Books in the Strange Attractor Press series

The first in-depth biographical study of the British surrealist and occultist Ithell Colquhoun,This book offers the first in-depth biographical study of the British surrealist and occultist Ithell Colquhoun, situating her art within the magical contexts that shaped her imaginative life and work. After decades of neglect, Colquhoun's unique vision and hermetic life have become an object of great renewed interest, both for artists and for historians of magic. Although her paintings are represented in such major collections as Tate Britain and the National Portrait Gallery, Colquhoun's rejection of both avant-garde and occult orthodoxies resulted in a life of relative obscurity. Her visual and written works have only recently received adequate recognition as a precursor to contemporary experiments in magical autobiography and esoteric feminism.After rejecting the hectic social expectations and magical orthodoxies of London's art and occult scenes, Colquhoun pursued a life of dedicated spiritual and artistic enquiry embodied in her retreat to Cornwall. Genius of the Fern Loved Gully balances engaging biography with art historical erudition and critical insight into the magical systems that underscored her art and writing.

An account of the English rock band Hawkwind shows them to be one of the most innovative and culturally significant bands of the 1970s.Fifty years on from when it first formed, the English rock band Hawkwind continues to inspire devotion from fans around the world. Its influence reaches across the spectrum of alternative music, from psychedelia, prog, and punk, through industrial, electronica, and stoner rock. Hawkwind has been variously, if erroneously, positioned as the heir to both Pink Floyd and the Velvet Underground, and as Britain's answer to the Grateful Dead and Krautrock. It has defined a genre—space rock—while operating on a frequency that's uniquely its own.Hawkwind offered a form of radical escapism and an alternative account of a strange new world for a generation of young people growing up on a planet that seemed to be teetering on the brink of destruction, under threat from economic meltdown, industrial unrest, and political polarization. While other commentators confidently asserted that the countercultural experiment of the 1960s was over, Hawkwind took the underground to the provinces and beyond. In Days of the Underground, Joe Banks repositions Hawkwind as one of the most innovative and culturally significant bands of the 1970s. It's not an easy task. As with many bands of this era, a lazy narrative has built up around Hawkwind that doesn't do justice to the breadth of its ambition and achievements. Banks gives the lie to the popular perception of Hawkwind as one long lysergic soap opera; with Days of the Underground, he shows us just how revolutionary Hawkwind was.

Works by the polymathic French author Victor Segalen, including a previously untranslated essay, a novel, and a libretto.Victor Segalen (1878-1919) had one of France's most curious literary careers, applying his imagination to musicology, ethnography, exploration, medicine, synesthetics, Chinese history, and the occult. This collection gathers together his previously untranslated essay "Synesthestics and the Symbolist School” and his novel In A Sound World, a work of fantasy concerning an inventor lost in his own immersive harmonic space. Segalen's medical training (he had a career as a ship's doctor) inspired an interest in the link between the prevailing Symbolism of the time and synesthesia, the condition whereby one sense affects the perception of another.This edition also includes an essay by the musician and cultural historian David Toop that explores the historical context of Segalen's ideas. Also included is Segalen's libretto for Orpheus Rex, a collaboration with the composer Claude Debussy, which he would use as an opportunity for further explorations of his synesthetic concepts. This book makes available all three texts for the first time in English.

A crime and a six-decade cover-up: the death of a fashion designer in the cesspit of vice and violence that was 1950s London.In 1954, Jean Mary Townsend was strangled with her own scarf and stripped of her underwear but not sexually assaulted. The subsequent police investigation was bungled, leading to a six-decade cover-up, ensuring that this twenty-one-year-old fashion designer was effectively killed twice: first bodily, and then as her significance and her memory were erased. Fred Vermorel's forensic, troubling (and trouble-making) investigation digs deep into Jean Townsend's life and times, and her transgressive bohemian milieu. It disentangles the lies and bluffs that have obscured this puzzling case for over half a century and offers a compelling solution to her murder and the official secrecy surrounding it. More than just a true crime story, Vermorel's investigation deploys Townsend's death as a wild card methodology for probing the 1950s: a cesspit of vice and violence, from coprophiles to bombsite gangs and flick knives in the cinema. Densely illustrated with archival material, Dead Fashion Girl is a heavily researched, darkly curious exposé of London's 1950s society that touches on celebrity, royalty, the postwar establishment, and ultimately, tragedy.

A biography of a key figure in psychedelic history: the man who turned Timothy Leary on to LSD.

A chronicle of a lifetime's passion for gig-going, by one of British television's most respected writers.

A journey deep into the heart of the trash experience: tales from the underground and exploitation movie scene in America during the 1960s.

Tracking eleven rivers beneath London that have been culverted, placed in tunnels, or diverted into the sewer system.Below the pavements, out of sight, a network of secret rivers pulses beneath the capital's busy pavements. The second volume of London's Lost Rivers explores eleven more rivers that have been buried, hidden or mislaid across the city—watercourses that have been culverted, placed in tunnels, or diverted into the sewer system. But while they may be hidden from view, clues remain, and this book will show you how to find them. These eleven walks trace the routes of buried rivers, tracking the impression they have left on the landscape and cityscape of London. Walks include the little-known Cock and Pye Ditch that shaped Covent Garden, Tottenham's Moselle River (not to be confused with the French version), the East End's unsavory-sounding Black Ditch, and the Ravensbourne, linking rural Bromley to the heart of the British Navy at Deptford. Accompanied by S. F. Said's haunting and evocative Polaroid photographs, this guidebook tracks routes that are recorded on no map, stripping back the layers to reveal London's veins and arteries.

Scholarship, debate, archival material, and esoterica relating to Arthur Machen, a "modern master of the weird tale.”For twenty years, Faunus, the biannual journal of the Friends of Arthur Machen, has been publishing an astonishing range of scholarship, debate, archival material, and esoterica relating to the writer H. P. Lovecraft described as a "modern master of the weird tale.” Arthur Machen (1863-1947) was not only an author of weird and decadent horror fiction lauded by Stephen King and Guillermo del Toro (among many others); he was also a journalist and essayist who, over decades, produced a vast body of nonfiction on subjects ranging from High Church theology to curry recipes. This anthology gathers some of the highlights of Faunus, from its very first issue to its most recent. Subjects include the Great War, the Celtic Church, the "real” little people, Machen and Modernism, Machen and the occult, and myriad other investigations into Machen's life and legacy.With a new introduction by long-term Friend of Arthur Machen member Stewart Lee, the book makes newly available reprints of rare pieces by Machen himself as well as items from the Faunus archive by writers including Tessa Farmer, Rosalie Parker, Ray Russell, Mark Samuels, and Mark Valentine.

The fascinating phantasmal worlds in the work of the artist Cathy Ward.Pulsing and surging with dark energies, Cathy Ward's mesmerising drawings capture a restlessly inquiring spirit through the meticulous rendering of organic forms. Their mystery, emotional depth, and enveloping sensuality recall an occluded art-historical canon of weird psychedelia, hermetic alchemical illustrations and outsider horror vacui. Liberty Realm presents a broad survey of works ranging from the acclaimed drawings exhibited recently in "Phantasmata” at The Good Luck Gallery (Los Angeles), "Talespinning” at the Drawing Center (New York), "Romantic detachment” at PS1 MOMA (New York), and "Utopia" at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center (Sheboygan, Wisconsin), to new explorations and insightful glimpses of her earlier output and formative practice. Substantial essays by Doug Harvey and Robert Wallis further untangle these fascinating phantasmal worlds.

From occult rites in soft porn discos to Sooty the TV puppet's amphetamine problem, a feast of curiosities from British film and TV.The past, they say, is another country, but as seen through the lens of British film and television, it is a deeply strange and unfamiliar land. From occult rites in soft porn discos to Sooty the TV puppet's amphetamine problem, from Old Mother Riley, and Vampire Hunter to Vincent Price's heart-attack-inducing cookery program, in this book veteran curators William Fowler and Vic Pratt have delved deep into the archives of the British Film Institute to serve up a feast of curiosities that will tempt the palate of even the most jaded cinephile.Each chapter considers a key aspect of British life as seen through the psychotronic lens of pop culture. Do All the Right Noises and Under the Doctor tell us more about attitudes to marriage and sexuality than a sociological survey? Can American musicologist Alan Lomax capture a truer image of the weird rites of Cornish folk culture than a native Cornishman? Why was Peter Watkins's The War Game banned from TV screens? These crucial questions, and many more, will be answered, and awkward truths told, by our highly informed, erudite and amusing guides to this cultural hinterland.

Drawings, personal photographs, documents, and ephemera by underground cartoonist, artist, writer, musician, and amateur magician Savage Pencil.Pulled together from his massive archive of drawings, personal photographs, documents, and ephemera, alongside a new, extensive interview conducted by author and legendary esoteric bibliographer Timothy D'Arch Smith, Rated SavX is an access-all-areas trawl through the life and work of the artist known as Savage Pencil.Underground cartoonist, artist, writer, musician, and amateur magician Savage Pencil has been conjuring up images and making a noise since 1977. Beginning with his "Rock 'N' Roll Zoo” strip for 1970s music paper Sounds to his drawing 'Trip or Squeek” for The Wire magazine, his instantly recognizable, delirious, and demented images have come to define their own form of acerbic graphic critique and satire. Savage Pencil has also designed album covers, T-shirts, posters and other merchandise for bands including Sonic Youth, Big Black, The Fall, Sunn O))), Coil, and Earth, and a host of obscure punk rockers, metal gurus, and noise addicts. As a result, Savage Pencil's drawings have become intrinsically linked with the sonic ideas that were being transmitted on such records as Sonic Youth's Death Valley '69 and Big Black's Headache.

Exploring Penda's Fen, a 1974 BBC film that achieved mythic status.In 1974, the BBC broadcast the film Penda's Fen, leaving audiences mystified and spellbound. "Make no mistake. We had a major work of television last night,” The Times declared the next morning. Written by the playwright and classicist David Rudkin, the film follows Stephen, an 18-year-old boy, whose identity, sexuality, and suffocating nationalism unravels through a series of strange visions. After its original broadcast, Penda's Fen vanished into unseen mythic status, with only a single rebroadcast in 1990 sustaining its cult following. With a DVD release by the BFI in 2016, Penda's Fen has now become totemic for those interested in Britain's deep history, folklore, and landscape. Of Mud and Flame brings together writers, artists, and historians to excavate and explore this unique cornerstone of Britain's uncanny archive.Contributors includeDavid Rudkin, Sukhdev Sandhu, Roger Luckhurst, Gareth Evan, Adam Scovell, Bethany Whalley, Carl Phelpstead, David Ian Rabey, David Rolinson, Craig Wallace, Daniel O'Donnell Smith, William Fowler, Yvonne Salmon, Andy W. Smith, Carolyne Larrington, John Harle, Timothy J. Jarvis, Tom White, Daniel Eltringham, Joseph Brooker, Gary Budden

A literary mix tape that explores the entwined boundaries between sound, material culture, landscape and esoteric belief.

The life of escape artist, fortune-teller, author and raconteur "Ironfoot Jack," aka Jack Rudolph Neave (1881-1959), the self-styled "King of the Bohemians" in London's Soho.

A radical retelling of our relationship with the cosmos, reinventing the history of astronomy as a new form of astrological calendar.Astronomy is another form of cinema. Time is fragmented and extended. Matter becomes light in motion. The camera remains fixed, looking outwards into the darkness, while the earth moves beneath our feet.A carefully constructed text in sixty numbered sections, The Space Oracle reinvents the history of astronomy as a new form of astrological calendar. This radical retelling of our relationship with the cosmos reaches back to places and times when astronomers were treated as artists or priests, to when popes took part in astral rites and the common people feared eclipses and comets as portents of disaster. Panoramic and encyclopedic in its scope, The Space Oracle brings astronauts and spies, engineers and soldiers, goddesses and satellites into alignment with speculative insights and everyday observations. The universe, Hollings argues, is a work in progress—enjoy it. Ken Hollings is a writer, broadcaster, and cultural theorist based in London. He has given readings, lectures and presentations of his work at the Royal Institution, the Berlin Akademie der Künste, the Venice Biennale, Tate Britain and the Royal College of Art, where he currently teaches. His previous two books, Welcome to Mars and The Bright Labyrinth are published by Strange Attractor Press."Ken Hollings is a master at connecting the dots between avant-garde art history, outré culture and weird science.” —David Pescovitz, Boing Boing

The return of the Strange Attractor Journal, offering a characteristically eclectic collection of high weirdness from the margins of culture.

The disturbing, exciting, and defiantly avant-garde films of Jesus "Jess" Franco, director of such films as Vampyros Lesbos and Lilian the Perverted Virgin.