Folk Horror Revival: Harvest Hymns

Volume I – Twisted Roots

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 Folk Horror Revival: Harvest Hymns
Volume I – Twisted Roots
_________________________________________________________________

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Durham. UK. 2018

All material within the book remains the © of their respective creators.

Cover © Grey Malkin & Andy Paciorek

Frontispiece & Back Cover © Jim Peters

Edited by Jim Peters, Richard Hing, Grey Malkin & Andy Paciorek.

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 Twisted Roots is dedicated to: Niccolo Paganini, Robert
Johnson, Nick Drake, Sandy Denny, Syd Barrett, Delia
Derbyshire, Mark E Smith and all those who gave more than
just a bit of their soul to provide us with a lifetime of music,
stories and inspiration.

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 Contents

If you go down to the woods today… - An introduction to Folk Horror

music - Jim Peters………………………………………………………….….8

Album Review - The Wicker Man (Paul Giovanni and Magnet) - Jonny
Trunk…………………………………………………………………………..20

Swaddling Songs and Hangmen's Daughters; a Brief History of Acid

Folk - Grey Malkin…………………………………………………………..23

Standing at the crossroads, believe I'm sinking down - The Dark Blues
- Andy Paciorek………………………………………………………………45

The Devil Has All the Best Tunes - The History of Occult Rock -
Darren Charles……………………………………………………………….53

Album Review - Sacrifice (Black Widow) - Darren Charles…………...66

Unreliable Narratives: History and Folk Memory in the Southern

Murder Ballad - Stephen Canner…………………………………………..69

“God gonna cut you down” - Cave and Lanagan - Andy Paciorek……93

Album Review - Magic Lady (Mandy Morton and Spriguns) - Gary

Parsons………………………………………………………………………....96

Just Saying It Could Make It Happen: A short Introduction to Folk

Horror in the Work of Kate Bush - Daniel Pietersen…………………….98

Ballads of Blood; the Wyrd and the Uncanny in the Child Ballads -
Grey Malkin…………………………………………………………………106

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Ballads & Candles – An interview with Maddy Prior - Katherine Peach
…………………………………………………………………………………137

Album Review - From the Witchwood (Strawbs) - Sharron Kraus…145

The Invisible Brethren: A Closer Look at The Incredible String Band’s

The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter - Gary Parsons………………….148

Anointed Queen – An interview with Alison O'Donnell - Grey Malkin

…………………………………………………………………………………156

Album Review - First Utterance (Comus) - Grey Malkin………………166

The Itsy Bitsy Spider in the Secret Garden - Rennie Sparks………….172

That’ll lay down Your Pride – Josephine Ellis…………………………..188

Album Review - Alchemy (Third Ear Band) - Sean

Breadin…………………………………………………………...…………...195

Nico Evening of Light – Andy Paciorek………………………………….199

Ghosts of Voices: Hauntology and Folk music - Eamon

Byers…………………………………………………………………………..201

Album Review - The Seasons (David Cain & Ronald Duncan) - Bob
Fischer………………………………………………………………………...219

Sounding out Pan - Radiophonics and Rural Horror - Ned Netherwood

………………………………………………………………………................222

Mark E Smith and The Fall: Musical Outsiders – Darren Charles…...232

Album Review - Musick to Play in the Dark Vol. 1 (Coil) - Grey

Malkin………………………………………………………………………..241

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The Invocation of the Black Sun: Alchemy and Sexuality in the Work
of Coil – Hayes Hampton………………………………………………….247

Night Tripping: The Gris-Gris Gumbo of Doctor John – Andy Paciorek

…………………………………………………………………………………266

Album Review - Witchcraft Destroys Minds and Reaps Souls (Coven) -

Darren Charles………………………………………………………………268

I am sitting in a Room - spectral resonance as a source of horror in the

work of Alvin Lucier and Nigel Kneale's 'The Stone Tape' - Daniel
Pietersen……………………………………………………………...………271

Sounds of The Stone Tape – An interview with Andrew Liles – Jim

Peters………………………………………………………………………….282

Album Review - Blood on Satan's Claw (Marc Wilkinson) - Candia

McKormack………………………………………………………….………290

“I’m your Witchdoctor” – Freakbeat, Garage, Psych and the Occult –

Richard Hing……………………………………………………………...…292

Sounds of Sacrifice: Music of British Folk Horror Films - Adam Scovell

…………………………………………………………………………………304

Album Review – Psychomania (John Cameron) – Jim Moon….………327

Season of the Witch and The Living Dead - An interview with John
Cameron - Jim Peters……………………………………………………….334

Album Review - Valerie and her Week of Wonders (Lubos Fiser) – Jodie
Lowther………………………………………………………..……………..340

Contributors………………………………………………………………....341

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 The Invocation of the Black Sun:
Alchemy and Sexuality in the Work of Coil
By Hayes Hampton

In the explosion of musical experimentation following the brief, late-

1970s reign of punk rock, the industrial/electronic band Coil began as
a solo project of singer, lyricist, and mystic John Balance. Balance, a
self-described “groupie”[1] of industrial music pioneers Throbbing
Gristle, “attended the live recording of” that band’s Heathen Earth
album in 1978[2] and soon began a romantic relationship with TG
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member Peter Christopherson. After a stint in the post-TG project
Psychic TV, Balance and Christopherson began to record full-time as
Coil in 1984, compiling a large and musically diverse oeuvre as they
explored realms from Scatology (the title of their first album) to BDSM,
psychedelic states, occultism and mysticism, discarnate intelligences,
abasement, self-loathing, AIDS, ecstasy, sex, death, and
transcendence. Throughout their 20-year career, Coil used alchemical
metaphors and symbolism to structure their investigations into
sexuality, magic, altered states of consciousness, and the borders of
the self, and indeed they envisioned their music as an alchemical
project. Moreover, alchemy provided Coil with a metaphorical system
of flexibility and ancient provenance, affording them cultural
credibility for their advocacy of gay rights in an era distinctly hostile
to gays: the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s.

For this pair of openly gay men recording music at the height of the
AIDS epidemic, alchemy allowed Coil to articulate a queer identity
that was grounded in the physical world—especially in the body—
but in a spirituality that unraveled the culturally-constructed body.
Coil’s negotiations of bodily and sexual identity were complicated by
the social disapprobation and homophobia that accompanied the
advent of AIDS in the UK. Aware of the cultural origins of that
homophobia and of embodied identity itself, Coil extended their re-
imagining of the gay body to the urban landscape around them,
creating music and accompanying visual images at the points of
intersection between individual and cosmic, personal and
transpersonal. Coil, in short, used alchemy to create a new way of
performing gay identity and of imagining the self. Indeed, Coil’s use
of alchemical symbols, tropes, and texts points toward a new way, in
popular culture at least, of envisioning the tension between matter
and spirit -- a particularly fraught dichotomy given mainstream
society’s fear of gay bodies and late twentieth-century occultists’
growing skepticism regarding the supernatural.

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Coil’s beginnings as a band coincided with increasing public
awareness of AIDS and the backlash against gay men that
accompanied it. Balance and Christopherson responded to this
backlash not with the pleas for understanding and equality common
in the pop sphere, nor with the performative anger and political
parody common among post-punk musicians; instead, they used
social attitudes regarding pollution and contagion as the basis for
creating a queer approach to alchemy. Alchemy, for Coil, was both an
esoteric pursuit and a hermeneutic; it was their mystical alternative to
the Marxist-inflected social analysis taking place on albums by
contemporary bands like Crass, Gang of Four, and Scritti Politti, born
of a skepticism towards political solutions arising in part from the
pariah status conferred on gay men during the AIDS panic. In a 1985
interview, Balance and fellow band member Stephen Thrower spoke
of the hypocrisy of the British political system and the banning of gay
books and harassment of gays by police. Thrower remarked, “I
wouldn’t want to politicize [the fight against oppression], because
then you’ll make the same mistakes as those you’re fighting against.
That’s just one example why the British socialists don’t mean
anything in the political arena. They’re so dry and boring, and miles
away from the people they mean to represent.”[3]

Rather than social transformation, Coil aimed at personal

transformation, and they rejected organized religion for the same
reason they rejected organized politics. In answer to the question
“Why are you pagan?” Balance said in a 1984 interview: “god
structure is a macro version of … social hierarchy … it all leads to no
person having responsibility for themselves and therefore they are
totally wide open to manipulation by others.”[4] Coil’s work
constantly argues that taking control of one’s consciousness is both
necessary and an act of magic, an assertion arising directly from the
deep influence upon them of magical and alchemical texts,
particularly those of a sexual nature.

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Chief among Coil’s magical influences were Austin Osman Spare,
Aleister Crowley, and Kenneth Grant. All three writers, in various
ways, considered sexual magic the best path for joining the lower
realms of mind and matter to the highest spiritual realms, and
transmuting lower states of consciousness into higher. Though all
three writers accordingly mention the alchemical tradition and
explicitly link it to their work, Crowley’s corpus by far contains the
most frequent references to alchemy and the most overt metaphorical
borrowings from the ancient art. From Coil’s earliest recordings in the
1980s to the handful of albums released after Balance’s death in 2004,
Crowley’s work, especially his interpretation of alchemy as sex magic,
forms a constant source of material for the band. Crowley, a student
of both the Western esoteric tradition and Eastern traditions like Yoga
and Buddhist meditation, created a philosophical system that
presaged Aldous Huxley’s “perennialism” in that it postulated a set
of stable, underlying truths beneath the variegated surfaces of
religious traditions from around the world. For Crowley, this
underlying unity originated in sex. According to Crowley’s
Confessions, a fateful encounter with the head of the German occult
society Ordo Templi Orientis led him to understand that
Freemasonry, alchemy, magic (both ancient and modern), Kabbalah,
and other mystical traditions all pointed to the same secret [5]: the
surpassing magical power of combined male and female sexual
fluids. Throughout his texts, he refers to sexual fluids by such
alchemically-tinged names as “the Great Work,”[6] “the Elixir of
Life,”[7] and the “Arcanum of Alchymia.” [8] This sexually-generated
“True Stone of the Philosophers”[9] seems, in the earliest of Crowley’s
writings concerning it, to have been exclusively the product of
male/female intercourse, but Crowley’s unceasing researches led to
variations that included an individual male’s sexual fluids and the
combined sexual fluids of two males. Because of the unlimited
creative and transformative power he attributed to what were
commonly perceived as mere bodily secretions, Crowley’s vast,
complex, and polygeneric body of writing uses alchemy as one of its

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master metaphors, and Coil followed him both in their preoccupation
with sexual magic and their use of alchemical imagery.

Crowley’s sexual alchemy was only one side of his larger project of
transmuting base matter into spiritual energy. Another prima materia
used both literally and symbolically by Crowley was shit, most
notoriously in a coprophagic episode that occurred at the Abbey of
Thelema in July, 1920. Biographer Lawrence Sutin summarizes
Crowley’s goal during this period as “the creation of a ‘divine Self’
fully released from the fears and inhibitions of the all-too-human
soul,” and therefore “self-prescribed magical ordeals … were his chief
focus in the summer of 1920.”[10] Crowley would, “on an almost
nightly basis,”[11] enter a room he called the Chambre des Cauchemars
and ingest a peyote extract he had obtained from the Parke-Davis
pharmaceutical company[12] and/or opium, hashish, ether, heroin,
alcohol or cocaine. A brochure Crowley issued to promote the Abbey
makes it clear that he saw the Chambre as an alchemical vessel for the
dissolution of the self-- the false, lower self, at any rate. Drugs,
however, weren’t enough to force Crowley into a confrontation with
his most elemental fears and reflexes and so he and his sex-magical
partner Leah Hirsig entered into an escalating sado-masochistic game
(with Hirsig dominant), designed, as Crowley wrote, to “[make] me
free forever of my preferences for matter, [make] me Pure Spirit.” [13]
The game culminated with Hirsig goading Crowley into eating her
shit, mocking his hesitation by calling him a “False Priest.” Crowley’s
understandably intense description of this event includes, as an
indication of his near-shattering disgust, an allusion to the alchemical
black sun but ends with his declaration that “I passed ordeal, I took
oath; I am indeed High Priest.”[14]

In other writings as well, Crowley portrayed shit as an archetypal

form of base matter. In a 1985 interview, John Balance cites Crowley’s
poem “Leah Sublime,” which vividly sings the praises of coprophilia
(it was written before Crowley had actually performed the act).[15] In

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777, Crowley’s compendium of magical correspondences and
symbolism, he calls the Egyptian dung beetle “the Bark of the
Midnight Sun,”[16] portraying the insect as symbolic of the power of
the aspirant’s higher self to ferry him across “the black pool of the
Abyss.”[17] Crowley published a collection of poems, in fact, called The
Winged Beetle, inspired by the dung beetle’s evocation of the begetting
of renewal from waste, light from darkness, creation from
destruction. It isn’t surprising, then, that, as artists steeped in
Crowley’s work, Coil would be drawn to shit as a liminal substance.

Coil’s use of shit was not merely magical allegory, however, since as
gay men in 1980s Britain, Balance and Christopherson were
inextricably associated in the popular imagination with the lower
depths of the body, of urban space, and of morality. Transmuting the
base materials of homophobic rhetoric and of gay sexuality was of
primary concern for the era’s gay musicians, whether through the
alchemy of civil rights rhetoric, or declarations of pride, or
glamorized visions of bathhouse decadence. As far as the
homophobic political right was concerned, however, gays were
polluting “normal” society with their “unnatural” acts. Where the
rhetoric of contagion and sin was, imagery of excreta was not far off.
A Gay Times history quotes the remarks of one “James Anderton,
Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police,” who in 1986 “told a
conference on Aids [sic] that gay men ‘were swirling about in a
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human cesspit of their own making.’”[18] Such language, queer scholar
Jon Binnie argues, is typical of homophobic rhetoric in which “gay
men [are] pathologized as wasteful, as trash—associated with death,
disease and the sewer.”[19] Gay men in the 1980s thus became
symbolic of all that is loathsome, repulsive, excluded from
civilization. Coil’s recordings responded to this anathematization in
part by focusing on another liminal bodily fluid, blood, on the album
they made in response to the AIDS crisis, Horse Rotorvator. Songs such
as “The Anal Staircase,” “Slur,” “Ostia (The Death of Pasolini),”
“Blood from the Air,” and the band’s cover of “Tainted Love” depict a
world both eroticized and menacing, suffused with blood.

At the same time, Coil’s celebration of things bloody and excremental

functioned as a challenge to the larger cultural impulse towards
sanitization of sexuality and erasure of gay identity. The British press
treated AIDS as a matter of invasive contagion, on a par with the
predatory infection of innocent humans with bad blood that drove the
plots of then-popular Anne Rice vampire novels. AIDS, from an
epidemiological perspective, is a blood contagion, but this scientific
truth was given a lurid slant by press and politicians determined to
wring all the money and cultural capital they could out of the spread
of AIDS. Historian Virginia Berridge traces the rising arc of hysteria:

The terminology of gay plague was used across the press, in

quality as well as tabloid papers. Take, for example, The Sun in
May of 1983 with “Watchdogs in ‘Gay Plague’ Blood Probe”;
The Daily Telegraph “Wages of Sin. A Deadly Toll”; The Sun
again “US Blood Plague Kills Three in Britain” and in July 1983
the People “What the Gay Plague Did to Handsome Kenny.”[20]

Fear of “killer blood” fueled gay plague stories in the British press for
years,[21] and drove an anti-gay panic which culminated in 1988’s
Section 28 law, which prohibited “local authorities” from “funding …
books, plays, leaflets, films or any other material showing gay

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relationships as normal.”[22] Sociologist Eric Anderson coined the term
“homohysteria” to refer to this period of “backlash to the gains made
by gay men and feminists of the ‘60s and ‘70s.”[23]

Coil’s alchemical tropes paradoxically answered homohysteria not

with assertions of gay pride or the value of freedom and
individuality, but with an assault on the very basis of the individual
self, either metaphorically in their presentations of occult
philosophies like Crowley’s, or literally in their fascination with
death. In contrast with strong assertions of queer identity like Tom
Robinson’s “Glad to Be Gay” or the sometimes coded narratives of
queer self-discovery in the lyrics of bands like Bronski Beat and the
Smiths, Coil’s songs and videos tended to feature characters
undergoing specifically gay yet unheroic deaths. For example, “Ostia
(The Death of Pasolini),” while a tribute to a friend of the band, who
died of AIDS, refracts that death through the murder of film director
Pier Paolo Pasolini at the hands of a male prostitute. Pasolini’s death
is presented as sacrificial in the song, but in Coil’s telling it is an
eroticized sacrifice and Balance is on record as saying, perhaps
insensitively, “I think he wanted to die the way he did.”[24] In 1985
Coil released the first benefit record for AIDS, their dirge-like
rendition of “Tainted Love,” but this song and its accompanying
video also disrupt accepted narratives of liberation and protest.
Misreading the band’s intent, “gay record store owners wrote to
denounce them”[25] and some gay clubs refused to play the song.
Christopherson observed that “a lot of people couldn’t see the point
in us doing anything as morbid as [“Tainted Love”],” and the video’s
imagery is deliberately ambiguous. The figure of Death, played by
Marc Almond, is an icon of classic gay sexuality: a leather and silver-
bedecked figure directly from the films of Kenneth Anger. Death,
Coil’s imagery seems to say, is not something visited upon us from
without, but always already with us and part of us. We are all deaths
in progress.

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For Coil as for Crowley, even the highest secrets of magic and the
most sacred oaths were means to an end: literally the end of the
individual self by the metaphoric death of spiritual enlightenment
and the attendant dissolution of the socially-constructed personality.
Ultimately Crowley’s “magick” was designed to dissolve the
practitioner’s identity completely, by unmooring it not only from
conventional values but from all attachments, preferences, and
identification with a stable self. John Balance put this ethos into
practice in his art and his life, via ritual, drug and alcohol use, and
immersion in his art, often to the point of “Mental breakdown,” as he
remarked to one interviewer, adopting as a motto Captain Beefheart’s
lyric “God, please fuck my mind for good.” The interviewer, in
response, linked Balance’s behavior to alchemy, and Balance agreed:
“Of a sort, as long as it transmutes in the right direction.” [26]

Asked by the same interviewer about the difference between

mundane rituals (e.g., patriotic ceremonies) and magical ones,
Balance said “There are those [rituals designed] to keep you in your
place and those that allow you to break out. That is where magic
comes in because it allows you to transcend, or side step logical
configurations of living.”[27] Balance told the interviewer that he was
discouraged from being true to himself both by mainstream
heterosexist culture and by gay culture; rather than aspire to be “the
fairy on top of the cake,” Balance said, he aspired to “break up
reality,” creating a new self and embodying the alchemical motto solve
et coagula.[28]

As Crowley himself wrote of the ultimate goal of the spiritual path,

“Attainment is Insanity,”[29] dissolution of the self to be courted via
meditation, ritual, heights of ecstasy or revulsion, drugs, physical
exhaustion, and above all a relentless, obsessive dedication to the
visions one obtains from the above practices. Drawing on literature
from the Upanishads to the Gnostic Pistis Sophia to eighteenth-century
humanism to William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience,[30]

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Crowley envisioned the highest level of initiation as the point where
man, having dissolved his individual humanity, resolves into god, or
what Crowley called “Unity…above all division.”[31] Thus, Crowley’s
magical system aims at psychic alchemy, using the aspirant’s habits,
proclivities, and even resistance to change as transformative material.
In his most complete statement, Magick: Liber ABA, in a chapter
entitled “Of the Eucharist; and of the Art of Alchemy,” he describes
the later, more painful stage of the process: “just as the Aspirant, on
the Threshold of Initiation, finds himself assailed by the ‘complexes’
which have corrupted him … so does the ‘First Matter’ blacken and
putrefy as the Alchemist breaks up its coagulations of impurity.” [32]

Here Crowley writes of the nigredo phase of alchemy, which he often

symbolized with a black dragon, though traditional alchemical
literature more typically symbolizes it with the symbol of the black
sun. Coil adopted the black sun as their logo and as a frequent lyrical
image, using a drawing from Crowley’s Liber Arcanorum which can be
viewed as a visual pun: both sun and anus. As a glyph joining the
nigredo with elimination of bodily waste, the black sun combines two
of Coil’s major tropes: the fragile, contingent nature of the individual
self and the exploration (and alchemical use) of forbidden or rejected
materials and sexualities.

Stanton Marlan, in The Black Sun: The Alchemy and Art of Darkness,
looks in depth at the black sun’s relationship to the alchemical nigredo
and its metaphoric eclipse of consciousness. The black sun, in
Marlan’s summary, brings together “blackness, putrefactio, mortificatio,
the nigredo, poisoning, torture, killing, decomposition, rotting, and
death … a web of interrelationships that describe a terrifying, if most
often provisional, eclipse of consciousness”[33] --that is, the dissolution
of the mundane self both desired and feared by the magician, and the
confrontation with the “dark forces” [34] he or she must master in
order to evolve spiritually. These “forces” were understood by
twentieth-century magicians like Crowley not so much as external,

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demonic forces but as psychological negativity: shame, guilt, fear, and
disgust.

For Balance and Christopherson, the “dark forces” included

psychological negativity in the form of gay self-hatred and puritanical
body-phobia and also what is culturally constructed as physiological
negativity: blood, urine, shit, and (gay) semen—the ultimate
forbidden substance of the 1980s, worse than crack cocaine. All of
these substances, Coil’s work insists, travel along the subterranean
rivers of our cities and our psyches, poisoning us unless we transmute
their subtle energies. Coil’s debut album, Scatology (1984), which John
Balance called “alchemy in sound,” explores the psychic and bodily
terrain of waste matter. “Literally,” Balance told an interviewer,
“some of the sounds -- shitting and toilets -- were … raw noises. We
were making good things from what is perceived as being basically,
bad things; dealing with subjects other people wouldn’t touch such as
rotting and death.”[35] The black sun logo, prominent on the album’s
cover, serves as a visual reference to other lacunae, holes, and
forbidden spaces mentioned in the songs or in the album’s extensive
liner notes: “The Devil’s Hole” that Charles Manson told his followers
awaited them in the California desert, Salvador Dali’s “Humanism of
the Arsehole,” the psychic and corporeal depletions of vampirism,
gluteal injections of antibiotics to cure STDs, and, most memorably,
the shit- and piss-spattered setting of “The Sewage Worker’s Birthday
Party.”[36] Inauspicious as each of these may be, each also contains the
possibility of transmutation; as Scatology’s liner notes summarize, “It
is about performing surgery on yourself –psychic surgery—in order
to restore the whole being, complete with the aspects that sanitised
society attempts to wrench from your existence.”[37]

Indeed, Coil’s black sun logo presents an elegant union of higher and
lower: a union of the spiritual and material, just as Crowley used the
sun to symbolize both sexuality and the highest spiritual truth.[38] For
these reasons, and for its deliberate resemblance to the anus, Coil’s

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black sun combines deification and defecation, spirituality and
sexuality in one image, and connects them with their magical mentors
Crowley, Austin Osman Spare, and Kenneth Grant, all of whom
explored at length what the Kabbalah calls the qliphoth, the shattered
waste products of the divine act of creation that manifest as “the
negative substratum that underlies all positive life,” with impurity
and disgust on one end of the spectrum, ending in the “demonic and
terrifying paraphernalia of death, hell, and the Devil.”[39]

Coil’s work, as well, attempts to chart the solve et coagula of spiritual

evolution, often via tensions between seen and unseen, revealed and
hidden, public and private, gustatory and excretory. They explored
these tensions both in terms of hidden knowledge, such as the inner
teachings of various schools of magic, but also in terms of those areas
of lived experience that we tend to obscure or hide: the waste areas of
the city and the psyche. For example, Coil staged the publicity photo
shoot for Scatology as a qliphothic urban exploration, traveling to the
bleak concrete prairie of the Hammersmith Sewage Pumping Station.
In the series of photographs, as a somber, fashionably goth Balance
looks on, Christopherson gradually covers his hands and face with
thick, black effluent, his face losing all the composure one expects in a
pop music photo session and finally taking on a feral grimace. Here
Christopherson enacts what Spare calls an “atavistic resurgence,” [40] a
willed descent into the qliphoth with the intent of reclaiming some of
the power the individual surrenders in order to enter into the social
contract. Before the camera (and the gaze of the perhaps puzzled
reader of Scatology’s liner notes), Christopherson transmutes the
basest of matter into artistic and personal power, befouling his white
shirt and tie with the bodily residues such garments seek to mask and
contain.

Viewed alchemically, the sewer is macrocosm to the microcosm of the

anus, and joins the urban with the wild, taking that which cannot be
tolerated by civilization to those areas excluded from it; the sewer is

258
our “nightside of Eden,” to use Grant’s phrase, forming an urban
qliphoth along with the homeless shelter, the public toilet, and the bath
house. Coil, as a band formed in London, whose work is heavily
informed by the history and psychogeography of that city and whose
career can be neatly divided into London (1984-1999) and post-
London (2000-2004) periods, produced a discography haunted by that
city. Coil’s psychic mapping of London is expressed most famously in
Balance’s obsession with the “lost rivers” of London, formerly above-
ground rivers which over the centuries were gradually channeled into
conduits, adapted into early sewers, and covered over with
pavement. The original “lost rivers” were all integrated into the city-
wide sewer system that began construction in the 1860s, and more
rivers joined them. As the alchemist’s alembic is a device in which
gross materials are distilled into finer ones, the sewer along with its
attendant treatment plants and canals is meant to purify the city.
Thus, London’s Victorian-era sewer system is an example of ritual
architecture, a new kind of urban space, combining the majesty of the
palace, the awe of the catacombs, and the saving power of the
cathedral. Intended to guide the city’s waste from nigredo to albedo, the
alchemical state of purification, the sewer is at the same time hidden,
dangerous, and fraught with fear and disgust. Coil’s musical
evocations of London, such as “The Lost Rivers of London,” “Dark
River,” “The Anal Staircase,” “Love’s Secret Domain,” and “Batwings
(A Liminal Hymn),” often concern themselves with enclosed,
subterranean or sewer-like spaces whose palpable unpleasantness or
danger forms, at the same time, an alchemically liminal doorway to
ecstasy or gnosis.

Coil’s psychogeographic and occult preoccupations thus enabled

them to re-imagine gay identity along lines far different from those
drawn in the mass media of the time, subverting the dichotomy of
earnest, shirtsleeves-wearing Red Wedge activism, on the one hand,
and fey, fashion-obsessed gender-bending on the other. Gayness in
Coil’s music communicates a sense of danger—not the danger of

259
contagion, but of genuine transgression. On the other hand, the
band’s lyrics and imagery took gay sex into a cosmic realm, whether
overtly, as in the “ecstatic tale of bukkake” related in “Are You
Shivering?”[41] or more subtly, as in the other logo Coil used in
addition to the black sun: John Dee’s hieroglyphic monad, which
combines symbols of the base elements and the Sun and Moon into a
human figure both corporeal and divine. The hieroglyphic monad
betokens the later stages of the alchemical process in which, having
transmuted both pollution and purity, the aspirant evolves into unity
with the cosmos.

Like Dee’s celestial monad, the gay male as transmuted in Coil’s work
is a unity of low and high: body, spirit, scatophile, fairy, drug abuser,
cruiser, and angel. Thus, Coil’s alchemy was a magical project, but
also a musical and a social project: through their manipulations of
sound and image, they sought to transmute negative images of gay
sexuality into images of mystery and elemental power. John Balance
and Peter Christopherson took Crowley’s multi-layered excremental/
alchemical vision from the occult underground to the world of pop
culture. Like Crowley, Coil insisted on the necessity of immersing
oneself in embodied existence rather than attempting to evade or
transcend it. In the words of one of Balance and Christopherson’s
collaborators in a 1985 trans-Atlantic alchemical ritual, Coil’s ideal
was to “place [the] soul in direct circumference of the shadow of the
black sun” in order to undergo the “burning and death … that is
required in order for one to go into the upper levels.” [42] Coil’s “upper
levels,” spiritual as well as corporeal, had scarcely before been
imagined in popular culture, a psychic space in which body, mind,
and cosmos melded with orgasm, hallucination, and chaos, “in order
to restore the whole being.”[43]

260
Notes
[1] John Balance, interview, Fist 5 (1992), accessed August 16, 2014,

www.brainwashed.com/common/ htdocs/publications/coil-1993-
fist.php?site=coil08
[2] Brainwashed, “John Balance,” accessed January 4, 2014,

http://www.brainwashed.com/coil/ info/john.html
[3] John Balance and Stephen Thrower, interview, Abrahadabra 1 (1985),

accessed September 1, 2016,

www.brainwashed.com/common/htdocs/publications/coil-1985-
abrahadabra.php?site=coil08
[4] John Balance, interview, They Are Going to Take Me Away Ha Ha

(1984), accessed September 1, 2016,

www.brainwashed.com/common/htdocs/publications/coil-1984-
they-are-going.pdf
[5] Aleister Crowley, The Confessions of Aleister Crowley, ed. John

Symonds and Kenneth Grant (New York: Hill and Wang, 1969), 705-
710.
[6] Aleister Crowley, The Book of Lies (York Beach, ME: Samuel Weiser,

1986), 148.
[7] Aleister Crowley, Magick: Liber ABA, Book Four, Parts I-IV, ed.

Hymenaeus Beta (San Francisco: Weiser, 2012), 274.

[8] Aleister Crowley, Liber Aleph (York Beach, ME: Red Wheel/Weiser:

1991), 167.
[9] Crowley, Liber Aleph, 95.
[10] Sutin, Do What Thou Wilt, 282.
[11] Ibid. 282.
[12] Ibid., 253.
[13] Aleister Crowley, The Magickal Record of the Beast 666, ed. John

Symonds and Kenneth Grant (London: Duckworth, 1972), 230.

[14] Ibid., 235.
[15] John Balance, “Coil Interview,” ADN 7 (1985)

www.brainwashed.com/common/htdocs/ publications/coil-1985-
adn-7.pdf

261
[16] Aleister Crowley, 777 and Other Qabalistic Writings of Aleister
Crowley, ed. Israel Regardie (York Beach, ME: Weiser, 1986), 121.
[17] Crowley, 777, 120.
[18] Richard Smith, “Behind the Story—Section 28,” Gay Times, last

modified February 8, 2008,

www.gaytimes.co.uk/Magazine/InThisIssue-sectionid-650.html
[19] Jon Binnie, The Globalization of Sexuality (London: SAGE, 2004), 57.
[20] Virginia Berridge, “AIDS, the Media, and Health Policy,” in AIDS:

Rights, Risk and Reason, ed. Peter Aggleton, Peter Davies, and Graham
Hart (London: RoutledgeFalmer, 2003), 16.
[21] Ibid. 16.
[22] “When Gay Became a Four-Letter Word,” BBC News, last

modified January 20, 2000, http://news.bbc.co.uk/

2/hi/uk_news/scotland/611704.stm
[23] Eric Anderson, “The Rise and Fall of Western Homohysteria,”

Journal of Feminist Scholarship 1 (2011): 86.

[24] John Balance and Peter Christopherson, “Lust’s Dark Exit,”

interview, Electric Dark Space (1991),

www.brainwashed.com/common/htdocs/publications/coil-1991-
lusts_dark_exit.php?site=coil08
[25] John Gill, Queer Noises: Male and Female Homosexuality in Twentieth-

Century Music (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995),

131.
[26] John Balance, interview, Fist 5 (1992),

brainwashed.com/common/htdocs/ publications/coil-1993-
fist.php?site=coil08
[27] Ibid.
[28] Ibid.
[29] Aleister Crowley, The Magickal Record of the Beast 666, ed. John

Symonds and Kenneth Grant (London: Duckworth, 1972), 86

(emphasis in original).
[30] Aleister Crowley, “Curriculum of A.∙.A.∙.,” The Equinox 3.1 (1919),

accessed July 1, 2014, http://hermetic.com/ crowley/equinox/iii/i

[31] Crowley, Magick, 138.

262
[32] Crowley, Magick, 273.
[33] Marlan, Black Sun, 11.
[34] Marlan, Black Sun, 6.
[35] John Balance, “Coil: An Interview with John Balance” Compulsion

Online, www. compulsiononline.com/interview_coil.htm

[36] The CD re-release of the album maintains the motif, using as cover

art a witty re-working of Man Ray’s Homage à D. A. F. de Sade, a

photograph of male buttocks framed by an inverted cross.
[37] Coil, Scatology, Force & Form, K.442, 1984, LP.
[38] See, for example, Crowley, Magick, 515-16.
[39] Kenneth Grant, Nightside of Eden (London: Skoob Books, 1994), 31
[40] Phil Baker, Austin Osman Spare: The Life and Legend of London’s Lost

Artist (London: Strange Attractor, 2010), 88-89.

[41] Russell Cuzner, “Serious Listeners: The Strange and Frightening

World of Coil,” The Quietus, last modified November 24, 2011,

http://thequietus.com/articles/07447-strange-and-frightening-
world-of-coil
[42] Tim O’Neill, “Ambrosia Transpersonal Communications,” A Coil

Magazine (1987), 7, accessed July 2, 2014, http://

brainwashed.com/coil/images/magazine/vii.jpg
[43] Coil, Scatology, Force & Form, K.442, LP.

Bibliography
Anderson, Eric. “The Rise and Fall of Western Homohysteria.” Journal
of Feminist Scholarship 1 (2011): 80-94.
Baker, Phil. Austin Osman Spare: The Life and Legend of London’s Lost
Artist. London: Strange Attractor, 2010.
Balance, John. Interview. Fist 5 (1992). Accessed August 16, 2014.
www.brainwashed.
com/common/htdocs/publications/coil-1993-
fist.php?site=coil08.
---. Interview. “The Price of Existence Is Eternal Warfare,” Grok 6
(1983). Accessed June 3, 2014.
brainwashed.com/common/htdocs/publications/coil

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-1983-grok. php?site=coil08.
---. Interview. They Are Going to Take Me Away Ha Ha (1984). Accessed
September 1, 2016.
www.brainwashed.com/common/htdocs/publication
s/coil-1984-they-are-going.pdf.
Balance, John, and Stephen Thrower. Interview. Abrahadabra 1 (1985).
Accessed September 1, 2016.
www.brainwashed.com/common/htdocs/publications/ coil-
1985-abrahadabra.php?site=coil08.
Berridge, Virginia. “AIDS, the Media, and Health Policy.” In AIDS:
Rights, Risk and Reason, edited by Peter Aggleton, Peter
Davies, and Graham Hart, 13- 27. London: RoutledgeFalmer,
2003.
Binnie, Jon. The Globalization of Sexuality. London: SAGE, 2004.
Brainwashed. “John Balance.” Accessed January 4, 2014.
www.brainwashed.com/ coil/info/john.html.
Coil. “Are You Shivering?” Musick to Play in the Dark Vol. 1. Chalice,
GRAAL CD 003, 1999. Compact disc.
---. “Ostia (The Death of Pasolini).” Horse Rotorvator. Some Bizarre,
ROTA CD1, 1987. Compact disc.
---. Scatology. Force & Form, K.442. LP.
Crowley, Aleister. 777 and Other Qabalistic Writings of Aleister Crowley.
Edited by Israel Regardie. York Beach, ME: Weiser, 1986.
---. The Book of Lies. 1913. Reprint, York Beach, ME: Weiser, 1986.
---. The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography. Edited by
John Symonds and Kenneth Grant. 1929. Reprint, New York:
Hill and Wang, 1969.
---. “Curriculum of A.∙.A.∙.” The Equinox 3.1 (1919). Accessed July 1,
2014. http://hermetic. com/crowley/equinox/iii/i/.
---. Liber Aleph. York Beach, ME: Red Wheel/Weiser, 1991.
---. Magick: Liber ABA, Book Four, Parts I-IV. Edited by Hymenaeus
Beta. San Francisco: Weiser, 2012.
---. The Magickal Record of the Beast 666. Edited by John Symonds and
Kenneth Grant. London: Duckworth, 1972.

264
---. The Winged Beetle. 1910. Accessed June 2, 2012.
hermetic.com/crowley/winged-beetle/.
Cuzner, Russell. “Serious Listeners: The Strange and Frightening
World of Coil.” The Quietus. Last modified November 24,
2011. http://thequietus.com/articles/07447-strange-and
frightening-world-of-coil.
Grant, Kenneth. Aleister Crowley and the Hidden God. 1973. Reprint,
London: Skoob Books, 1992.
---. Nightside of Eden. 1977. Reprint, London: Skoob Books, 1994.
Marlan, Stanton. The Black Sun: The Alchemy and Art of Darkness.
College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2008.
O’Neill, Tim. “Ambrosia Transpersonal Communications.” A Coil
Magazine, 1987. Accessed July 2, 2014.
brainwashed.com/coil/images/magazine/vii.jpg.
Smith, Richard. “Behind the Story—Section 28.” Gay Times. Last
modified February 8, 2008. http://www.
gaytimes.co.uk/Magazine/InThisIssue-sectionid-650.html.
“When Gay Became a Four-Letter Word.” BBC News. Last modified
January 20, 2000.
news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/611704.stm.

265
 Ladies and Gentlemen … I present to you….

The Harvest Hymns Contributors

Sean Breadin: From childhood days with Eastern European folk

flutes & VCS3 synthesisers in his native Northumbria, Sean grew up
with equal measures of experimental, popular and medieval music
that inspired his own work involving a museum of ancient &
ethnographic musical instruments though latterly he's contented
himself with analogue synthesis, electric guitar and a shed load of FX.
With his wife Rachel McCarron he works as the Folk 'n' Fun duo
Rapunzel & Sedayne (AKA Venereum Arvum) and curates the
hauntological histories of Hermione Harvestman. Intermittently, he
can be found as a Professional Storyteller or else traipsing medieval
churches & cathedrals in search of Foliate Heads.

Eamon Byers completed his PhD at Queen’s University Belfast in

2014. His thesis explored the interaction between medievalism and
folk music in English culture from the eighteenth century to the
present day. Also in 2014, he co-organised ‘A Fiend in the Furrows:
Perspectives on ‘Folk Horror’ in Literature, Film & Music’, the first
conference dedicated to the academic study of folk horror. He
currently teaches English at Marymount International School London
and continues to research and publish on the interactions between
folk culture and medievalism in music, literature and politics.

Stephen Canner is an archivist and independent scholar. His research

takes him on detours that include the dark paths of the American
hinterlands. As the lead singer and songwriter for the acoustic
Americana band, The Victor Mourning, his song writing rakes
through the heritage of rural Southern apocrypha and apocalypse,
with death, sin, and the bottle ever at hand.
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Darren Charles has been a chief administrator for the FHR project
since its very inception and has been very involved in all things Folk
Horror for a long time before then. As part of The Dead End Street
Band he was responsible for producing some fantastically gloomy,
obsessive drones mixed with all manner of field recordings,
electronics and pedal abuse. Darren was also central to setting up the
Unearthing Forgotten Horror events in Newcastle where cult horror
films were mixed with live performances including those by Darren
himself with both The Dead End Street Band and his current noise
outfit Equestrian Vortex.

Off the back of the success of these events, Darren created the
Unearthing Forgotten Horrors radio shows which cover obscure
horror soundtracks, dark drones, weird electronica, crazed kosmiche
and twisted psychedelia all of which is beautifully put together by
Darren and his amazing knowledge of these music genres.

Josephine Ellis was born in Carlisle in 1976. She has developed

successive minor obsessions with the following: Anglican and related
choral music; Sacred Harp singing, also known as "proto-gospel noir";
folk songs relating to the sea, death and seduction; and fat Victorian
novels. She writes sonnets and commentary on the blog
"wordsmiths2801" and took her name from the Hebridean sea
monsters known as the Blue Men of the Minch. She works as a
freelance town planning and sustainability consultant, and lives in
Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

Bob Fischer grew up in the 1970s feeling oddly unsettled by the faces
of the Edwardian children in the opening titles of Bagpuss. He is a
writer and broadcaster whose book Wiffle Lever To Full! was
published by Hodder & Stoughton, and is a travelogue of British
science fiction conventions described by the Gay Times as “A joyous,
342
irreverent celebration of Britain’s secret love of the bizarre”. He has
spent the last two decades playing strange music and mumbling to
the listeners of BBC Tees, as well as making radio documentaries
about North-Eastern folklore; a subject he has also written about for
Fortean Times. In his spare time, he communes with hobmen.

Hayes Hampton is Professor of English at the University of South

Carolina Sumter where he teaches writing, American and African
American literature, the history of spiritual autobiography, and
rhetoric and popular culture and has a particular interest in Magic,
Western Esotericism, Popular Culture and Chaos. His presentation in
2013 at the Popular Culture Association in the South Conference was
entitled ‘“There’s Someone in My Head but It’s Not Me’: Popular
Music and Conspiracy Theories,’’ and for that title alone he deserves
respect.

His most recent publication is the article “‘Born Again Pagans’: An

Industrial Band Discovers ‘Sea, Hill, and Wood’” in Sacred Lands and
Spiritual Landscapes, edited by Wendy Griffin and introduced by
Ronald Hutton (Tucson: ADF Publishing, 2014).

Richard Hing grew up in splendid isolation in the depths of rural

Herefordshire, but is nowadays based in Portsmouth and works as a
palaeontology lab technician. Apart from dinosaurs, three of his
principal interests are natural history, fortean phenomena, and '60s
freakbeat and psychedelic rock, and has found folk horror to nestle
quite comfortably in the centre of all that. He is the chief
administrator for the Folk Horror Revival Twitter account and a Sub-
editor at Wyrd Harvest Press.

Sharron Kraus is a singer, musician and composer inspired by

traditional music, psychedelia, horror soundtracks, surrealism,
mythology and gothic and magical literature. She has released six solo
albums, the first of which, Beautiful Twisted, was named by Rolling

343
Stone in their Critics’ Top Albums of 2002. She is one of the musicians
focused on in Jeanette Leech's Seasons They Change: The Story of Acid,
Psych and Experimental Folk. She has a doctorate in Philosophy from
the University of Oxford.

Jodie Lowther is an artist, musician and co-founder of the Soft Bodies

Records label. Originally hailing from the North East of England, she
is inspired mostly by horror, surrealism and psychedelia. Jodie has
illustrated album covers and music videos for many popular artists,
and musically records as one half of the band Quimper as well as a
solo project under her own name.

Grey Malkin: When not practising necromancy or playing with his

cat, Grey Malkin was a part of Scottish haunted folk outfit The Hare
And The Moon who released five albums showcasing their own
peculiar and spooked take on traditional music and are now as
ghosts. Grey is also a member of flautist Amanda Votta's The Floating
World and can be found in various incarnations of United Bible
Studies. Additionally, he has played on albums and songs by,
amongst others, Stone Breath's Timothy Renner, Kitchen Cynics,
Great Attractor, Sandfingers, Trappist Afterland, Tryst of Wolves and
The Ilk as well as collaborating with Alison O'Donnell (Mellow
Candle), Ken Patterson (Caedmon) and the acid folk band Sourdeline.
Grey's album reviews of new psych/folk/hauntology/wyrd releases
can be found on both the splendid Active Listener music blog and the
Folk Horror Revival website as well as in Moof Magazine and, when
doing none of the above, he enjoys sitting in the woods, lying by
rivers, reading books on folklore and eating crisps. Grey Malkin is
also an administrator of Folk Horror Revival and a Sub-editor at
Wyrd Harvest Press.

Candia McKormack is a founder member of the British Gothic Pagan

band Inkubus Sukkubus. Formed in 1989, their songs cover subject
matters from medieval witchcraft and 17 th-century witch
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persecutions, to vampirism, hedonism, lycanthropy, magick and
folklore. Candia grew up in the Severnside village of Saul in
Gloucestershire, where the tidal river was a very real part of rural life,
where the seasons were respected and observed, and where the cider
house was the hub of the community. Inkubus Sukkubus are very
much still going strong, having recently released their 20 th album,
Barrow Wake.
Jim Moon is a writer and broadcaster on what he likes to call all
things weird and wonderful. He lives in a house stuffed with strange
books and weird films, and is currently suffering an outbreak of
puppets. News of what he’s doing and his writings appear at
hypnogoria.blogspot.co.uk/ His weekly audio show can be found
here - hypnobobs.geekplanetonline.com/

Ned Netherwood is a proud Yorkshireman, father and beer expert

living in Arizona. He is responsible for wasistdas.co.uk and
everything that comes out of it such as the acclaimed record label,
widely ignored radio show and drunken barroom DJ sets. He is the
author of An Electric Storm: Daphne, Delia & The BBC Radiophonic
Workshop and recently contributed a Doctor Who story to the charity
anthology A Second Target for Tommy alongside former
showrunner Steven Moffat. A TV showing of Blood on Satan's Claw in
the early 90s was the start of his folk horror passion.

Andy Paciorek is a graphic artist, writer, lecturer and is the creator of

Folk Horror Revival project. Drawn mainly to the worlds of myth,
folklore, symbolism, decadence, curiosa, anomaly, dark romanticism
and otherworldly experience, and fascinated both by the beautiful
and the grotesque and the twilight threshold consciousness where
these boundaries blur. The mist-gates, edges and liminal zones where
nature borders supernature and daydreams and nightmares cross
paths are of great inspiration to him. His drawing anthologies – Art of
the Beautiful~Grotesque and Peripheral Visions: Scenes from Sketchbooks

345
are due to be released soon. He is the founder of Folk Horror Revival
and the Editor in Chief at Wyrd Harvest Press.

Gary Parsons is an MA film graduate from Goldsmiths College

London who specialises in short films. Utilizing both, elements of the
surrealist genre and images of the occult, these films are both
beautiful and at times disturbing.

Katherine Peach is an editor, writer, musician, actress, costume

maker, and mushy pea connoisseur born in Baltimore, Maryland. She
is one-half of the mysterious folkloric music project Wandering Eldar.

Jim Peters was born to this earth at a very young age and as his
school report so astutely put it has had a lot if growing up to do since
then. Public Records show Jim as officially working at The British
Museum but unofficially he is one if the intrepid band of FHR admins
as well as the curator and conservator for the Septimus Keen archives
and an audio relic hunter, mixer and remixer under the moniker of
Melmoth the Wanderer. He is proud to be a child of the Chilterns, a
husband, a father and a Sherlock Holmes obsessive. He is the Guest
Editor and concept creator of Harvest Hymns.

Daniel Pietersen When not helping to usher in the Folk Horror

Revival, Dan spends much of his time traversing the dimly-
remembered archives of the Constant University in an attempt to
catch some of the rogue narratives that dwell there. He is also the
owner of Facebook’s Speculative Horror group and can be found
standing in the middle of fields on summer evenings, looking
hopefully upwards. Dan lives in Edinburgh with his wife and dog,
both of whom play with dead things more than they should.

346
Adam Scovell is a writer and filmmaker currently based between
Liverpool and London. He is studying for a PhD in film music and
transcendental style at Goldsmiths. He has produced film and art
criticism for over twenty publications including The Times and The
Guardian, runs the Blog North Awards nominated website, Celluloid
Wicker Man, and has had work screened at FACT, The Everyman
Playhouse, Hackney Picturehouse and Manchester Art Gallery. In
2015, he worked with Robert Macfarlane on an adaptation of his
Sunday Times best-seller, Holloway, and has worked with several
collaborators on film projects including Iain Sinclair, Stanley
Donwood and Richard Skelton.
Rennie Sparks is one half of the song writing team known as The
Handsome Family. Their tenth album, Unseen (September, 2016) is
full of songs about mysteries at the edge of reality. She lives in
Albuquerque, New Mexico on the edge of town.

Jonny Trunk founded Trunk Records in 1995, a cult British label that
specialises in film music, library music, early electronics and exotic
recordings. It was the first label to release music from cult horror
films such as The Wicker Man. He has also held modern music and
movement classes using vintage electronic recordings and regularly
finds music for advertising, film and TV. Trunk also releases his own
material through the label, including his album The Inside Outside.
Since 2003, Jonny has been responsible for the rediscovery of Basil
Kirchin, by releasing his unknown 1960s experimental jazz and
soundtrack work. In recent years Trunk has been lecturing at art
colleges throughout the UK. His talks focus on the art of creativity
based on nostalgia, enthusiasm and cunning. Jonny is also a regular
broadcaster on London's art radio station Resonance FM. His radio
show OST has concentrated on film music, TV music, library music
and related recordings and is the only show of its kind on British
radio. It has championed the work of François de Roubaix, Roger
Roger (composer), Krzysztof Komeda and many other obscure
international soundtrack artists.
347
Focusing on Folk Horror, Psychogeography, Hauntology, Visionary
Pastoralism, Urban Wyrd, Occulture, folklore, history, curiosa, film,
literature, poetry, art, photography and theatre.

100% of profits from FHR / Wyrd Harvest Press books sold in their
online store is charitably donated at intervals to different environmental,
wildlife and community projects undertaken by the Wildlife Trusts.

Other titles available (more to follow)

Folk Horror Revival: Field Studies - Second Edition (2018) ~ A new and
revised edition of the seminal tome Folk Horror Revival: Field Studies. A
collection of essays, interviews and artwork by a host of talents exploring
the weird fields of folk horror, urban wyrd and other strange edges.
Contributors include Robin Hardy, Ronald Hutton, Alan Lee, Philip
Pullman, Thomas Ligotti, Kim Newman, Adam Scovell, Gary Lachman,
Susan Cooper and a whole host of other intriguing and vastly talented
souls. An indispensable companion for all explorers of the strange
cinematic, televisual, literary and folkloric realms.

Folk Horror Revival: Corpse Roads (2016) ~ An epic collection of

spellbinding poetry, focusing on folk horror, life, death and the eeriness
of the landscape by many creative talents both living and departed.
Accompanied throughout with atmospheric imagery by an impressive
collection of contemporary photographers.

348
Carnival of Dark Dreams (2016) ~ A visual day-trip into the depths of
the jungle, the sands of the desert, to many haunted habitats and worse
still into the darkness of the human imagination. But fear not, for
captured, caged and presented for your curiosity by Dr. Bob Curran and
Mr. Andy Paciorek are some of the deadliest, most grotesque, fearsome
entities of world folklore. Roll up Roll up for the fright of your lives. Dare
you visit The Carnival of Dark Dreams???

This Game of Strangers (2017) ~ Prepare to taste the worm in the golden
apple of Camelot as the evocative poets Jane Burn and Bob Beagrie peer
behind castle walls and uncover the soiled sheets of the romance /
betrayal of Lancelot and Guinevere. Slipping seamlessly from the lyrical
to the modern, Bob and Jane draw us in like voyeurs to the clandestine
passion and sometimes mundane (though always rich in language)
details of the love affair between the most beloved of the legendary king.
Prepare to read the classic tale of romance and bewitchment as it has
never been told before. Illustrated throughout with atmospheric
photography by several great artists.

North (2017) ~ The eloquent words of two poets brought forth from the
land, the lodestone and lodestar. All roads lead here. Join Tim Turnbull
and Phil Breach as through poetry, prose and the atmospheric imagery of
great photographers, they explore and invoke the physical and emotional
landscapes. Head North my friends and don't look back.

Otherworldly: Folk Horror Revival at the British Museum (2017) ~ A

transcript of the entire British Museum 2016 event, featuring
contributions by Shirley Collins, Gary Lachman, Iain Sinclair, Reece
Shearsmith and many more. A great keepsake for those fortunate to be
there at the superb event and a riveting read for those who weren't but
love the whole folk horror phenomenon.

349
Hares in the Moonlight (2017) ~ Written by accomplished singer
songwriter, Sharron Kraus. A tale of magic and adventure for readers
aged 8 – 12 in the tradition of Alan Garner and Susan Cooper. Twins
Lucy and Jay rescue a caged hare and then follow it to a moonlit
gathering of hares. They find themselves falling into a world of
shapeshifting and becoming hares themselves.

Wyrd Kalendar (2017) ~ Join Chris Lambert and Andy Paciorek as they
guide you through the twelve months of the year weaving twelve
illustrated tales of Magic, Murder, Terror, Love and the Wyrd.

Folk Horror Revival: Harvest Hymns: Volume 2: Sweet Fruits (2018) ~

Blossoming and bursting from the Twisted Roots of Folk Horror music;
the second volume of Harvest Hymns explores how the damp and
darkness and other superb strangeness influences the current crop of
musical artists. Featuring interviews and essays containing the likes of
Ghost Box, The Hare and The Moon, Mortlake Book Club, Boards of
Canada, The Devil and the Universe, GOAT, English Heretic, Nathalie
Stern, Hawthonn and many, many more; Sweet Fruits is the perfect
dessert for all wyrd tastes.

www.lulu.com/spotlight/andypaciorek

350