now reels-ality (if you'll forgive me). 

Reality - politics, war, deportation enforcement, etc - is just feed for the reels, the demonic engine of attention-enthrallment and remorseless erosion of the capacity for linear-thinking  

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Borges on his protagonist's encounter with the Aleph itself:

How, then, can I translate into words the limitless Aleph, which my floundering mind can scarcely encompass? Mystics, faced with the same problem, fall back on symbols: to signify the godhead, one Persian speaks of a bird that somehow is all birds; Alanus de Insulis, of a sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere; Ezekiel, of a four-faced angel who at one and the same time moves east and west, north and south. (Not in vain do I recall these inconceivable analogies; they bear some relation to the Aleph.) Perhaps the gods might grant me a similar metaphor, but then this account would become contaminated by literature, by fiction. Really, what I want to do is impossible, for any listing of an endless series is doomed to be infinitesimal. In that single gigantic instant I saw millions of acts both delightful and awful; not one of them occupied the same point in space, without overlapping or transparency...

On the back part of the step, toward the right, I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance. At first I thought it was revolving; then I realised that this movement was an illusion created by the dizzying world it bounded. The Aleph’s diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished. Each thing (a mirror’s face, let us say) was infinite things, since I distinctly saw it from every angle of the universe. I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and nightfall; I saw the multitudes of America; I saw a silvery cobweb in the center of a black pyramid; I saw a splintered labyrinth (it was London); I saw, close up, unending eyes watching themselves in me as in a mirror; I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me; I saw in a backyard of Soler Street the same tiles that thirty years before I’d seen in the entrance of a house in Fray Bentos; I saw bunches of grapes, snow, tobacco, lodes of metal, steam; I saw convex equatorial deserts and each one of their grains of sand; I saw a woman in Inverness whom I shall never forget; I saw her tangled hair, her tall figure, I saw the cancer in her breast; I saw a ring of baked mud in a sidewalk, where before there had been a tree; I saw a summer house in Adrogué and a copy of the first English translation of Pliny — Philemon Holland’s — and all at the same time saw each letter on each page (as a boy, I used to marvel that the letters in a closed book did not get scrambled and lost overnight); I saw a sunset in Querétaro that seemed to reflect the colour of a rose in Bengal; I saw my empty bedroom; I saw in a closet in Alkmaar a terrestrial globe between two mirrors that multiplied it endlessly; I saw horses with flowing manes on a shore of the Caspian Sea at dawn; I saw the delicate bone structure of a hand; I saw the survivors of a battle sending out picture postcards; I saw in a showcase in Mirzapur a pack of Spanish playing cards; I saw the slanting shadows of ferns on a greenhouse floor; I saw tigers, pistons, bison, tides, and armies; I saw all the ants on the planet; I saw a Persian astrolabe; I saw in the drawer of a writing table (and the handwriting made me tremble) unbelievable, obscene, detailed letters, which Beatriz had written to Carlos Argentino; I saw a monument I worshipped in the Chacarita cemetery; I saw the rotted dust and bones that had once deliciously been Beatriz Viterbo; I saw the circulation of my own dark blood; I saw the coupling of love and the modification of death; I saw the Aleph from every point and angle, and in the Aleph I saw the earth and in the earth the Aleph and in the Aleph the earth; I saw my own face and my own bowels; I saw your face; and I felt dizzy and wept, for my eyes had seen that secret and conjectured object whose name is common to all men but which no man has looked upon - the unimaginable universe.

I felt infinite wonder, infinite pity.

Out on the street, going down the stairways inside Constitution Station, riding the subway, every one of the faces seemed familiar to me. I was afraid that not a single thing on earth would ever again surprise me; I was afraid I would never again be free of all I had seen. Happily, after a few sleepless nights, I was visited once more by oblivion.