2020 Roundup – and a New Album…?

I meant to write an update around the turn of the year, but for some reason felt I had little to talk about. It turns out I overlooked a few things that I should write about here.

It was a great honour to be given money for a commission from The Quietus and Aerial Festival to produce some work loosely responding to Wordsworth’s The Prelude. We used this as an opportunity to continue our work with the Corpse Way (mentioned previously here and here). You can listen to our work below, and also read about our processes in this PDF.

The Quietus has been very kind to us since Layla and put out our first Hawthonn album in 2015 – and I realise that I never shared the episode of the Radio 4 series New Weird Britain where we feature alongside Richard Skelton and Gazelle Twin. So, here we go: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0006132

The big news in Hawthonn land is that we are 99% finished on our new album!!! Now it is just mastering, a title, artwork, and all that stuff that needs to be sorted!

I also appeared on Conner Habib’s Against Everyone podcast – this was the first solo podcast I had done for around ten years, but I think it went ok – show notes can be found here.

I’m also very pleased by the reception of An Excellent Booke of the Arte of Magicke, published by Scarlet Imprint. It was wonderful to read not one, but two reviews on Paralibrum by Frater Acher and Craig ‘Vi’ Slee! Paperback and hardback versions are still available – this was a major labour of love, so it is great to see it out in the world and being so well received!

On GPS and Pulsing Voids

I rarely write fiction, but, after a ‘bracing’ walk on Ilkley Moor this afternoon, I decided to upload this old piece. It was originally written in 2010 and published in the first issue of the Wyrd Daze zine in 2013. Obviously technology moves on apace, but some things that influenced the story were the then nascent Google Glass project, and Blaise Agüera y Arcas’ presentation on augmented reality mapping. I’d also been reading too many old Moorcock-era New Worlds anthologies at the time. So, even though the Internet probably doesn’t need any more bad fiction posted to it, here it is regardless.

Only the Pulsing Void

Christine strode through the long grass, regularly glancing up at the path ahead and down at GPS locator on her mobile phone. “Nearly there,” she thought, “I just need to head a little bit to the west.” A couple of minutes later, as she came to the edge of a small stream where the first golden rays of the rising sun caught the spray, her phone buzzed. The correct latitude/longitude coordinates had been reached.

She took off her backpack and began to configure the system. The bipod was extended two-and-a-half feet from each shoulder-strap of the pack and the spherical camera screwed on to the top. She booted the computer, logged in with her user-name ‘Xine1981’ and began the session. This one was going to be straightforward. The unrecorded terrain was all relatively flat, the occasional hill, but no steep gradients or other geographical headaches to contend with. Christine had worked out that if she started at the centre of the moor and then progressed outward in aa spiral then she could hit about 90% of the required nodes. She could drive within a reasonable distance of the remainder, mainly on the north-western periphery, and photograph them on a subsequent day.