{"id":185,"date":"2017-03-20T10:00:47","date_gmt":"2017-03-20T08:00:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/special-interests.net\/main\/?p=185"},"modified":"2017-03-20T10:01:46","modified_gmt":"2017-03-20T08:01:46","slug":"englands-hidden-reverse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/special-interests.net\/main\/englands-hidden-reverse\/","title":{"rendered":"England\u2019s Hidden Reverse"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong><em>England\u2019s Hidden Reverse &#8211; A Secret History of the Esoteric Underground<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Book Author: DAVID KEENAN<br \/>\nStrange Attractor Press,<br \/>\nhardback, 978-1907222177<br \/>\nPub year: 2016<br \/>\nNumber of pages: 446<\/p>\n<p>Review by: Aram Yardumian<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-186\" src=\"http:\/\/special-interests.net\/main\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/englands-hidden-217x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"217\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/special-interests.net\/main\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/englands-hidden-217x300.jpg 217w, https:\/\/special-interests.net\/main\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/englands-hidden.jpg 593w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 217px) 100vw, 217px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>\u2018One goes step by step by step by step into the darkness. The actual movement is the only truth.\u2019 \u2013 Ingmar Bergman\u2019s <em>The Magician<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Those who remember <strong>COUM Transmission, Throbbing Gristle,<\/strong> and its associated culture explosion in the 1970s remember, perhaps most of all, their use of found imagery in live performance. Decontextualized films and stills of genocide, torture, ritual circumcision, and famine were featured at most TG shows. And self-mutilation, bondage, and sexual intercourse were part of later COUM This drive toward obsession and violence defined the era as \u2018Industrial\u2019 more than the music ever did. And all the first wave of violent electronics projects\u2014<strong>SPK, Maurizio Bianchi, Whitehouse<\/strong>\u2014drew on a related set of influences\u2014Viennese Actionist performance, Russian Futurism, the crimes of Peter Kurten, W.S. Burroughs\u2019s theories on information as power, and so on\u2014even if their working philosophies were radically different. Industrial music was never about a dance beat, it was audio-visual art made by non-musicians, and the artists used images of transgression not for shock value, nor\u2014worse\u2014as sensation, but rather, author David Keenan argues, as a form of self-interrogation, a refusal of rational thought and inclusive morals.<\/p>\n<p>Keenan\u2019s 2003 book <em>England\u2019s Hidden Reverse<\/em>, updated and republished this spring after more than a decade of continued research, documents the lives and work of the men and women who ritually resuscitated the corpse of English music after Throbbing Gristle tore it limb from limb. The nearly 450 illustrated pages of <em>England\u2019s Hidden Reverse<\/em> are derived from the most primary of sources\u2014direct interviews, correspondence, and even cohabitation with the subjects. Keenan weaves together in a triple helix the stories of three introverted artistic projects: <strong>Coil, Current 93,<\/strong> and <strong>Nurse With Wound<\/strong>. While outwardly they share very little, their histories (and fan bases) are so thoroughly intertwined that they cannot be dissected separately. What really binds these projects together into a scene is not, Keenan says, a common voice or a common fate, but rather an obsession with \u2018night time imagery\u2019 and its use as a \u2018descent &#8230; into the subconscious and into the repressed\u2014psychologically and historically\u2014via the interrogation of the possibilities of transgression.\u2019<br \/>\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/pEKj0lSE9zI\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>If Throbbing Gristle served as a vector for audio-visual descents into the human night, they succeeded because projects like Coil, Current 93, and Nurse With Wound carried the torches onward and into new worlds beyond confrontational electronics. If these groups can be linked by their archaeology of the inner realms of imagery, and the channeling of the \u2018murky subconscious\u2019 into art, they are made distinctive by their lives and approaches. Steve Stapleton describes his work as Nurse With Wound as \u2018surrealism in sound\u2019. He didn\u2019t even own an instrument in 1979 when he released his first record, and in 2016 he still can\u2019t play one. His modus operandi is one of the committed non-musician building a private esoteric universe at home and in the studio. After scores of albums, Stapleton continues to maintain that his output is purely experimental, even clinical. Though he for years insisted there was nothing of him personally in the music, he now reluctantly admits there is a lot more of himself there than he realized. Coil, while also employing Surrealist methods, composed electronic music of incredible rigor\u2014sometimes expansive spatial landscapes, sometimes claustrophobic boxes of psychosexual mania, sometimes drug-smitten EBM. The possibilities feel infinite, yet you can always hear the Thames flow. Its underground passages and secret channels, along which flow the most haunting thoughts. David Tibet, operating since 1983 as Current 93, sees the thread running through his immensely varied output as the harking back \u2018to a lost sense of innocence\u2019. His output has ranged from Crowleyian tape-loop exercises to forlorn and damningly cohesive harmonium and piano albums, to songs in a matured English folk idiom reminiscent of The Incredible String Band and Shirley Collins\u2014all sealed with the lyrical imagery of Tibet\u2019s apocalyptic and Kierkegaardian Christianity.<br \/>\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/XtJxVAsPxZU\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><em>England\u2019s Hidden Reverse<\/em> is more than the story of these three groups, and the personal histories of their membership. The artistic and personal connections these artists forged with each other and with the London-based scene they helped foment were deep and complex: Tibet and Stapleton have collaborated on several occasions, and Stapleton with Whitehouse, Tibet with Death in June, Balance (of Coil) with Tibet, and both, up to a point, were both inspired by Austin Osman Spare and Crowley. Sleazy was a member of Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV, which were, in varying degrees, formative for Tibet, who also was enamored (also up to a point) with Psychic TV. This is only the surface of the complex artistic genealogy described in <em>England\u2019s Hidden Reverse<\/em>. And as their notoriety\u2014and infamy\u2014gradually grew, with events like Equinox (21 June, 1983), they helped to define a burgeoning scene that included other forms of post-Industrial art and culture\u2014a list of which Keenan offers: \u2018modern primitives, Nazi geeks, bedroom occultists, boot boys, [and] autistic noise rockers.\u2019 The same enduring countercultural anti-Thatcherite boogey men that sought to turn England inside out.<br \/>\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/kZK7vja5FLA\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Ironic, then, that Coil, Current 93, and Nurse With Wound were associated with these scenesters, since after all, David Tibet mourns the loss of innocence, including England\u2019s, and Coil was more concerned with the rise of the Thames tides than with the institutions on its shores, and Nurse With Wound was too Dada-cracked to spraypaint class struggle slogans. The connection is deeper, Keenan maintains. It is found in the curious phrase \u2018England\u2019s Hidden Reverse\u2019, in which he refers to the \u2018descent into the dark of our evolutionary past\u2019 effected by the creative processes of these obscure groups; but also to an observation made by John Balance, of Coil, about his artistic motility: \u2018I\u2019m on a lifelong mission to get rid of this equation, dark is evil and light is good. &#8230; Light\u2014illumination\u2014comes from within the darkness.\u2019<\/p>\n<p>If this idea sounds like intellectual currency from the early nineteenth century, this is not casual d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu. The artists of the Romantic Era, both in England and on the continent, in their turn away from aristocratic values and the inauthenticity of moral absolutes and truth, followed a very similar artistic path. In the work of Blake, Novalis, Baudelaire, et al, it is the fixation on an inner vision, and reliance upon emotion and irrationality, improvisation, esoterica, and the apprehension of horror, rather than external arbitration of values, that bound them together as a movement. Even if Current 93, Coil, and Nurse With Wound would appear to have little in common with each other in their subjects, compositional methods, or lifestyles, <em>England\u2019s Hidden Reverse<\/em> suggests there is a common inner dialogue between them, one which remarkably mirrors that of Romantic poets and painters. Whether their dive into darkness as both self-discovery is intellectually continuous with the nineteenth century, or a <em>sui generis<\/em> bulwark against the hyper-rationality and ultimate power promised by the information age, with its endless images and state-level ordering of society, is for someone else to decide. It\u2019s enough for now to suspect Stapleton, Balance, Sleazy, and Tibet will be someday regarded as modern Romantics, with similar fascination\u2014and apprehension.<br \/>\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/BXsWBMXorhM\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<div class=\"mh-excerpt\"><p>England\u2019s Hidden Reverse &#8211; A Secret History of the Esoteric Underground Book Author: DAVID KEENAN Strange Attractor Press, hardback, 978-1907222177 Pub year: 2016 Number of <a class=\"mh-excerpt-more\" href=\"https:\/\/special-interests.net\/main\/englands-hidden-reverse\/\" title=\"England\u2019s Hidden Reverse\">[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":186,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[28,29,30,31,32,33],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/special-interests.net\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/special-interests.net\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/special-interests.net\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/special-interests.net\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/special-interests.net\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=185"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/special-interests.net\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":188,"href":"https:\/\/special-interests.net\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185\/revisions\/188"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/special-interests.net\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/186"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/special-interests.net\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=185"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/special-interests.net\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=185"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/special-interests.net\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=185"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}