Headlands

One of our ongoing projects is Headlands. This has been developed and designed by Yvonne Salmon and James Riley as a multi-platform work encompassing expanded cinema, spoken word, field research, a curated exhibition and various publications.

The project looks at the folkloric and ufological intersections that exist between two villages in North Cornwall: Port Isaac and St. Teath.

We mounted the project as an exhibition at the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge from 23rd June to 11th July 2016. This was followed by an live event at the Festival of Ideas on October 22nd, 2017. A trailer for the live event can be found here. We are now preparing the piece for release as a book and album on Eighth Climate Records. Further live performances are planned for the future . Scroll down for images and the promotional text for the original exhibition.

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Headlands Hotel, Port Isaac, Cornwall

Tintagel, Cornwall

Field work: Salmon shooting in St. Teath

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Headlands - A New Exhibition on the First Floor

In 2015 Yvonne Salmon and James Riley travelled through North Cornwall. They went in search of evidence pertaining to two fictional and folkloric events: the filming of the sci-fi drama The Nightmare Man (1981) in Port Isaac and the 1645 'abduction' of Ann Jefferies from the nearby hamlet of St. Teath.

A series of material and symbolic factors connect these two episodes. They also lie at the intersection of place, culture and myth that characterises Cornwall's particular psychic territory.

Influenced by Patrick Keiller and the Robinson Institute, Headlands presents a series of texts, images and magical objects. Drawing on Yvonne Salmon's work as an artist and James Riley's experience with private archives, it is intended as an essay by way of artefacts, a dispatch from the zone.

You can see this exhibition on the first floor landing of the English Faculty building from 23rd June to 11th July 2016.

Yvonne Salmon and James Riley will be on the first floor landing at 1pm on Thursday 30th June. They will be happy to talk through the exhibition with any interested parties.

Headlands is presented as an output of the ongoing research project The Alchemical Landscape. It has been timed to coincide with 'The Alchemical Landscape II: Screen Media, Occulture and the Geographic Turn', a one day symposium at Girton College, Cambridge on 7th July. An event linked to the Headlands exhibition will be presented as part of the 2016 Festival of Ideas. The Alchemical Landscape Project has been awarded CRASSH research group status and will run a seminar series during the academic year 2016-2017.

The Other Side

Bishop James Pike 

I'm very happy to announce 'The Other Side: An Audiophonic Séance'. Working with Evie Salmon under the Alchemical Landscape banner, we've had the pleasure of collaborating with Jo Brook of Bad Timing to bring together "a night of dead formats, traces, sites and spectres from the underground". 

The event features a series of acts and performances connected via a shared interest in the mediumistic power of recording technology: 

Howlround
Documents 
Evie Salmon & James Riley performing 'Dust'
bad timing djs: mix tapes from the underground

We'll be holding the event at the Judith E. Wilson Drama Studio, Faculty of English, 9 West Road, Cambridge on Thursday 12th May, 7.30pm. 

Tickets are free but places are limited. Please reserve via eventbrite:

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-other-side-an-audiophonic-seance-tickets-24826139652

We're also inviting you to consider a £5 donation towards performers' travel costs. 

For more information, see the Bad Timing website and scroll down for details of each act. 

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Howlround is an ongoing exploration of the possibilities of magnetic tape as a creative medium for electronic music. Their live performances and compositions are created entirely by manipulating tape loops of natural acoustic sounds on vintage reel-to-reel machines, with additional reverb or electronic effects strictly forbidden. Their fourth LP Tales From the Black Tangle was released at the end of 2015 and was a dark and compelling concoction of industrial sirens, foghorns, seawash, ship to shore distress signals and even the creaking of a Broadcasting House microphone cradle in need of some oil.

'Uncanny, mesmerising, difficult and sublime' The Quietus

http://www.howlround.co.uk/

Documents is a nascent development of the long running creative occult project English Heretic. Documents has been set up to explore a remit of ethnographic recordings from the imaginal world. Combining the aesthetic of Bataille's surrealist journal Documents with the hermetic psychology of James Hillman, the project represents a deepening of the themes laid out by English Heretic. Documents first broadcast was released on the Eighth Climate imprint in December 2015.

Documents will perform two pieces. "Music For The Execution Of Geoffrey Firmin" An imaginary séance for the tragic protagonist of Malcolm Lowry's Under The Volcano abstracting dialogue from the film adaptation of Lowry's book to achieve rapport the spectre of Firmin. "Last Broadcast at Boleskine" manipulates field recordings taken at the cemetery overlooked by Aleister Crowley's notorious Loch Ness home. These recordings, carried out on the 1st December 2015, anniversary of Crowley's death, shortly before Boleskine House burned down, constitute music to precipitate the violent demise of an abode on the borderland. Together these pieces explore landscape, film and documentary dialogue as a form of theatrical EVP.
http://www.english-heretic.org.uk/EighthClimate/

Evie Salmon and James Riley work across multiple faculties at the University of Cambridge. They co-direct The Alchemcial Landscape, an ongoing research and public engagement project looking at occulture and geography.

'Dust' is a speculative investigation into the afterlife of two lost recordings by Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs. Spoken word, archival murmurings and dead formats.

http://residual-noise.blogspot.co.uk/
http://thealchemicallandscape.blogspot.co.uk/

bad timing djs mix tapes: experiments from the underground

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A note on the image above: Bishop James Pike (1913-1969) was an American Episcopal Minister, one of the first to make regular television appearances. Following the death of his son in 1966, Pike began to experience paranormal phenomena. In 1967 he appeared with the medium Arthur Ford as part of a television seance to contact his son. These experiences formed the basis of his book The Other Side (1969). Philip K. Dick based the character of Timothy Archer on Pike when he wrote his novel The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982). 

Pike and his book will not be directly referenced on May 12th, but for obvious reasons his symbolic life has informed some of the thinking behind the event. 

New Releases from Eighth Climate

Following on from recent releases featuring English Heretic and Matthew Shaw, the imaginal record label Eighth Climate has put out two further albums: 

Documents, Volcano Adventures 

Justin Hopper, I Made Some Low Inquiries 

Both are highly recommended and can be ordered directly from the Eighth Climate website. 

Volcano Adventures: 

"Volcano Adventures is a report from Stanislav Grof's Basic Perinatal Matrix III. BPM III is the most violent and convulsive phase of Grof's psychedelic mapping of consciousness to the birth process. Documents presents an idiosyncratic take on BPM III, weaving an audio narrative congealing the biographies of a host of volcanic voyagers from the Marquis De Sade, on a sabbatical in Italy, to Malcolm Lowry and Claude Vorilhon. 52 minutes of lush maat rock and music for the execution of Geoffrey Firmin."

I Made Some Low Inquiries: 

"A report on two landscapes composed in poetry and sound. I Made Some Low Inquiries begins with the folk ballads of the Ozark Mountains in the southeastern USA, and the tradition of nature magic in rural East Anglia. These poems, songs and sounds are an act of translation between the two – of bilocation, examining two mythological landscapes that exist in very real locations. Through front-porch gothic Americana and agrarian Suffolk toad-bone rituals, I Made Some Low Inquiries wanders in and out of phase with landscape, memory, myth and 'nature' itself. This piece by Justin Hopper includes music by Lost Harbours and Cath & Phil Tyler, and special guest readings by Shirley Collins."

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On an associated note, readers may have seen the range of stories connected to the recent fire at Boleskine House, Loch Ness. English Heretic recorded there recently and posted a typically insightful piece about its range of associations. Click here for the post.