The Vale of Soul-Making

A brief summary of recent goings-on!

It’s been a very busy three weeks, working on my paper for Devils, Ellves or Firadrakes for the Occult Geographies session at next week’s Royal Geographical Society conference (abstract here). The paper has ended up as a 10,000-word draft, which now needs to be reduced to a 20-minute presentation by this time next week!

While I was in a word-processing mood, I took the time to edit and upload my artist talk Music, Magic, Metaxy: Sounding Psychepoietic Landscapes, which was delivered at the Uncanny Landscapes conference organised by Royal Holloway University and the Centre for Creative Collaboration in March. You can read the text here, and view the slides here.

From Music, Magic, Metaxy: Sounding Psychepoietic Landscapes

Last year, Tom Carter of Charalambides was hospitalised with pneumonia while on tour in Europe. Gavin Prior of United Bible Studies has put together a vast compilation to raise money to help out with the costs he incurred as a result. 99 tracks from nearly everyone (including XETB!) in the last 15 or 20 years of underground of drone/free folk/experimental music for 7.50 Euros. Download here.

I recently got some copies of the compilation 70 Years of Sunshine, on Monotype records, curated by Kim Cascone. I was pleased to see some positive words about my contribution in Daniel Spicer’s review in the latest issue of The Wire, and he also played it on the latest episode of his radio show, The Mystery Lesson (the Wadada Leo Smith & TUMO track which he plays after is incredible!).

That’s it for now! Something more substantial to come in September, once presentations have been made and prior to the madness of beginning a new academic year…

Angelystor

Angelystor is now available to stream and download at Bandcamp. This is a 39-minute piece of music inspired by Layla’s photography and recording at St. Digain’s Church, Llangernyw.

Folklore tells us that at this church every July and October 31st, the spirit Angelystor, or The Recording Angel, speaks the names of those that will shortly die in the parish. The churchyard is home to an ancient yew tree, said to be one the oldest living things in the world. It seems appropriate for an angel of death to haunt the locale of a deathless tree. Angelystor imagines a night in the churchyard, from dusk through to dawn.

The music of Angelystor is often heavy, Saturnine and melancholic – as befits the month of the recording (October) and the nature of the yew tree. The scale used in the piece was abstracted from the partials found in two utterances of a crow (a Saturnine bird) on the original field recording (more info here). It’s not all gloom, though – the more luminescent music of ‘dawn’ begins at 25 minutes, which also includes the chant adol-hrwng-fa – said by the Welsh psychic Charubel to be the invocation of the yew, and a ‘soul remedy’.

Cello was played by Briony Yorke, who also joined Layla and myself in the chanting section. I have also compiled a series of Layla’s photographs into an accompanying booket, available in the download package at Bandcamp, and also online at Issuu. It’s a long piece, and not quite in the style of XETB (hence releasing it under my own name), but I personally feel it is one of my most substantial pieces of work and hope you enjoy it. Listening on headphones is recommended, in a relaxed, receptive state… possibly in a rural churchyard at dusk.

From the accompanying booklet.

A locative app version of Angelystor is still in preparation, but should be finished in late summer.

Say Aaah: Music of the Vowels

The idea that the vowels hold the secret to some mystical, primal language appears to have a genuinely ancient lineage. Notably they seem bound up with the ritual expressions of the Gnostics. For example, in the Nag Hammadi codices we find a Hermetic dialogue entitled The Discourse on the Eighth and Ninth. As in some of the dialogues of the Corpus Hermeticum (XI & XIII), the master in this dialogue also breaks from philosophical and theological speculations to sing: as though poetry, sound and music may provide the pupil with another route to divine experience alongside meditation and philosophical instruction. What is interesting about the hymns in the Nag Hammadi codex is their peculiarly Gnostic character:

“Grace! After these things, I give thanks by singing a hymn to you. For I have received life from you, when you made me wise. I praise you. I call your name that is hidden within me:

A O EE O EEE
ooo iii oooo
ooooo
ooooo uuuuuu oo
ooooooooo
ooooooooo
oo.

You are the one who exists with the spirit. I sing a hymn to you reverently.”

Of Three Spirits

I’m very pleased to announce that Three Spirits, the new Xenis Emputae Travelling Band album is now available on cassette from Brave Mysteries.

The album features material from West Kennet Long Barrow, Thurgoland Tunnel, Staups Moor and Littlebeck Woods. The last track of the album, Littlebeck Trisagion, is intended as an aural companion to the chapbook The Mirror of Elicona, published by Hadean Press.

Tracklisting: I. Arc of Difference. II. Hidden Seam & Lode Forde. III. The Great Chord. IV. Edi Beo Thu Heven Quene. V. Littlebeck Trisagion: i. Elicona, ii. Invocation, iii. Almazim.

Who are the ‘three spirits’? Perhaps the spirits alluded to in the music: Elicona, Almazim and the Tutelar of the Place? The titles of tracks I and II are cribbed from David Jones’ rousing call to the genius published under that title. Or perhaps they are the three spirits of those that play on the album: myself, Layla Legard (vocals) and Simon Bradley (cello).

Bradley, Legard and Legard at Lead Church.

Whoever they may be, I hope the mystery only deepens your appreciation of the music! My heartfelt thanks to Nathaniel Ritter & Clay Ruby for all dedication to putting this out and some other brilliant music in their latest set of cassette releases (which includes material by Steven R. Smith of Hala Strana/ Thuja and Maurizio Bianchi). Many thanks to Nathaniel also for putting together this beautiful video for Arc of Difference:

It’s been an extremely busy couple of months, but more regular transmissions from this blog will resume in June. Until then… !

Albion Dreaming

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!

XETB Plays the Music of John Dee

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 here, I also adopted it as my own mark in Almias… it even materialised on my wedding cake!

A Dérive in the Pyrognomic Library

I am pleased to announce that I added The Pyrognomic Glass to the Xenis Emputae Travelling Band Bandcamp page yesterday. This was originally recorded in 2005 for a CD on Phil Todd‘s Memoirs of an Aesthete label. Phil kindly re-released as a vinyl LP with my accompanying chapbook, Abital, in 2009. I am happy to say that the downloadable version includes the booklet as a PDF, along with the original CD and LP art. You can also browse and download Abital on its own, by heading over to Issuu.

Vinyl edition of The Pyrognomic Glass.

If the above image whets your appetite, I’m pleased to say that there are still some copies available for the bargain price of £7 + P&P from the Memoirs of an Aesthete web shop, or alternatively from Cold Spring Records.

I have an incredible number of fond memories of working on The Pyrognomic Glass and Abital – of exploring Wharfedale with a bag-full of instruments and a  head-full of thoughts about dew, alchemy and genii locorum. This also marked the beginnings of thinking about not only psychogeography, but also ‘psychometeorology’: how does weather and time influence my imaginative and creative response?

Bandcamping

I’m pleased to announce that I am dragging myself into the 2010s with a long-overdue Bandcamp page. The first three to go up are A Prism for Annwn, Gamaaea and The Crooked Pool. All albums are ‘pay what you want’ – even free if you fancy.

This means that you’ll be eventually able to get the XETB, Pneumatic Consort and maybe even Neon Death Slittes and innumerable side-projects in high quality MP3s or FLACs from the original recordings, rather than the 192kbps MP3s which the collection at Archive.org is based on.

That’s the difference between this:

Water Invocation, MP3

… and this:

Water Invocation, lossless

The Turning Year

From the Shepheard’s Kalender (1656)

Before we say goodbye to MMXII, here are a few bits and pieces that have escaped the blog, but have been circulated on my Twitter and Facebook pages.

First, I was very pleased that both Warren Ellis and John Coulthart had some nice things to say about my music, which gives me reason to start 2013 and the final preparations for Angelystor with a spring in my step! Also, the Leila Waddell material seems to have been phenomenally popular, thanks to everyone who has stopped by this humble blog!

Over Christmas I added a couple of miscellaneous bits to the Soundcloud account, which I hope to use more often (as well as mirroring the XETB archive on Bandcamp when I get time).

First up was an unreleased XETB track based around a banjo improvisation in the Dorian mode, which Ficino associated with the sun, Apollo and “simple, reverential and earnest” music. Personally I decided it was a bit too aimless and full of fluffed notes to make it onto a release, but I still think it has some charm! The title itself comes from Il Mondo Magico de Gli Heroi, an obscure work on alchemy, which includes a number of explanations of alchemical symbols such as the Sun and Moon based on extensions of their names. LUNA thus becomes LUx NAturae, SOL becomes Solum Omnium Lumen, and so on. Although I’ve yet to read it, I understand that Il Mondo Magico is a key element of Joscelyn Godwin and Guido Mina di Sospiro’s Forbidden Book.

The other new addition to the Soundcloud was a recording of my mother, singing at a local folk club back in 1971! This is one of my favourite songs, and one that I also often sing, although in a longer, and somewhat ‘bluer’ version!

Finally, if you missed it at the bottom of an earlier post, here’s a lo-fi recording of The Institute of Stone Age Sex doing part of their live thing.

Happy new year!

Phil

King Orfeo and the Golden Moment

An old post from an old blog given new life…

In 2010 started learning folk songs more seriously, which rekindled my interest in the idea of the ‘golden moment’ in music.

Caterwauling at the Grove Folk Club, photo Layla Legard

I remember first hearing the ancient song King Orfeo sung on Alan Lomax’s Classic Ballads of Britain and Ireland, collected between 1949 and 1969. Click on foregoing link to listen to it: it is sung by John Stickie, an elderly man whose frail, thin voice would have had you believe he was a close relative of the Sibyl of Cumae.