It’s been quiet here. For the first time in longer than I can remember, my summer wasn’t spent madly scrabbling round for ad hoc jobs and projects and I was able to spend some time with my family – and speaking of which, Layla and I have begun working on a new project called Hawthonn. It takes its inspiration from the landscape of Bassenthwaite, the final resting place for the earthly vessel that hosted Coil’s Jhonn Balance.

While the legacy of Balance’s life, art and death could be called the daemon that is guiding the project, we are keen to stress that this is also very much informed by our own process of engagement with the imaginal landscape of Bassenthwaite and the complex of myth and image currently emerging from this; we hope that the final album will be an oblique (or, rather, ‘occult’?) tribute to a figure whose vision continues to haunt us. Since speaking to friends and acquaintances about this project, I have been humbled by their recollection of the kindness of both Balance and Christopherson during the early years of their project, before the volume of correspondence became impossible to deal with. An example I hope that we will to be able to follow (on my own I am terrible at maintaining correspondence…).

I’m also pleased to say that Angelystor will be released as a book, score and CD by Wounded Wolf Press shortly. I’m very happy with how this project has turned out – here’s two pages of the score as a little preview:

I also found time to finish a pretty lengthy paper colliding a large number of disciplines and interests (“Cornelius Agrippa meets Angela Voss and Kim Cascone”), which is intended to inform a future project called Ancient Springs. Hopefully this paper will make it to the review process for one of my favourite open-access journals… you can read the abstract here.

At present I’m madly preparing for the coming academic year, but I’m also attempting to develop a radically edited, final version of Psychogeographia Ruralis for an imprint that I greatly respect… we’ll see how that goes over the next few weeks…