As a teenager in the mid ’90s I was obsessed with English psychedelic music from the late ’60s. Between 1995 and 1998 I even ran a website called A Very English Trip dedicated to recording all I could find out about bands like Kaleidoscope, Bulldog Breed, Jason Crest and so on.
Web design, ’90s style.
The standard of writing was absolutely terrible, but the web was a smaller place in those days and the site brought me into contact with many of the forgotten names of the 60s pop and rock world… I even got the inside story on Bulldog Breed’s classic Austin Osman Spare from Rodney Harrison, one of the band members!
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To celebrate the first birthday of this blog I have put together a mix of music inspired by John Dee. As scientist, cryptographer, cartographer, alchemist and magus Dr. Dee has always been of profound interest to me. To many he is still considered notorious for his conversations with angels, aided by various mediums or ‘scryers’ of dubious credibility. However, it is not his angel-bothering that most interests me, rather his works broadly in the domains of astrology and alchemy: Propaedeumata Aphoristica (1558) and Monas Hieroglyphica (1564). The latter is a cryptic study of a symbol (the Hieroglyphic Monad, above) which Dee considered to be a Hermetic key to the universe. He believed that the study of the Monad would revolutionise not only the pursuit of alchemical gold, but also astronomy, mathematics, music, optics, linguistics… in short, all arts and sciences. This symbol has fascinated me for years: I’ve previously posted a section from a longer work on the relationship between the Monad and the speculative music 