Image by Clark Ashton Smith
Strange Attractor May Mailout
Contents
I. Introduction
II. Pre-orders
III. Now Available
IV. Murderous Passions Reprint
V. Strange Attractor Press at the Barbican
VI. Join us! ...on Patreon!
I. Introduction
Greetings!
With Summer on the way and a whole heap of books both heading to and
returning from the printers, we finally have a little time to start what we hope
will be a series of monthly mailouts interspersed with weekly updates. We
have updates on most of the things we're working on at the moment - and
it's a heck of lot! - so please do read on for news on a number of new
releases, a series of pre-orders, a live event at London's Barbican,
information on our Patreon and its benefits, and more...
As always, we're hugely appreciative to all of our supporters that have allowed us to continue celebrating unpopular culture by ordering our books. We're still a two-person team, just Mark and Jamie, and while this has its benefits in terms of our independence, it does mean that our workload can get the better of us from time to time. So thanks to everyone who has waited patiently for pre-ordered books! Hopefully this email will give you a lot of things to get excited about!
Beasts as always,
Jamie & Mark, Strange Attractor Press
II. Pre-orders
From archaeologies of censored music to the predictive techno-cultural
circuitries of hip-hop, we have a number of new titles available for pre-order
right now...
Bone Music, Stephen Coates' follow up to the
hugely successful X Ray Audio, about sonic resistance
to the repressive cultural environment of the old Soviet regime, is on its
way to print. In colour throughout and stunningly designed by Tihane Sare,
our special hardback edition will include a unique flexi-disc of original bone
music and a risograph print. Pre-orders for both the special and standard
editions are now live, and you can read a little more on this fascinating work
of cultural archaeology below...
Shipping September '22
During the Cold War era, the songs that Soviet citizens could listen to were
ruthlessly controlled by the state. But a secret underground subculture of music
lovers and bootleggers defied the censors, building recording machines and
making their own records of forbidden jazz, rock 'n' roll, and Russian
music, cut onto used hospital x-ray film. Bone Music is the follow up
the acclaimed X-Ray Audio: The Strange History of Soviet Music on the Bone,
delving deeper into a forgotten era when being a music fan could mean a
lengthy prison sentence, or worse.
Who made these records? Why did they do it and how was it even possible? Foregrounding interviews and oral testimonies gathered over five years, Bone Music presents the stories of the original bone bootleggers, their customers, musicians, record collectors, and commentators, evoking a spirited resistance to a repressive culture of prohibition and punishment. It reveals that although Western jazz and rock'n'roll were important to the Stilyagi youth culture, the true rebel music was that of forbidden Russian émigrés, gypsy romances, and criminal tunes: the soul songs of a society brutally cut off from its culture.
Richly illustrated with dozens of new images of Soviet x-ray discs and sound letters, Bone Music details how the bootleggers worked, outlining the technical precedents of their techniques, situating their discs in a revised history of recorded media, and bringing a wealth of compelling new detail.
We fell in love with Roy Christopher’s incisive writing on hip-hop and technology when Repeater Books published his work Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines The Future back in 2019. Boogie Down Predictions expands Roy’s interest in time, race, and the politics of music technology by assembling a legitimate dream team of writers, musicians and futurologists who take hip-hop culture as an opportunity to imagine new possibilities of thinking-making-being, from the cult of RAMM:ΣLL:ZΣΣ to the evolution of a Black Quantum Futurism. Believe us when we say that this book is fully loaded, from heavy hitting theoreticians including Kodwo Eshun and Steven Shaviro (writing on Ghostface Killah!), to sonic world-builders such as Rasheedah Phillips. The collection even includes an expansive interview on piracy and copyright evasion by Public Enemy’s Chuck D! Boogie Down is currently at the printers, and we'll be seeing copies in the UK in September (August for the US). Read on for more...
PRE-ORDER BOOGIE DOWN PREDICTIONS
Shipping September '22
Featuring: Omar Akbar, Juice Aleem, Tiffany E. Barber, Kevin Coval, Samantha
Dols, Kodwo Eshun, Chuck Galli, Nettrice Gaskins, Jonathan Hay, Jeff Heinzl,
Kembrew McLeod, Rasheedah Phillips, Steven Shaviro, Aram Sinnreich, André
Sirois, Erik Steinskog, Dave Tompkins, Tia C.M. Tyree, Joël Vascheron,
tobias c. van Veen, K. Ceres Wright, and Ytasha Womack
“This book, edited by Roy Christopher, is a moment. It is the
deconstructed sample, the researched lyrical metaphors, the aha moment on the
way to hip-hop enlightenment. Hip-hop permeates our world, and yet it is
continually misunderstood. Hip-hop's intersections with Afrofuturism and
science fiction provide fascinating touchpoints that enable us to see our todays
and tomorrows. This book can be, for the curious, a window into a
hip-hop-infused Alter Destiny—a journey whose spaceship you embarked on
some time ago. Are you engaging this work from the gaze of the future? Are you
the data thief sailing into the past to U-turn to the now? Or are you the unborn
child prepping to build the next universe? No, you're the superhero. Enjoy
the journey.” —from the introduction by Ytasha L. Womack
Through essays by some of hip-hop's most interesting thinkers, theorists,
journalists, writers, emcees, and DJs, Boogie Down Predictions embarks on a
quest to understand the connections between time, representation, and identity
within hip-hop culture and what that means for the culture at large. Introduced
by Ytasha L. Womack, author of Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and
Fantasy Culture, this book explores these temporalities, possible pasts, and
further futures from a diverse, multilayered, interdisciplinary perspective.
A conglomerate is a sedimentary rock composed of many different kinds of rocks
naturally bound together. A family, just like a rock, can be composed of
many parts...
PRE-ORDER ILANA HALPERIN: FELT EVENTS HERE
Shipping Late May '22
Artist Ilana Halperin shares her birthday with an Icelandic volcano. Working
through the aesthetics of geology since the late 1990s, her multifaceted,
conceptual practice unearths the intimate poetics of rocks, minerals, and body
stones.
Halperin’s fieldwork has led her from erupting volcanoes in Hawaii to
petrifying caves in France and geothermal springs in Japan. Felt Events surveys
the last two decades of Halperin’s output (1999–2020), representing
a mid-career moment of reflection.
This collection includes critical and experimental writing from international
curators Lisa Le Feuvre and Naoko Mabon, art historians Andrew Patrizio and
Dominic Paterson, anthropologist Jerry Zee, and writer Nicola White. It also
offers examples of Halperin’s performance lectures, some of which appear
in print for the first time.
Felt Events introduces Halperin’s work to new generations of artists,
writers, and environmental activists—those who will shape the critical
landscapes of the twenty-first century.
III. Now Available
These titles are now back from the printers and shipping imminently. We have
very few copies left of the special editions of both Justin Hopper's
Obsolete Spells and Phil Baker's City
of the Beast, so do place your order sooner rather than later if
you're hoping to obtain one!
A topographical narrative as elegantly constructed as Harry Beck’s
schematic map of the London Undergound – an astonishing subterranean
journey awaits, taking us through the myriad calling points of Crowley’s
life, and this wicked city’s collective unconscious.
– Jake Arnott
In 93 locations, author Phil Baker (the celebrated biographer of Denis
Wheatley, William Burroughs and Austin Osman Spare) explores Victorian and
Edwardian London through the eyes of one of its most infamous inhabitants, the
writer and occultist Aleister Crowley. Drawing on unpublished diaries, Baker
paints a not-always-flattering portrait of the Great Beast via the trails left
by his many voracious appetites for sexual, magical and intellectual
stimulation, and curry.
We now have copies of an elegant signed special hardback edition available
alongside a standard paperback. These will be shipping as soon as possible.
Aleister Crowley, “The Great Beast”, infamous author and occultist, had a love-hate relationship with London, but it was where he spent much of his adult life, and it was the capital of the culture that created him.
City of the Beast is not a walking guide, although many routes could be pieced together from its pages. It is a biography by sites, revealing a man, an era, and a city. Fusing life-writing with psychogeography, steeped in London’s social history from Victoria to the Blitz, it draws extensively on unpublished material and offers an exceptionally intimate picture of the Beast.
Through 93 locations, we follow Crowley searching for prostitutes in Hyde Park and Pimlico, drinking absinthe and eating Chinese food in Soho, and finding himself down on his luck in Paddington Green – but never quite losing sight of the illumination that drove him: “the abiding rapture,” he wrote in his diary, “which makes a ‘bus in the street sound like an angel choir!”
For too long Victor Neuburg has been a curious footnote in the lives of others, specifically Aleister Crowley and Dylan Thomas, but now it’s time to consider, and appreciate, him on his own merits. Justin Hopper collects texts, poems and plays published by Neuburg's Vine Press in the 1930s. It's a substantial collection, with a long biographical introduction by Justin, a foreword by Richard McNeff a wide range of Vine Press poems, plays and texts, both complete and abridged. The special edition hardback includes a bonus book, Wax, a feminist SF play by Runia Macleod, and a CD of Neuburg's poems set to music by Sharron Kraus.
Obsolete Spells presents another side of Neuburg,
through his own earthy-yet-diaphanous poems and the strange books of the Vine
Press, a hand-operated imprint he ran from his West Sussex cottage between 1920
and 1930.
As a printer and publisher, Neuburg acted as a conduit for bohemian writers and
arts luminaries, and those dedicated to experimental living: Peter Warlock set
his words to music, singer Marian Anderson lived in his spare room, and he was a
fixture at his local utopian free-love community, the Sanctuary. Through it all,
he turned the handle on the Vine Press, publishing books of nature writing and
folksong; neo-pagan poems and utopian philosophy; hymns to Old Gods and paeans
to love and wonder.
Obsolete Spells offers selections from every Vine Press book, including
texts by Neuburg and many others, most of which have been out of print for a
century. Introductory essays by editor Justin Hopper, a foreword by Richard
McNeff and an afterword by Margaret Jennings-White (daughter of author Rold
White) round out this unique glimpse into a lost literary idyll.
IV. Murderous Passions Reprint
We are now opening up pre-sales for a new reprint of Stephen Thrower's
much sought after study of Jess Franco's early films, Murderous
Passions.
Due to the high cost of printing this 512-page, full colour, volume, we will
need to pre-sell a certain number of copies before we can go to press. However,
given the demand for the book, we are confident that copies will be available
towards the end of the year. Please be aware that you can order with confidence,
and request a refund at any time until we have gone to press.
All pre-sale copies will come with an illustrated bookplate signed by Stephen
Thrower.
PRE-ORDER
THE MURDEROUS PASSIONS REPRINT HERE
Available late 2022
Jesús Franco was a fascinating, iconic gure in world cinema. A passionate
believer in artistic and sexual freedom, he constantly tested the boundaries of
taste and censorship during an extraordinary career spanning sixty years and
more than 170 films.
His delirious spontaneity turned the raw basics of popular cinema – sex
and violence – into an avant-garde whirl of sensations. Franco’s
taste for the kinky and horrific, his idiosyncratic visual style, and his
lifelong obsession with the Marquis de Sade, birthed a whole new strain of
erotica.
Films like Succubus, Vampyros Lesbos, A Virgin Among the
Living Dead and The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein throw out the
rulebook and reinvent genre cinema, while even his weakest efforts exude
something strange and wild amid the chaos. Meanwhile, multiple international
variants turn the Franco filmography into a dizzying hall of mirrors, entrancing
for the afficionado but confusing for beginners – until now.
Originally published in 2015, Murderous Passions delves into
Franco’s career from 1953 to 1974 (a second volume, Flowers of
Perversion, covers 1975 to 2013). Assisted by esteemed critic and
researcher Julian Grainger, Thrower shines a light into the darkest corners of
the Franco filmography, uncovering a wealth of new information. Unparalleled in
scope and ambition, this revised and updated edition of Murderous
Passions contains eighty more pages of images, many in colour.
V. Strange Attractor Press at the Barbican
Join Strange Attractor Press us as we celebrate our mission to produce ‘popular books on unpopular culture’ and peer into a world of folklore, counterculture and high weirdness.
We have our first live event of the year lined up this May 31, at the Barbican London.
See Turner Prize-winning artist Tai Shani deliver a performance reading from her new book, The Neon Hieroglyph. Writer and BFI curator William Fowler shares the strange tale of painter, decorator and mystic Joseph Dehavilland, who created a sensation when he was crucified on Hampstead Heath in the 1960s. Historian Phil Baker explores Victorian and Edwardian London through the eyes of occultist Aleister Crowley; while Justin Hopper and musician Sharron Kraus will discuss mystic and poet Victor Neuburg and perform his poems, set to music, and visuals by Wendy Pye.
vi. Join us! ...on Patreon!
If you like what we do and want to help us continue our mission to celebrate unpopular culture, then please do consider supporting us on Patreon. We were blown away by the response to the campiagn when we launched it earlier this year, and our current monthly subscriptions look set to cover our monthly studio costs, which is a great help given the fraught circusmtances faced by contemporray independent publishers.
We've been creating monthly 'Communiqués From The Strange Frontier' for our subscribers, detailing all of our activities, previewng projects in the works, and providing exclusive extracts from forthcoming titles. It's certainly the best way to keep up to date with what we're both up to, and if you pitch for the £10 or higher supporter's tier you'll receive the following wonderful merchandise designed for us by British Comix legend Savage Pencil:
1 x Double Sided Bookmark
1 x Vinyl Sticker (10cm x 10cm)
1 x Strange Attractor Enamel Pin
CONSIDER SUPPORTING US ON PATREON HERE!