We have a regular newsletter with the week’s new releases that goes out every Thursday or Friday too. And if your fondness for books about music leads you in the direction of histories of scenes — in other words, if your bookshelf features Our Band Could Be Your Life , Girls to the Front , or Corporate Rock Sucks — you’ll have an idea of what to expect here. Here’s Jesse Dorris, writing at Pitchfork about the 2020 reissue of their Musick to Play in the Dark : “‘Are You Shivering’ sets the stage with a ferocious roar, like a groaning opening of black rubber curtains; it recedes to reveal a glistening expanse of slippery little noises sliced into dripping tinsel. Alongside these names, it also folds Throbbing Gristle, Whitehouse, Shirley Collins, Charles Sims and AE Housman into the esoteric narrative, making for a book that has become highly influential and increasingly pertinent to a lot of music and literature produced in recent years, such as that by Grumbling Fur, English Heretic and Kemper Norton.

I admit that NWW was usually too disturbing for me in the past, but this book encouraged me to listen to more of his music (recommended starting point: Spiral Insana), and I'm glad I did. Das Problem mit Begriffen wie Meisterwerk besteht dabei in erster Linie darin, dass sie allzu flächendeckend verwendet werden, was letztlich die Wertigkeit des Begriffs selbst verwässert. England’s Hidden Reverse is a must-read for fans of Coil, C93 and NWW, and for fans of Keenan’s later fictional writings who want to see where he started from. I was absolutely devastated, and coincidentally it was the start of a dark time in my own life for various reasons. An expanded edition of the classic exploration of the English esoteric musical underground-with the first biography of Coil, Current 93, and Nurse With Wound.

It includes references to their (often shared) esoteric and literary inspirations – such as Crowley, Spare and Burroughs. The book details, most often in their own words, the obsessions – magical, musical, sexual and narcotic of Stapleton, Tibet, Sleazy, Balance and others. Having had direct access to and after many years of writing about these people in the Wire Keenan was best-positioned to capture their tangled story into one well-structured and accurate narrative. MIT Press Direct is a distinctive collection of influential MIT Press books curated for scholars and libraries worldwide.

The author actually goes out of his way to excuse this behavior, comparing the use of fascist symbols in punk music, but claiming that by not expounding upon the reason for using these symbols they have more artistic merit than punk. Still, I really love Coil and Current 93, mainly due to discovering them sideways through the Crowley/Spare connection, and it was fascinating to learn about their tumultuous and extreme lives. England's Hidden Reverse" concerns the art and music scene built around three (interconnected) groups: Psychic TV/Coil, Nurse With Wound and Current 93.Nämlich jenem, das ich zunehmend verspürte, als ich, vorm Bücherregal stehend, England's Hidden Reverse immer wieder auf später verschob. Denn die Formel geht auf: Ohne Coil keinen Techno, ohne Nurse With Wound keinen Industrial/Noise und ohne Current 93 keinen Neo- oder Postfolk.

Keenan charts the highs – Coil’s visionary industrial releases Scatology (1984), Horse Rotorvator (1986) and Love’s Secret Domain (1991), Current 93’s transition from the harsh, tape loop soundscapes of Nature Unveiled (1984) to the apocalyptic folk music of masterpieces Thunder Perfect Mind (1992), Of Ruine Or Some Blazing Starre (1994) and All The Pretty Little Horses (1996), Nurse With Wound’s first flowering of Stapleton’s unhindered vision on Homotopy To Marie (1982) and their epic drone sculpture Soliloquy For Lilith (1988). He conducted numerous interviewers with all the key players, and was granted unprecedented access to their archives. Inspired by the further reaches of krautrock, electronic music and the worst nightmares of the Velvet Underground, and just as equally all the transgressive shock tactics they’d learned as COUM, TG created a new form of music to reflect the horrors of austerity Britain, a semi-improvised machine drone that revelled in its noisiness and messiness, capped off with P-Orridge wailing lyrics inspired by Burroughs and Ballard to soundtrack a nighttime alternate world of serial killers and sexual deviancy. Ich für meinen Teil genoss überschwänglich, einmal so etwas wie einen biographischen Einblick in Tibets Werdegang zu haben.These were men who made explicitly queer experimental music - an idea that fascinated me when I was younger. It's great, even when it gets into some of the acts I'm less interested in, the characters involved are still fascinating.