Mood Music for The English Heretic Collection

Mood Music for The English Heretic Collection

Monday, 01 June 2020

I am delighted to announce Repeater Books will be publishing "The English Heretic Collection" anthology on October 13th 2020. As a taster and supplementary to the sample pages, I thought it would be good to create a play list of music to accompany the book.

Rather than hawk any of the English Heretic musical asides, what follows might be considered a mood board of correspondences. In compiling the list, I've tried not to deviate too greatly from the accompanying narrative, and many of the pieces are explicitly (if often briefly) referenced in the book. Some pieces bleed across chapters, as do themes in the writing. For example, might Annie Anxiety's seedy, nocturnal kerb crawl also exist along the Western Avenue of "Anti-Heroes"? Or does John Cale's alcoholic katabasis, "Dying on the Vine", imbibe from the verdigris troughs of "The Underworld Service Guidebook"? And Mount Vernon Art Lab's "Warminster IV" intrudes my reality, across many skies, from a fly agaric Rendlesham to Rael's epiphany in "Volcano Adventures".

As I've mentioned in the book's preface, the anthology, in some ways, represents an anti-pattern or a fossil cleaved from the multimedia chimera of most of the releases. And this play list seems to curate a new  museum from the anthology. With exhibits like Mountain's "Nantucket Sleighride", once the headbanging Sunday afternoon theme to Weekend World, indexed alongside the end-time, plainsong poem of Current 93's "Falling Back in Fields of Rape", the playlist holds a personal hippocampal, natural history of its own. Perhaps, one day a new species of writing will spore from these songs.

This isn't a top ten list, many personal favourites, omitted, and some included, seemingly bedecked in the bunting of traditional nostalgia, for example Elgar. Those who recall Wyrd Tales 1, might recognise that piece's groaning melancholy was sampled for a horrific Home Guard path-working. A story, gleefully reassembled in entirety for the anthology.

For those without too much of a pure soul, you can listen to the stream over at Spotify. That said, everything belongs in my collection, bar Al Stewart's epic rendition of "Nostradamus". I actually prefer Peter Bellamy's version, but couldn't source it there. I'd obviously encourage you to dig out physical copies, where still available.

Preface

Raymond Cass - The Ghost Orchid

The New Geography of Witchcraft: A Black Plaque for Michael Reeves

Forest - Graveyard

Electric Wizard - Eko Eko Azarak

Phantoms of Liberty

Al Stewart - Nostradamus

Jacqueline du Pre - Elgar: Cello Concerto in E minor

Modern Qliphoth

Coil - Batwings

Annie Anxiety - Third Gear

Kalacakra - Nearby Shiras

Mount Vernon Arts Lab - Warminster 4

A Black Plaque for Angel Blake

Marc Williamson - Children into Church

"Anti-Heroes"

Shirley Collins - A Blacksmith Courted Me

John Cameron - Riding Free

Mondo Paranoia

Steinski - The Motorcade Sped On

George Crumb  - Black Angels: 1, Departure

Plan for the Kidnap of Princess Anne

Cabaret Voltaire - Baader Meinhof

Roy Budd - Get Carter (Main Theme)

The Underworld Service

Einsturzende Neubauten - Morning Dew (Bonnie Dobson cover)

Julian Cope - They Were On Hard Drugs

A Study of Lunar Research Flights

Popol Vuh - Bruder des Schattens

Crass - Asylum

Volcano Adventures

John Cale - Dying on the Vine

Judy Collins - Marat / Sade

Wyrd Aesthetics

Robert Ashley  - Purposeful Lady Slow Afternoon

Summer of Blood

Love - You Set the Scene

Wish you were Heretic

William Burroughs - From "Cities of the Red Night"

Current 93 - Falling Back in Fields of Rape (excerpt)

Closing Ceremonies

Mountain - Nantucket Sleighride