New book: 'To Farse All Things'

Sample pamphlets for publishers

It's so baffling that there isn't more uptake for the groundbreaking projects I keep assaulting publishers and funding bodies with. The post-electronic music textbook... the story of J.B. Schalkenbach's electro-musical breakthroughs, etc. all remain untouched, although journals have accepted condensed sections over the years. Obviously I cannot self-publish or fund anything myself as I remain completely impoverished - the same fifteen-year-long state of affairs which initiated this whole post-electronic endeavour and the attendant 'miraculous agitations'. Last year this blog promised an imminent release of a study into outlying literature, not entirely in vain. Throughout 2025, the distribution of 4- or 8-page enticer brochures reached a fever pitch. These samplers had urgent appeals prominently placed on the covers. One publisher remarked that a project surveying thwarted, or so-called "off-the-wall" literature would benefit from "a cool head" (implying mine is too hot and agitated?). It's impossible to remain neutral when you have first-hand experience of the ambition-scuppering thwarting agencies! There's some encouragement, however, to be gained from engaging with the submerged/thwarted books and media of past, which are exemplars of visionarily persevering spirits (except maybe in the cases where creators deliberately court obscurity). Although like all energy, motivation can be damped by lack of response. Mine is rapidly going that way, especially in view of my blogs not even appearing on Google searches any more (maybe the posts about my Radionics Radio project went too close to promoting unorthodox medicine?). I still hope the project can be published at some point. In the future I believe outlying media will be of extreme interest for having escaped uptake into AI deep-learning, and also for it interpreting reality in singular ways.

As a book designer, this year I worked on 'To Farse All Things' which documents the lives and artistic (and culinary) interests of its authors William English and Sandra Cross - founders of the Dining Room (1980-1990): a pioneering vegetarian basement restaurant and artistic venue near Borough Market. I was able to insert some 'outliers' into a highly unusual section of the book where accumulated mini-myths capsize the remainder of narrative into an absurdist storybook written by William, clearly funnelling in his own experiences as a rare bookdealer. The richly-illustrated final eighteen pages constitute a tale about a bookdealer named Mildew, specialising in "failed artists' ephemera", and I filled this with examples to instil the same delirium Mildew inhabits: that of ouroboros career trajectories and priceless detritus from unattended showings.

"Failed artist" is a bit severe - I've written and lectured on 'Failed Histories' in the past, but in 2019 decided to reframe these as 'Thwarted Histories' to suggest a fluid, antagonising agency. But Mildew is world-weary and cynical in ways only bookdealers can be, and prefers "failed": by way of biography Mildew says, "I was a failed artist myself (...) I went through the art school sausage machine, churning out unemployable misfits destined for a life of dysfunction." I found that bit chilling.

This is just one distinct part of the book, which acts as a sort of 'event horizon', distilling many of the book's themes into a cathartic dream-like wooze. Other parts of the book rigorously showcase William and Sandra's film work, alongside the works and traces of many friends, fellow-travellers, and collaborators. One section features some of the stranger items from William's vast Kenneth Anger collection. The inventor Captain Maurice Seddon also features prominently. I supplied a foreword which attempts to bridge different timelines, invoking our mutual late friend Hugh de la Cruz who worked as a washer-upper at the Dining Room, and who, in later years, engaged me to help him design a perpetual motion machine in exchange for living rent-free in an empty flat he'd vacated (this never fully came to pass).

'To Farse All Things' was published to coincide with the recently-concluded exhibition of the same name at Nottingham's Bonington Gallery, curated by Tom Godfrey. The book remains a crucial resource for a 'lost' part of London's Borough Market history. It can be seen, in some ways, as a follow up to William English's 2019 'Perfect Binding' (which I also designed and wrote the foreword for). Please consider seeking out and buying these books. Both are published in a strict limited edition of 300.

Outlying, Occluded, and Thwarted Literature

The previous post here was last year's end-of-year round-up. What of this year? The dreaded minus budget remains a great burden, so there's little to report. More gigs would be nice. And a job, or a bursary for study. It's tough. Maybe the backward-looking (and self-indulgent) act of summarising one's activities over the year has an element of cursedness? To avoid making the same mistake this year, I'll forecast forward instead of recapping backward. Before I do, it's worth mentioning this month Michael Umney won the International URTI Radio Grand Prix for the BBC Radio 4 show 'Knock Knock: 200 Years of Sound Effects' (mentioned in the previous blogpost), produced under the Resonance FM banner. Presented by Sarah Angliss, the programme delves into the acousmatic world of the unseen soundmaker - those people who ply their acoustical contrivances in the shadows for the service of storytelling and drama... and the documentary itself has the immersion of drama to it.

One project I hope to finally bring to fruition in 2025 is my book surveying outlying, occluded, and thwarted literature. One such piece of outlying literature was featured in the aforementioned 'Knock Knock' radio programme: 'Sound effects and how they may be produced' by Alfred Whitman (1926) - a mimeograph not seen in any library. I was first alerted to this internal BBC document by the bookseller Alan Conchar who had handled a copy around 2005. It wasn't until 2022 that I could finally see a copy, after Umney tracked one down in his programme-maker capacity by liaising with the BBC. Like all outlying literature, there are always reasons for the outlyingness. In this case, circulation was limited from the outset in view of sound-effects then being a niche interest, and also that the trade secrets of the sound-effects-person's craft are fully revealed within it.

I've been collecting offbeat books on sound since the early 2000s, and the extent to which something can be so offbeat as to become invisible was first intuited when I came across the excellent book-list compiled by gongsman Frank Perry. It contains unknown/unfindable items, such as W.G. Hooper's 1943 'The Great Musician of the Universe', and - for a long time sought - Margaret Watts-Hughes' two 'Eidophone' books (featured on Miraculous Agitations back in September 2011, where I playfully compare her sound visualisation devices to those depicted in the mysterious Voynich Manuscript). Incidentally, this year I was able to supply some images of my copies for an imminent publication putting Watts-Hughes ideas back into print. As for Frank Perry's list, which has itself become difficult to find (a shame for such a useful resource), it's on the Wayback Machine here. Perry's library of sound and music books spans a hundred years, focussing on the 'suchness' of sound and timbre - it straddles the faultlines between objective and subjective musical phenomena. The further you go towards the subjective, the more esoteric (and contentious) things become. The fizz of discussion surrounding all things contentious is of value for creativity (I argue).

Many years ago, one of my former tutors, Hugh Davies, told me something like this: if you want to find paid work as a writer/researcher, it is worthwhile to become a sort of independent curator by judiciously amassing a personal archive of rare, preferably unique historical ephemera, documents and materials. Sharing one's findings from such a private archive would offer inbuilt originality, and constitute genuinely useful new work. Gathering materials became possible by working/volunteering on the fringes of the antiquarian book trade, and even through bin diving. Davies' advice hasn't quite borne out in practice - work remains scant - although the research-driven Radionics Radio project (funded by Sound and Music) was a successful example.

Examples of outlying literature

But to return to Perry's book-list: it is significant that at the very end Perry states "it goes without saying, that I do not necessarily fully endorse everything listed above". This kind of disclaimer becomes more necessary when dealing with outlying literature. I gradually widened my scope of interest from acoustics to accounts of subjective experience of sound. At the extreme end of this genre are books such as 'Crook Frightfulness' (whose paranoid author I was able to identify), and Dorothy Burdick's 'Such Things are Known' (1982). Despite being published nearly 50 years apart, both titles are very similar autobiographical investigatory first-person accounts of hearing unseen, sinister voices. Both authors reject all diagnoses of mental illness, rigorously pursuing rational explanations, despite the apparently impossible effects described. It perhaps needn't be said that both titles were self-published.

Any self-published piece of writing prior to the internet has inherent dynamism in being an unedited self-propelled bubble of an idea. Of course, self-published efforts can burst through the bubble and find mass appeal - e.g. Mark Twain's 'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn', or Erika Mitchell's 'Fifty Shades of Grey' - but my interest is in the overlooked publications. Often there is some waywardness or uncompromisingness that distinguishes these as 'difficult'. Having developed an interest in 'thwarted histories' and the dynamics of obscurity, I've found there are important stories to be told lurking behind these outliers - sometimes shedding light on marginalised communities, neurodivergence, and how fact and fiction / the objective and subjective intertwine; stories that reflect on the present-day concern with virality, Search Engine Optimisation, struggles to come to terms with modernity, and the eternal search for the optimum angle to interface with a wider public.

'Asphyxia: The "Idiote", the Library Wifi and the Suppressed Safe'

At 6pm today (Wednesday 10th May) Resonance Extra will begin a regular episodic version of what was originally a single 22-hour radio show commissioned by Radio Art Zone: 'Asphyxia: The "Idiote", the Library Wifi and the Suppressed Safe'.

Late in 2022 I was commissioned by Radio Art Zone to be a part of their epic 100-day radio art project.  Radio Art Zone was conceived by Sarah Washington and Knut Aufermann as a radio station - without any interrupting adverts - relaying massive radio shows internationally, and streaming online.  The length of each 22-hour contribution meant that listeners were plunged deep into sound-worlds, grasping at whatever radiophonic cues were at hand to ascertain contexts, acoustical conditions, geographical locations, themes, or narrative arcs (if any).

I titled my show 'Asphyxia' in anticipation of the suffocating atmosphere that'd likely pervade when smothered by a single person's 22-hours.  Many other Radio Art Zone participants minimised the threat of asphyxia by infusing the oxygen of the outside world - e.g. Chris Weaver (fellow Oscillatorial Binnage member) produced 'Rushy Green Tape Exchange' - 22 hours of cassette diary exchanges with improv artist Adam Bohman, spanning continents in their scope; or more explicitly 'Body Edit Mind' by Milo Thesiger-Meacham saw a vast amount of obscure media found online interspersed with real-life recordings testing the limits of editability.

I confess to not having heard many of the other 22-hour shows in full, and I doubt any listener absorbed my contribution beyond a mere dip.  The new Resonance Extra broadcasts of 'Asphyxia: The "Idiote", the Library Wifi and the Suppressed Safe', commencing today, offer more manageable regular one-hour timeslots.

More properly, 'Asphyxia' refers to the all-too-familiar dynamics that condemn things to obscurity. (Incidentally, I have supplied a text on this theme for an upcoming book published by Radio Art Zone's Sarah and Knut, release date TBC).

The show is described as "a damaged would-be radio documentary exploring the Narnia of restricted access material with its wedded themes of suspicion, gatekeeping, conspiracy, frustration, and the maddening infinite regress that emerges wherever information is suppressed.  It is a journey into the inner turmoil of being forestalled; namely, a condition electronic composer Daphne Oram termed 'mismatched impedance'; - where vocation is thwarted, heralding the onset of emotional disturbance as one's energies are clipped and distorted."

The "Library Wifi" refers to the 'hackable' streams of data passing through The British Library's network, whilst the "Suppressed Safe" is the British Library's restricted access material.  Overshadowing all this is my controversial "work where you like" practice whereby I trespass into workplaces where I've been denied employment to "volunteer" my services to prove my employability. The "Idiote" signifies the person in the street, as opposed to the "Clubman" - the patriarch in-the-know; two terms crystallised in the Edwardian era by paranoid ex-accountant turned amateur etymologist, Marcus Stanley Chambers (aka "Exact Thinker"), who wrote scathingly of uncooperative national institutions withholding (supposedly) secret knowledge on the origin of language.

Marcus S. Chambers' illustration

There is an undercurrent of thwarted research and wasted energies throughout the series. Abused necks - seats of human voice - are given special attention in today's first episode - anatomical points of interest in the work of Marcus S. Chambers, and his anarchist, masonic-secret-exposing counterpart Sydney Hanson (with his DIY printing press). These authors are part of an ongoing research project I'd started as long ago as 2006, but ironically I found no willing outlets to publish anything, leading me to wonder half-heartedly whether there really was a conspiracy of silence around their findings. The present-day obscurity of their work forms a self-fulfilling prophecy about the suppression of knowledge (and opportunity), lending much unease, mystery, and squirms to outmanoeuvre "crank" vibes throughout the show.

If the aforementioned makes any sense at all, it should shed light on the many hindrances and impoverishments that have curtailed my activities of late (and others too, I note - the cost of living is crippling), hence lack of posts here lately.  Yet this in itself is interesting, and it's worthwhile to make a study of the factors at play, identifying solutions, etc., continuing the ongoing theme of 'thwarted histories' on this blog and elsewhere.

Thwarted and Unthwarted Histories: Sound archaeology, and a digression on a Neoist curator

This blog has a recurring theme of 'failed histories', i.e., forgotten stories that hang by the tiniest of threads discoverable only by meticulous scrounging.  Last week I gave a talk covering some of these - 'Thwarted Histories of Electronic Music' - at a salon in Copenhagen organised by The Institute for Danish Sound Archaeology / Institut for Dansk Lydarkaeologi as part of the Gong Tomorrow festival.  'Thwarted histories' was chosen as a title instead of 'failed histories' to provide increased melodrama; 'thwarted' suggests an antagonist...  some sort of external force that acts to condemn things to obscurity.  Maybe this force is traditionalism?  Or prejudice?  Or apathy?

Whatever the thwarting agency may be, the Institut for Dansk Lydarkaeologi (aka IDL) situate themselves in opposition to it.  IDL are dedicated to reviving the legacies of early sonic experimenters whose activities have been neglected (they'll be presenting their researches at Cafe Oto on the 28th November).  IDL's Copenhagen salon was held at the uppermost floor of Huset-KBH, a large old venue with the forthrightly-named 'Bastard Cafe' on the ground floor - the entire place exudes a cyberpunky warmth, or 'hygge'.  Tantalising Danish-language talks included composer Carl Bergstrøm-Nielsen on his work with the Gruppen for Alternativ Musik, singer-songwriter Marie Eline Hansen performing fully-conceived reconstructions of obscure pieces originally by Lene Adler Petersen and Henning Christiansen.  Also, IDL's Jonas Olesen presented his intensive researches into acoustical engineer/therapist Christian A. Volf's electronic sound activities stretching back to the 1930s.  Chatting afterwards, Olesen described his excavations into uncharted archaeological strata - it reminded me that the most tenacious historians are often the ones working independently of academia.  Other IDL members Rasmus, Magnus, and Mikkel spoke on the current culture of reissuing rare, out-of-print material (IDL are also a label).

IDL also diffused the 1978 four-channel Bent Lorentzen work Visions (IDL are about to reissue his electronic works).  Bent Lorentzen is a Danish composer who would perhaps be better-known to the English-speaking musical world if only his promised book 'The New Music Theory' had appeared.  Until this salon, my only knowledge of Bent Lorentzen was of this unobtainable unicorn.  Lorentzen's nonexistent 'New Music Theory' is cited by British electronic composer Daphne Oram in her idiosyncratic 1972 work 'An Individual Note of Music, Sound and Electronics' as dealing with "acoustics, electronics and the psychology of music" and, according to Oram, will "soon appear in English" published by J. & W. Chester Ltd.  Lorentzen's publication seems to have been 'thwarted' for unclear reasons.

Two other English-language talks at the IDL salon were illuminating regarding the dynamics of research/sound-archaeology and information dissemination: Felix Kubin gave a poignant, entertaining presentation on the perverseness of the cassette medium and Germany's cassette culture, developed under the spectre of cold war nuclear annihilation (as also detailed in Kubin's Chromdioxidgedächtnis CD+tape artefact on Gagarin Records), and earlier in the evening, following on from IDL's discussion on reissue culture, sound archivist Andrea Zarza Canova was interviewed by IDL's Jan Høgh Stricker about her Mana Records label she co-founded in 2017 (releasing both old and new works: Benedict Drew's abstract electronic protest music Crawling Through Tory Slime is a modern favourite).

Andrea Zarza Canova's descriptions of her early navigations in experimental music were refreshingly evocative.  She explained that several years ago, she'd regularly visit the online repository for avant-garde music, UbuWeb, where one user named 'Continuo' showcased offbeat and rare materials that resonated with her interests.  Over time, Zarza Canova struck up a correspondence with this uploader, who turned out to be a French collector, which led to the first Mana Records release: a reissue of Pierre Mariétan's rare 1987 urban soundscape composition Rose des vents.  The French collector assisted in establishing contact with the original composer, and so a vanished artefact was able to re-materialise as an artefact once again.

Collectors and archivists provide lifelines to imperilled musics on the brink of oblivion.  Zarza Canova's story gave me flashbacks of my pre-YouTube mp3-trading adventures in online IRC chatrooms, or file-sharing service Napster in the mid-2000s... and negotiating with certain users in possession of untold rarities.  This was a rite of passage for a certain generation.  I had often wondered who these esteemed users were - what were their stories?  How did they obtain these rare recordings?  I had the impression that they must've been associated with the artists, or possibly were the artists themselves.  They were loath to chat.  I remember one whose upload speed was only ~10kB per minute: a cause for much distress, since the user had the apparent entirety of cassette releases from It's War Boys - post-punk label I coveted.  "Patience" he urged me.

This blogpost is getting nostalgic.  To counteract this, I should present a present-day wonder: a digression on a collector/uploader operating today...  There is a YouTube user who curates one of the most extraordinary experimental audio collections available online: 'celestialrailroad', who began uploading in 2012.  Much of this channel's content makes the It's War Boys label look like Parlophone.  In 2017, celestialrailroad was almost derailed by the Arts Council-funded Lux organisation making heavy-handed copyright strikes against the channel, temporarily disabling all its content.  I intuited that after this near-calamity celestialrailroad reached even deeper underground towards more wayward things still.  The channel's breadth is extensive - there are It's War Boys relics of course, along with big name experimentalists such as Walter Marchetti, Bob Cobbing, Ian Breakwell, etc., but there are gobsmacking obscurities too; one-off slices of life such as found audio cassette journals, or recordings of aeroplane shows.  Whoever is behind celestialrailroad has a finely-tuned sense of what's what...  A sense of the 'pre-internet perverse' - a sort of authentic, jolting waywardness: off-grid activities somewhere between the definition of 'art' and 'a cause for concern', like something coming through your letterbox in the dead of night wrapped in tinfoil.  Sumptuous grit... (if this makes any sense).

As with the online IRC and Napster archivists of yore, I began to wonder about the character behind the collection.  In February 2018 celestialrailroad uploaded one of the taped phone calls of Captain Maurice Seddon (Royal Signals, retired) from The Seddon Tapes Volume I (on Paradigm Discs).  I'd worked on the audio segues on this LP with William English, the custodian of the Seddon archives (Seddon was the inventor of heated clothing).  English and I vaguely theorised that the head of Paradigm Discs, Clive Graham, could be celestialrailroad.  After talking to Graham at The Wire magazine's Xmas party in 2018, he denied this, but the plot thickened: he too was curious about the channel's mastermind and had been able to discover that it was run by somebody called Wirb Neug, who also had another YouTube channel of the same name, and a Facebook page.

This new information simply raised more questions.  Wirb Neug's Facebook revealed interests in spoken word and rare poetry ephemera, particularly Bob Cobbing's Writers Forum and its milieu, and also the work of provocative playwright Edward Bond.  Among this were status updates on things such as smells emitted by co-workers, photos of a clothes hanger, a re-posting of an old memory about being woken by the sound of a neighbour vomiting.  It was all fascinating.  Many references went over my head.  Further investigations seemed futile - Wirb Neug/celestialrailroad seems to be ensconced in the traditions of Neoism: exactnesses evaporate.  Mirages abound.  Poetry is everywhere.  The following oblique bundle of facts may illustrate the potential complexity: The Celestial Railroad is a modernist piano piece by Charles Ives, based on a short work of fiction by Nathaniel Hawthorne, which is itself presented as a dream, which constitutes a parody of Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, which is, in turn, an allegory.  The channel takes its name from this.

I had pondered whether celestialrailroad could be more than one person, especially as there's one exchange on Wirb Neug's Instagram where a user assuming Wirb to be the creator of a post's content (a Graf Haufen/Karsten Rodemann nugget) receives a reply where Wirb claims to be "a young Croatian woman" living in Berlin.  This is plausible.  But one day, in May 2019, a live video was uploaded (quite uncharacteristic of celestialrailroad)...  It was a Cafe Oto gig with Akio Suzuki, Aki Onda and David Toop, where I just happened to be present.  I remember noticing the person filming, sitting directly opposite me at the other end of the room - and it was neither Graf Haufen nor a young woman, but a youngish man with glasses, probably in his 30s, which jarred with my imagined vision of celestialrailroad as being of an older generation (I believe there are generational boundaries inhibiting acquisition of certain rare materials for specific age-groups - this is observable somewhat in the antiquarian book world, but I digress).  Was this Wirb Neug?  The obsession was nearing an answer...

My Oscillatorial Binnage bandmate Toby Clarkson was in attendance at that Oto gig too, seated beside me.  I asked him to scrutinise all the photos he'd taken that evening, but alas, as an experimental photographer, his leftfield sensibilities compelled him to document only the floor of the venue.  The best photo he obtained merely shows Akio Suzuki's legs as he reaches into his box of soundmaking tools.  The photo is a few hundred pixels shy of capturing celestialrailroad's shoes at the upper right-hand corner.  See below:

Additional contemplation at this time leads to the conclusion that further evidence remains unknown and may remain so.

Appreciate the sonic rescuings of celestialrailroad and Wirb Neug on YouTube.