WHEN MATTS MAKE BOOKS

This is quite a long-running series, now! 

Not talking about the When Mates Make Books posts, of which there are countless, but specifically When Matts Make Books. 

Matthew Ingram has done a bunch, the prolific bugger that he is: the two blog compendiums The Big Book of Woe and  The Bumper  Book of Woe; the 1970s Lost Rock Albums monograph; his first print book Retreat: How The Counterculture Invented Wellness; and then The "S" Word,  a collection of writings about spirituality in alternative music. Not forgetting the graphic novel TPM.

And now here's the sequel-not-sequel to Retreat  -  a book about  the nexus of counterculture and horticulture - that comes out in the first week of April:

The Garden: Visionary Growers and Farmers of the Counterculture

The Garden explores the transformative journey of the 1970s countercultural farmers and growers whose radical practices redefined how we grow and eat today.

Countercultural Roots: Chronicles how a generation influenced by psychedelics, Eastern philosophy, and reactions to Vietnam, the Oil Shocks, and DDT sparked a deep interest in sustainable farming.

In-depth Exploration of Influences: Covers movements like the organic food revolution, Permaculture, back-to-the-land initiatives, radical ecology, and the impact of thinkers like Rudolph Steiner on 1970s communities.

Impact on Today’s Agriculture: Through interviews with key figures, The Garden reveals how these visionary growers, often without farming backgrounds, pioneered alternative agriculture and influenced modern sustainable practices. 

A Legacy for the 2020s: Highlights the enduring impact of these farmers, providing inspiration for today’s efforts to reconnect with nature and rethink sustainable living.

Perfect for readers interested in organic farming, environmental history, or the cultural legacy of the 1970s, The Garden tells the untold story of how counterculture reimagined food and our relationship to the earth.

Endorsements:

"I admired Retreat. Fluid and intelligent and... I could go on! The new Matt Ingram is even better... With The Garden, Ingram recuperates an even more transgressive gesture: the counterculture's attempted rethinking of our first culture, agriculture." - Jay Stevens, author of Storming Heaven

"The idea of gardening and farming as acts of revolution and dissent may be unfamiliar to many of us, so it’s great to have Matthew Ingram’s brilliantly readable book celebrating the unexpected ways that individuals, communities, and movements have, simply by growing their own food, found green-fingered ways to stick it to the man.” - Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, River Cottage

"Matthew Ingram has not only investigated a huge amount of material and talked to many people, he also has an ability to bring it all together in a way that makes sense and is fun to read." - Charles Dowding, No Dig

“Matthew Ingram has done all of us who care about ecological growing and a better world a big favour in this compendious but highly readable history of the gardening counterculture and its personalities. His in-depth, warts-and-all account of these past efforts will be endlessly informative for new generations wrestling with the demons of agricultural change, cultural change and climate change in our present, sobering times.” - Chris Smaje, author of A Small Farm Future

"A fascinating and detailed account of the extraordinary people prepared to counter the march of depletive systems. Matthew Ingram beautifully describes the alarm bell ringing for hippies and far-sighted visionaries prepared to stand up for soils and sustainable practices. The Garden sheds light on the characters and events that have shaped the use of our land. For those of us searching for sustainable solutions to complex and overlapping problems, this book provides forgotten information and lessons from the past for the dilemmas of the present and the future." - Ian Wilkinson, FarmEd

"Matthew Ingram has preserved and enlarged a corner of history which few have visited or are even aware of. He narrates, with the page-turning excitement of a mystery novel and the first-hand accounts of those who witnessed it, a pivot point that had enormous implications. If we get through the converging crises of this decade, our future will be profoundly better as a result of the shift he describes." - Albert Bates, The Farm

Buy it here

There's a book launch  - open to the public, just register at the link - taking place at the Onion Garden in SW1 on Tuesday April 8 6.30pm

I've not had a chance to give it a proper peruse yet but I do know that Matt's gone at the subject with his usual deep-diving passion. 

Here’s a piece in tandem with the book that Matt wrote for The Quietus in the subject of compost https://thequietus.com/interviews/things-i-have-learned/great-compost-tips/

And another on getting back to the land

Here's a mix Matt made of thematically attuned music and here are liner notes for the mix at Sick Veg. As he notes: 

Both “Retreat” and “The Garden” have large discographies in the back. This forms part of my mission to reconnect people’s interest in this music with the ideas to which it was originally conjoined. These ideas were what gave it its power.

Sick Veg is a think tank and grow lab that he's started, whose areas of investigation include  Agriculture, Community, Ecology, Food, Growing, Health, Nutrition, Organic, Practice, Regenerative, Soil, Spirituality, Therapy, the Urban, and Wilderness.

It's also a blog. And crikey, he's been posting there for a while now - images, videos and micro-essays. I had no idea. 

Here's a nice one on the gardens of his childhood. 

There's a YouTube channel as well! Flashback to the days of woebot.tv

As of now there's just the one video up there, about Stewart Home's book Fascist Yoga. 

And here's a new one, "Imaginary Landscapes", on the paintings of Charles Pryor

WHEN MATTS MAKE BOOKS

 

It's out! Matthew Ingram's new book The "S" Word: spirituality in alternative music, is ready to order. 

Self-deprecatingly, Matt describes the tome as "very geeky" and "for music geeks only". But in fact anyone who is interested in music's capacity to engender higher states of consciousness and its  association with the devotional, the transcendent, the sacred, enlightenment, mysticism, magic, trance, etc, will find this a fascinating read. 

I was pleased to offer up this morsel of endorsement:  

“Intensely researched, latticed with surprising connections and correspondences, these essays expand and deepen our awareness of the links between music and the numinous. The "S" Word is an illuminating book about illumination.” 

Contents-wise, there's several epic essays already aired on Matt's blog but now only to be found within these covers (meditations on Eastern Philosophy and The Cosmic Sound, Psychic Pop Relics, Dub... paeans to Neil Young and Mark E. Smith) plus a previously published profile of Chris Blackwell. But more than half the book consists of new writing: a staggering 18,000-word exploration of New Age music (very expansively understood here), a paean to Prince, a whole chapter dedicated to Roedelius of Cluster / Harmonia renown, and a treatise on Tibetan recordings.  

The "S" Word is available universally as an eBook but residents of the United Kingdom can also purchase it in the gorgeous solid form of a 255-page book copiously illustrated with colour photographs.  Terms, conditions, and prices are be found here at the Woebot site long with more information about the contents.  

WHEN MATES MAKE BOOKS

A couple of goodies here: a very old and very good mate with a new collection of his own writing, a more recent and very good mate with a collection he's conceived and corralled of other's writing. 

                   

Matthew Ingram has a new book out soon that pulls together his recent spate of extended essays exploring the connections between music, spirituality, health and the counterculture, and adds some all-new long pieces on New Age and Prince, plus a profile of Roedelius. Keep your third eye trained on the Woebot blog for news of  The "S" Word's materialisation on this plane. 

Asif Siddiqi has written a bunch of tomes on the space race and matters cosmonautical, but out in just a few days is his first foray into music books: One-Track Mind: Capitalism, Technology, and the Art of the Pop Song. Edited by Asif and published by Routledge it's a collection of 16 essays corralled around a focus on a single song, track, piece, or unit of recorded sound. Artists include Le Grand Kallé and African Jazz, Moby Grape, Led Zeppelin, David Bowie, X-Ray Spex, Prince, Neil Young, The Replacements, NWA, Salt-N-Pepa, Hanson, LCD Soundsystem and MIA; contributors include Oliver Wang, Esther Liberman Cuenca, Helen Reddington, Scott Poulson-Bryant, Gina Arnold, Amy Coddington, Susan Schmidt Horning, George Plasketes, Gabrielle Cornish and Asif himself. And I'm in there with a piece on Donna Summer's "I Feel Love". 

Release rationale: 

The song remains the most basic unit of modern pop music. Shaped into being by historical forces—cultural, aesthetic, and technical—the song provides both performer and audience with a world marked off by a short, discrete, and temporally demarcated experience....  Arranged chronologically in order of release of the tracks, and spanning nearly five decades, these essays zigzag across the cultural landscape to present one possible history of pop music. There are detours through psychedelic rock, Afro-pop, Latin pop, glam rock, heavy metal, punk, postpunk, adult contemporary rock, techno, hip-hop, and electro-pop here. More than just deep histories of individual songs, these essays all expand far beyond the track itself to offer exciting and often counterintuitive histories of transformative moments in popular culture. Collectively, they show the undiminished power of the individual pop song, both as distillations of important flashpoints and, in their afterlives, as ghostly echoes that persist undiminished but transform for succeeding generations.... 

chasing the virus / chasing the divine

Over at No Bells blog, here's a piece in which genre epidemiologist Kieran Press-Reynolds tracks and traces the mutation and proliferation of new audio variants - nanogenres with names like sigilkore, slung, dariacore, murder metal, maplekore, hyperplugg. Even someone like myself - triple vaxxed with scepticism, ears shielded with N95-like taste-filters - finds his diagnosis compelling. 

In the '90s, folks liked to talk about the dub virus. Which never made sense to me - why compare something sacred and healing to little bitty entities that wreck your computer or make you feel like shit? Dub and roots makes you breathe better, it rebalances your system. Here's a luminous-numinous piece by Matthew Ingram about his lifelong love of dub and the music's connections to his latterday concerns with health and spirituality. There is also a Woebot in Dub mix, #3 of a series (here's 1 and 2).

One my favorites (a Woebot turn-on, in fact) and as a good a reason to believe in God as any I can think of. 

Christmas bloggage treats

 Unexpected after-Xmas treats from blogger-authors!

Blogger-author Matthew Ingram a.k.a. Woebot reappears with an extensive, rich, attractively illustrated post about recordings that relate to the spiritual concerns of his 2020 book Retreat:  How the Counterculture Invented Wellness. Many surprising inclusions (e.g. Wire's Pink Flag as Zen Album).

Blogger-author Phil Knight returns, after a long silence, with The Interregnum Navigation Bureau, a new blog. It's a space for exploring Phil's declinist view of history and assessing the epistemic / epistemological traumas of this Age of Disintegration - "the stresses and strains that are presently distorting and corroding what was until fairly recently a broad consensus of reality" - the endeavor no doubt feeding into his current work-in-progress. (Or should that be work-in-regress?)

WHEN MATTS MAKE BOOKS

                                     


In a couple of weeks, an old and very good mate is publishing a book that has been a passion project for the last several years, involving an astonishing amount of research and trips to far corners of the world. 

That mate is Matthew Ingram, a.k.a Woebot - and although he's put out a pair of compendiums of brilliant bloggage, and a tasty monograph, it would be fair to describe Retreat: How the Counterculture Invented Wellness as Matt's first book proper. Published by Repeater on July 14, the debut does not disappoint. Here is my blurb: 

“This richly researched archaeology of the counterculture places health at its core, showing how ideas of healing and therapy were inextricably bound up with the era’s spiritual longings and erotic politics. Each chapter scintillates with surprising revelations, unexpected connections and startling insights”

More info about Retreat and further endorsements can be found at the Repeater website. 

As part of the build-up to publication, Matt has broken out of blog retirement to post a long and probing essay on Woebot, not so much a preview of the book as a side-bar to it - on the relationship between music, Eastern philosophy, spiritual equilibrium, cosmic vibrations, "bliss consciousness" etc. 

Read it here while also listening to this fabulous 2-hour mix of astral sounds Matt has especially prepared for your elevation. Tracklist here. 

Lots of revelations in the mix, here's a couple of that particularly glisked my third eye: 





Not on the mix, but the tune-writer's own version:




Met Mr. Budd a year or two ago, on the streets of South Pasadena (Geeta knows everybody)


                                         

                                                                   The author holds forth...