Just posted a review of The Buried Soul, an engrossing but flawed analysis of the archaeology of death from Timothy Taylor, the guy who brought us the excellent Prehistory of Sex. Check it out.

When I get time I’ll try and work out a way to slip new content into my RSS feed, or create another one separate from this blog feed. And it’d be nice to have a feed coming out of the excellent plugin powering my Library, where you’ll find regular reviews that don’t make the full-blown near-essay status that gets things into the reviews section these days. For now, I’ll keeping shouting from here when I add juicy stuff to the site.

It’ll be my first time this year at the Green Man Festival in Wales (15th-17th August), but the beautiful site and interesting line-up have me excited.

I’ll be there as part of Strange Attractor’s remit to fill the cinema tent with esoteric delights on the Saturday night between 11pm and 2am. I’ll be ranging widely over the interpretation of cup-and-ring rock art; David Luke will be holding forth on some intersection between psychedelics and parapsychology; Robert Wallis will be giving us the low-down on animism and strange herbs; and Stephen Grasso will be shedding light on life as a modern Western voodoo practitioner.

Then there will be music.

Should be fun—see you there?

Tim Leary once quipped that acid is a substance that causes psychosis in people who don’t take it. We find broader evidence of this principle of drug psychosis in the discussion of a new UK Drug Policy Commission report, which shows “just how little evidence there is to show that the hundreds of millions of pounds spent on UK enforcement each year has made a sustainable impact.”

Former police chief constable David Blakey, of the UK Drug Policy Commission, said enforcement agencies tended to be judged by the amount they had managed to capture.

“This is a pity as it is very difficult to show that increasing drug seizures actually leads to less drug-related harm,” he added.

But he later said asking whether the money spent on enforcement was wasted was “more of a moot question”.

“This is against the law and the law needs to be enforced so whether or not we are actually driving drugs down and making drugs disappear - which I think would be asking too much of any country - there is an element of law enforcement which should and must continue,” he told the BBC.

Don’t try to follow the logic here too closely—this kind of insanity can be contagious.

Thanks to the excellent blog of my good friend, the Bristol-based artist Kirsty Hall, I’ve just become aware of an oddly British phenomenon, National Shed Week. Her post on it is a great little intro, with selections from the “best shed” competition (the winner was a shed that incorporates a fully-fitted pub bar).

Well, Shed Week 2008 is now over, so it’s a little late to enter this shed into the competition. In any case, it’s not “my shed”, so I can’t claim any responsibility for its wondrous condition. But I’ve been enjoying living with it recently. Kirsty claims a preference for “the more ramshackle” sheds; I’m sure she would appreciate it, too:

It’s way beyond repair. I’m not sure how long it would take me to get around to dismantling it if I owned the property. But it wouldn’t be pure laziness holding me back; there’s a messy, downtrodden poetry to it that would be missed.

I remember seeing a documentary where one of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters (or perhaps Kesey himself), showed the fabled original bus, the mobile freak machine that toured ceaselessly through America’s psychedelic meltdown. Currently it’s a rusting wreck among some trees on a farm somewhere. The guy showing it pointed out the slowly peeling paint and rusting body, and delightedly elaborated his vision of it as a slow-motion strip-tease, the decay of industrial artifice in the face of nature’s inexorable force as a kind of gradual, erotic revelation of essentials.

This shed is almost an opposite to that vision. Human construction is similarly being decomposed by the elements, but the abundance of foliage alongside this organic deconstruction, moving in to colonize the hapless wooden structure, is a kind of engulfment, an enfolding, an embrace. Erotic, but more intimate than theatrical.

Trees were felled, sliced into regular lengths, and reassembled into a shelter for human use. Now the plants are reclaiming their remnants. It makes me think of J.G. Ballard’s visions in The Unlimited Dream Company, of London overrun by tropical flora; or that recent book about how the biosphere would evolve in the next century or few if humans just vanished, leaving their artifacts behind for nature to molest and merge with.

I think it would be possible to pry the ivy-smothered door and creep in, but I don’t want to. It feels like it would be an invasion into private space, a corner of this dense city that’s been re-created as a pocket of wilderness. I hear foxes sometimes nest in there. The cat wanders in occasionally; but even she’s cautious.

Some day it’ll need to be torn down. But until then, I’ll relish being the neighbour of this mysterious icon of the wild.

A day of seminars featuring cutting-edge thinking from pioneers in the field of magickal practice, followed by an evening of rituals demonstrating Chaos Magick in action. More info »

Arthur Magazine, America’s tireless beacon of intelligence, psychedelia and provocation (i.e. everything America needs right now), is in financial need. The irrepressible editor Jay Babcock has maxed all his credit cards, and the many people giving their time to the periodical (whose noted contributors include Erik Davis, Thurston Moore and Douglas Rushkoff), are asking for a hand in getting over a hump in their efforts to sustain this vital venture.

In his plea email, Jay said:

If we don’t obtain at least $20k by July 1, ARTHUR is done. Our long-term prospects are good if we are fortunate enough to make it through this rough patch.

Not long to go. It looks like they’re doing well so far, but every penny helps, as they say. If you’ve some spare cash and want to support some truly worthy media, head over and help right now.

My “meme” posts are almost inevitably prompted by a tag from that arch-memeticist, Jim. This one seems simple and seductive:

List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your [summer]. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they’re listening to.

1. Nine Inch Nails are hardly a summer band. And Ghosts I-IV is hardly an album of songs (it’s a collection of 36 texture- and shape-driven instrumentals). But it’s been making sense in the recent murky nights. It’s hard to single a track out, since the decision to number rather than name them—presumably to leave the shapes sculpted by the music itself in sharper relief—makes the process seem a little daft. Still, the pensive ambience of ‘13 Ghosts II’ really gets me.
2. The Brian Jonestown Massacre were imprinted deeply on me during the hazy days of spring last year, and ‘Donovan Said’ (from the dreamy Their Satanic Majesties Second Request) now leaps into my playlist as soon as the sun starts to brightly burn.
3. Saul Williams‘ recent gig at the Scala was breath-taking, a mutant mini-carnival of 21st century funkadelia, industrial beats and quicksilver political-cosmic rap. The sinuous slow-build of ‘WTF!’, from the excellent Niggy Tardust album, remains a favourite.
4. Urthona’s sprawling, amorphous pagan noise anthem ‘Sun And Moon So Heavy’. Damn, it’s good.
5. I missed Ride during their heyday, even though I was bang in the middle of that scene, taking more drugs than lecture notes at Reading University. They seemed flimsy next to my then-favourite British psychedelic merchants, Primal Scream and Spiritualized. Listening now to ‘Leave Them All Behind’, the majestic 8-minute opener to their LP Going Blank Again, I can only say I probably didn’t give them a fair chance.
6. Hitting London yesterday after a blazingly gnostic wander around Avebury, I needed some finely appropriate music as I walked along the streets, something languorous like the evening warmth of the streets, something that related back somehow to the day’s elemental revelations, but something with an urban energy, too, to attune me back to the city. The perfect track turned out to be ‘Water No Get Enemy’ by Fela Kuti.
7. Quite often recently I’ve gone through to the kitchen after some routine computer wrangling to make food, and the shadows of the leaves outside are dancing silently. The small, ramshackle garden is partly shaded, partly warmed by the sun. I open the door to the garden and try and pick some music that perfectly complements this graceful lull. As often as not, it’s ‘Open The Light’ by Boards of Canada.

I can’t be bothered to tag anyone, and I just nearly lost all of this post… So without further ado, I’m off to listen to rather than write about music!

I hadn’t actually posted to specifically advertise my upcoming talk at The Moot With No Name on June 18th (though you may have noticed it on the calendar). But, here’s a post to let y’all know it’s had to be rescheduled to September 24th (blame this strange work/money/rent system we’ve come to).

The talk will be a slideshow-based presentation going over my research centred around Ilkley Moor and the goddess Verbeia (see ‘The Goddess in Wharfedale’). As well as being a visually rich bout of research, and hence eminently suited to this kind of talk, I’m also hoping to highlight even further the involvement of my personal experience in the investigation. Partly to deconstruct the process, to reveal some of the goings-on “behind the scenes”, but also to highlight how irreducible this kind of gnostic research often is. The promise and peril of hitting seams of genuine, befuddling mystery, however obscure. With nice pictures.

Anyway, it’s a way off for now, but pencil 24/9 in and hopefully see you there. The Moot With No Name is at The Devereux pub near Temple tube station, London, starting around 7.03pm. They’ve got Rupert Sheldrake on 11th June, could be interesting.

Dale Pendell’s highly-lauded trilogy of works on plant allies escaped me for far too long, and it’s great fun catching up. I’ve just posted my review of the first book, Phamako/Poeia, and I’m well into Pharmako/Dynamis. Pharmako/Gnosis beckons on the other side of this weighty middle tome. I’ll see how the other two books go, I might house mini-reviews in my library rather than doing full reviews; I’ve tried to capture my feel for the whole trilogy in this first review.

Two very different albums of brooding, sometimes delicate, sometimes monstrous noise are currently soundtracking my world. Lyrics are nowhere to be seen, and would probably feel lost in these relentless sonic landscapes.

The new “proper” Nine Inch Nails album, The Slip, sounds great so far, and is a free CD-quality download. But Reznor’s previous outing, Ghosts I–IV, has been grabbing my attention more. Thirty-six tracks, averaging 2-3 minutes in length, form what Reznor calls a “soundtrack for daydreams”. Like Eno’s More Music For Films crunched through a beatbox and various electric and acoustic guitars, it occasionally rocks out with NIN’s customary grind; generally it’s pensive and deeply intriguing.

“I Refute It Thus” by Urthona, with its three epic tracks and freeform guitar washes, is the other end of the spectrum. It emerges from the home studio of none other than Neil Mortimer (whose eco-minded Kennet Print are responsible for the printing of the glorious covers of our publications). Released by Dreamflesh allies Head Heritage, it’s no surprise that it comes resplendent with megalithic majesty and gritty poetics that conjure the crystalline brightness of uncut nature, via the heavily distorted technologies of free-noise rock. It more than lives up to the blurb that talks of “Neil Young and Crazy Horse’s Arc noise collage mangled with a low generation audience recording of My Bloody Valentine at their most mental”. The final 21-minute jaw-dropper, ‘Sun And Moon So Heavy’ rages with a shimmering beauty that makes you forget all musical comparisons and sink into an embracing ocean of feedback, peppered with delicate trilling notes and omninous arcing groans. This is the best kind of cosmic noise, evoking the heath and the gaping skies of day and night alike.