5 minute read
Strange Attractor Press
film
The Otherwise
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The Screenplay for a Horror Film That Never Was Mark E. Smith and Graham Duff
In 2015, Mark E. Smith of The Fall and screenwriter Graham Duff cowrote the script for a horror feature film called The Otherwise. The story involved The Fall recording an EP in an isolated recording studio on Pendle Hill. The Lancashire landscape is not only at the mercy of a satanic biker gang, it’s also haunted by a gaggle of soldiers who have slipped through time from the Jacobite Rebellion. Every film production company that saw the script, however, said it was “too weird” ever to be made.
The Otherwise is weird. Yet it’s also witty, shocking, and genuinely scary. Now the screenplay is published for the first time, alongside photographs, drawings and handwritten notes. The volume also contains previously unpublished transcripts of conversations between Smith and Duff, in which they discuss creativity, dreams, musical loves (from Can to acid house) and favorite films (from Britannia Hospital to White Heat). Smith also talks candidly about his youth and mortality, in exchanges that are both touching and extremely funny.
Mark E. Smith was an English singer and songwriter who was the lead singer, lyricist, and only constant member of the post-punk group the Fall. Graham Duff is a British TV comedy and drama scriptwriter whose credits include Ideal and The Nightmare Worlds of H .G. Wells. As an actor he has appeared in, among other things, two Harry Potter films, Alan Partridge, and Dr. Who.
The first ever publication of Mark E. Smith’s screenplay for a horror film, coauthored with Graham Duff.
May 5 3/8 x 8, 160 pp. 12 illus.
US $21.95T/$28.95 CAN paper
978-1-913689-18-6
Distributed for Strange Attractor Press
A compendium of other musics, channeled from the spirit world, the fairy kingdom, outer space, secret societies, and occult lodges.
April 9 1/2 x 12 1/2, 184 pp. 12 illus.
US $21.95T/$28.95 CAN paper
978-1-913689-21-6
Distributed for Strange Attractor Press
music | cultural studies
Music from Elsewhere
Haunting Tunes from the Afterlife, Alien Worlds, and Occult Realms Doug Skinner
This unique collection of esoteric earworms gathers, and reproduces, music from other worlds. Here you’ll find tunes hummed, strummed, and sung by spirits, sprites, and fairies, extraterrestrial elevator music, dreamed ditties, marches for occult ceremonies, secret musical codes and languages, music made by animals, and more.
Each entry contains an explanatory text on its origins and purpose, and also reproduces the musical notation, in facsimile where possible, so that you can play along at home.
An in-depth introductory essay by musician, historian, and collector Doug Skinner rounds out this wondrous musical cabinet of curiosities.
Doug Skinner has contributed to the Fortean Times, Cabinet, Fate, Weirdo, Nickelodeon, and other periodicals. In addition to his books of stories, comics, music, and translations of works by Alphonse Allais, Charles Cros, and Alfred Jarry, he has written many scores for dance and theater, most conspicuously for Bill Irwin’s The Regard of Flight, which toured for decades. His TV and movie appearances include Ed, Crocodile Dundee II, several of George Kuchar’s videos, and a smattering of commercials.
Artist as Astronaut
The Otherworldly Art of Ionel Talpazan Daniel Wojcik
A vibrant collection of artworks by, and interviews with, the Romanian-American visionary artist Ionel Talpazan.
In the early 1960s, after a terrible beating by his foster mother outside their home in rural Romania, the young Ionel Talpazan had a life-transforming vision of “a beautiful blue light of energy” that he later believed to be of extraterrestrial origin. Four years after his experience, at age 12, he attempted to depict his numinous encounter, and began to obsessively draw otherworldly vehicles and celestial energies. Folklorist and art writer Daniel Wojcik has spent many years interviewing Talpazan and documenting his remarkable artistic vision and this book is the culmination of his fascination with this truly otherworldly artist.
In 1987, Talpazan escaped from Ceaușescu’s regime in Romania, swimming the Danube River to Yugoslavia where he was imprisoned and then sent to a refugee camp. He was later granted political asylum in New York City, where he survived by selling his art on the streets and in the flea markets of Manhattan. He produced more than 1,000 works during his lifetime and claimed that his work possessed a scientific as well as artistic value. Despite adversity and poverty, Talpazan’s impulse to create was relentless, ending only with his death in 2015. His work has now achieved international acclaim and is included in important collections and museums throughout the world.
Daniel Wojcik has published widely on the topics of apocalyptic belief, visionary culture, art and trauma, subcultures, and vernacular expression. He is the author of Outsider Art: Visionary Worlds and Trauma; The End of the World As We Know It: Faith, Fatalism, and Apocalypse in America; and Punk and Neo-Tribal Body.
June | 8 1/2 x 11, 184 pp. | 50 color illus., 20 b&w illus.
US $34.95T/$45.95 CAN paper
978-1-913689-25-4
Obsolete Spells
Poems & Prose from Victor Neuburg & the Vine Press, 1920–1930
edited by Justin Hopper
A collection of rare pagan poetry and purple prose from the heart of the 1920s counterculture.
Victor Neuburg is most famous for two things: discovering Dylan Thomas, and being the man that Aleister Crowley once turned into a camel. Obsolete Spells offers another side of Neuburg, through his own poems and the strange books of Vine Press, the hand-operated imprint he ran from his West Sussex cottage between 1920 and 1930. Neuburg’s youth involved terrifying-yet-farcical years as Crowley’s lover, victim, and magickal sidekick. His later period, as editor of the influential “Poet’s Corner” column for the Sunday Referee, made him a key figure in London’s literary scene. But in between, Neuburg acted as a conduit for bohemian writers, arts luminaries, and the sexually adventurous: Peter Warlock set his words to music, singer Marian Anderson lived in his spare room, and he was a fixture at utopian community, the Sanctuary. Through it all, he turned the handle on the Vine Press: books of nature writing and anonymous song; poems and artwork worthy of The Wicker Man, side-by-side with a book on cricket.
Obsolete Spells offers a selection of Neuburg’s work and from other Vine Press books—over-the-top hymns to the Old Gods, tales from a utopian landscape, and more, most of which have been out of print for a century.
Justin Hopper is an American writer based in Britain. His 2019 spoken-word and music album Chanctonbury Rings was called “an album of sensual spellcraft” by Caught by the River.
June | 5 x 7 1/2, 240 pp. | 16 illus.
US $21.95T/$28.95 CAN paper
978-1-913689-26-1
