Electricity & Imagination: Karl von Eckartshausen and Romantic Synaesthesia

Recently I acquired a copy of Fulgur’s Touch Me Not, a facsimile, transcription and translation of the Wellcome Library’s notorious Compendium rarissimum totius Artis Magicae (MS1766). This manuscript has circulated quite widely over social media during the last year or so, mostly owing to a fascination with the diversity of demonic genitalia on display therein!

However, little was said about the textual content of the manuscript. We might immediately deduce that it is 17th century, German, and likely connected with the overtly dark and demonic ‘Höllenzwang‘ magical literature, most often associated with Faust. Intrigued by the images, I was excited to discover that an edition was in the works, edited and translated by Hereward Tilton and Merlin Cox, the description of which promised ‘psychedelic drug use, animal sacrifice, sigillary body art, masturbation fantasy and the necromantic manipulation of gallows-corpses.’ My copy arrived last week, and it is a very handsomely produced volume indeed.

Such lurid descriptions as those above undoubtedly make good copy, but what I found most interesting was the way the text interpolated material – chiefly on narcotic salves and fumigations – from the Aufschlüsse zur Magie (1788/1792) of Karl von Eckartshausen. I was only dimly aware of the work of Eckartshausen, but Touch Me Not compelled me to find out more…

Images from MS1766 – a necromantic operation gone awry (and a demon described by Tilton & Cox as ‘dolichophallic’!); sigillic body art, as part of an operation to conjure Astaroth.

Kim Cascone: Dark Stations and Black Fields

Followers of this blog and my musical releases will know that the American sound-artist Kim Cascone has become both a friend and inspiration over the last few years. I wrote a piece on this blog in 2014 about my experience of a couple of concerts and workshops that I had invited him to present at Leeds Beckett University, and I also made him one of the subjects of the chapter I wrote for Void Front Press’ Sustain//Decay anthology. You can also find my chapter archived online here.

Sustain//Decay, published by Void Front Press.

I tend invest most projects I work on with imaginative images: I find the process of working with music conjures symbols, and I explore them – I see how they unfold in parallel with the piece in question. Often the exploration of the symbols becomes so intense that the music almost seems like a by-product of this engrossing internal process. This is the kind of thinking that led me to write texts like Psychogeographia Ruralis, and which is explored in more scholarly terms in The Bright Sound Behind the Sound. Layla and I have also carried these approaches into our work with Hawthonn, which became the other subject of the Sustain//Decay piece.

P. B. Randolph’s Astrological Melody

I recently began reading some of the work of Paschal Beverly Randolph (1825-1875), and was intrigued to discover a formula for composing magical melodies in his notorious Magia Sexualis. Unfortunately the instructions, on pp.69-74 of the 1931 French first edition and pp. 41-44 of the 1987 English translation, are almost incoherent: obviously some sort of editorial error or misreading of Randolph’s manuscript occurred prior to publication, and since neither translator was a musician the instructions have remained somewhat opaque. I am not sure if these errors are corrected in Donald Traxler’s 2012 translation, but I am posting my own synopsis of his method for those who are curious.

Echoes from Hesperian Gardens

I’ve just released Hesperian Garden, a 28-minute EP comprised of recordings I made in preparation for Listen to the Voice of Fire back at the start of March. You can listen and download at my Bandcamp page (- and I’ve also added an option to download all Bandcamp releases in one fell swoop for £14!).

The Phenomenology of Revelation

It was a great pleasure to travel to Aberystwyth at the start of the month for the Listen to the Voice of Fire: Alchemy in Sound Art symposium at the National Library of Wales. The day was organised by Dafydd Roberts, of Our Glassie Azoth, and brought together a variety of academics, composers and musicians to explore diverse responses to the theme of alchemy and its relationship with sonic arts. Below are some thoughts on the day – along with a little digression into the music of Radulescu! You can also find photos of the event here.

Prior to proceedings, it was a delight to hang out with Electroscope (in this configuration John Cavanagh, Gayle Brogan and Ceylan Hay aka Bell Lungs), and also to unexpectedly encounter Johann Wlight, whose Gold of a Thousand Mournings, was one of my favourite Larkfall releases from ‘back in the day’. I am pleased to say that he is still making his music, and hope to be able to hear some more sometime soon…

Dafydd Roberts introduced the day, talking about his own interest in alchemy and noise music – as well as his PhD thesis on the work of ‘alchemistical philosopher’ Thomas Vaughan, aka Eugenius Philalethes. The idea of alchemy as the ‘phenomenology of revelation’ also came up, which caught my ear and gave me the title of this post. This segued into a precis of his essay Born out of Chaos [Academia.edu], which connects the aesthetics of Our Glassie Azoth to both the work of Louis and Bebe Barron and cybernetic theory. An interesting connection was also made between the description of alchemy as a ‘history of error’ and the fetishisation of ‘error’ as an aesthetic via databending and glitch music. This reminded me of Kim Cascone‘s attitude that errors somehow upset our reality by confounding our expectations, and can be used as potent jumping off points for creative exploration. The talk of databending also pointed toward sonification, which would be a recurrent theme for many artists over the course of the day, which I touched on as an alchemical idea here, and which Kristina Wolfe has also suggested manifests a sort of contemporary apophatic mysticism.

Listening for the Voice of Fire

I am pleased to say that I will be participating in Aberystwyth University’s Listen to the Voice of Fire event on the 3rd of March at the National Library of Wales. There’s a pretty diverse range of musicians and academics involved – and tickets can be found here. I am pleased to say that Our Glassie Azoth are on the bill – and indeed, the whole event is organised by Mr. Glassie Azoth himself, Dafydd Roberts. OGA was a great inspiration to me during the early 2000s. Experimenting with an Amen, a split between OGA and side-project Alphane Moon is a particular favourite – especially the way it mixes alchemical imagery, drone and noise, interspersed with sweet, whispy Nick Drake-like miniatures.

Enquiriel & Co. – Selenus’ Musico-Angelic Cipher

Recently stories about StegIbiza have been cropping up on various newsfeeds of mine. StegIbiza is a proposed system for hiding morse code messages in minute fluctuations of tempo in dance music – the proposal is that a computer analysis of a track would be able to decipher the message, although whether this is dependable in practice is yet to be seen.

The practice of hiding secret messages in plain sight, within music, pictures or text, is known as steganography (secret writing) a term coined by, and historically bound up with, the 15th century abbot Trithemius and his Steganographia: a curious mixture of occultism and cryptography. This work was written 1500, but not published until 1606, and in the interim its reputation made it highly sought-after – John Dee’s own 1591 transcription survives in the National Library of Wales.

Names of the aerial daemons from John Dee’s transcription of Steganographia.

Tradition and Innovation: Speculative Music and the Hexadic System

Upon first hearing the news about Ben Chasny’s Hexadic System and album, one of the aspects that most interested me was the connection between the Hexadic System and the area of ‘speculative music‘, which is one of the perennial concerns of this blog. This post is a companion to the previous post on the practical aspects of the Hexadic System, and will look more closely at the relationship between the Hexadic System, atonality and ‘speculative music’. It’s a long read, but hopefully worthwhile for those interested in such things!

I. Speculative Music, Past and Present

In its most exoteric (outer, superficial) form, speculative music was traditionally concerned with matters such as tuning, temperament and rhythm: it was the theoretical side of music, opposed to the practice of playing and composing. However, within the neoplatonic worldview that dominated the Western world prior to the Enlightenment, such matters – dealing as they did with ratio and number – were inextricably associated with esoteric doctrines, primarily that of the music of the spheres: some commentators suggesting that the planets, like the notes in a musical scale, were distributed according to similarly simple, harmonic ratios. Given the supposition by esotericists that the universe is relational – as Agrippa had it spanning three worlds: the sublunar, celestial and divine, or supra-celestial – the ratios inherent in the planetary music would have sympathies with that which flows from the ‘divine’ world of souls and spiritual essences beyond them, and that which happens on earth below them. As John Dowland wrote in the high-minded and loftily poetic style of the age: “the whole frame of Nature, is nothing but Harmonie, as wel in soules, as bodies.”

“… Nature is nothing but harmony”, from John Dowland’s dedication of his Second Booke of Songs or Ayers.

Exploring the Hexadic System

I was intrigued when I discovered that Ben Chasny, of Six Organs of Admittance, had used a system of indeterminate composition to write material for his new album, Hexadic, working with the arising materials in the idiom of sprawling, improvisatory psychedelic rock, which evokes parallels with Mainliner, his earlier Comets on Fire freakouts, the grimy ‘tape muck’ of Ashtray Navigations and the distorted, dissonant metal of groups like SunnO))) and Khanate. There are also occasional forays into calmer territories on tracks like the beautiful Hesitant Grand Light and Guild, and the moody, ever-descending Future Verbs.

Although Ben has hitherto spanned a wide-range of styles and genres in his music-making, I still thought it was a brave decision to embrace such approaches so completely: the inevitability is alienating one’s more conservative ‘fans’, while trying to develop as an artist and pursue the aspects of music making that are most vital and interesting to oneself. I still think that the experiments in atonality initiated by composers such as Schoenberg and Hauer in the early 20th century have a lot more mileage in them, and this brilliant article by Philip Clarke really highlights the issues regarding the tensions between established and ‘new tonalities’:

Here’s the challenge. We need to be open to hearing this new tonality. It isn’t going to sound like the old tonality, and that’s fine – too much whining about new music is based on little more than ‘it doesn’t resemble the music I already like’. As mainstream pop, and what continues to pass for ‘New Music’, uses less tonality more cynically, there’s space for a new breed of composer interested in using more tonality, more pointedly to fill that gaping vacuum. Composers today are repeatedly pounced on because – allegedly – they lack relevance to the wider world. And thus a new, noble cause is born – creating an expressively pungent, provocative, culturally subversive tonality that rubs lamestream noses in their own mediocrity. Does that aspiration strike a chord?

Kircher & Schott’s Computer Music of the Baroque

Here is a piece of music, which was composed with a sort of 17th century computer called the Organum Mathematicum, devised by Athanasius Kircher and fully described by his pupil and assistant Gaspar Schott:

It was the last post, touching on Robert Fludd’s Temple of Music, which reminded me of my interest in the Organum in around 2007, which is when the above piece was written. Now that I am free of the limitations of LiveJournal, I’d like to use this post to revisit Kircher and Schott’s work.

A surviving Organum Mathematicum (Museo Galileo)