Chris Lambert’s presentation / performance at the Alchemical Landscape symposium was an impressive blend of myth and folklore with an added, strategic dose of pranksterism. The Black Meadow mythos is an admirably dense and wide-ranging conceit that allows Lambert and his associates (particularly The Soulless Party), to plunge deep into ideas of geographical specificity, local legend and the residual anxiety of military-industrial landscapes. The central (absent) figure of Professor Roger Mullins emerges as an ideal hauntological avatar, someone who is but never was and who also symbolizes the concerns of contemporary cultural practice via an uncanny nostalgia for the educational tools of the past. At its base, Lambert’s exploration of an ‘authentic’ myth is concerned with a series of magical properties: not just strange ‘powers’, but the magic and often disputed nature of ‘property’: intellectual, material and historical. We look forward to the project’s future iterations.
Check out the releases so far: the book, the album and the collection of songs. There have also been some very interesting performances and appearences linked to the project.
