Still In A Dream: UK events, media appearances + articles, Fifty Lost Treasures zine, translations, Rough Trade offer, and more

Just a month now until my new book is out!

Below you will find info about the UK tour in mid-June; news about the translated editions in Spanish, Italian, French, German, and Turkish;  links to upcoming podcast appearances, interviews, and pieces written by me related to the book; info about the limited-edition zine Fifty Lost Treasures available only through pre-orders at select retailers; and details of a Rough Trade special offer for pre-orders.

UK edition published June 18 by White Rabbit Books - pre-order. US edition Jan 2027.

STILL IN A DREAM UK TOUR JUNE 15-20

Dates, times, host locations, links for tickets, plus info about who will be joining me onstage to talk about the book and the era

Monday 15 - London - Rough Trade East 

Location: Old Truman Brewery 91, Brick Ln, London E1 6QL 

Time: 8pm

Conversation with Miki Berenyi (Lush / author Fingers Crossed)

Followed by audience Q+A and book signing. 

Get tickets here

Tuesday 16 - Bath - Roseberry Road Studios

Location: 25 - 28 Roseberry Road, Bath, Somerset, BA2 3DX 

Time: evening, details TBC

Conversation with Jonathan Wright (journalist and Groovy Times co-founder)

Followed by audience Q+A, book signing and a DJ set from TBC. 

Get tickets here

Wednesday 17 - Bristol -  Strange Brew

Location: Strange Brew, 10-12 Fairfax St, Bristol BS1 3DB 

Time: evening, details TBC

Conversation with Darran McLaughlin (Strange Brew)

Followed by audience Q+A and book signing (books courtesy Bookhaus).

Get tickets here

  

Thursday 18 - London  - IMCP The Long Play Sessions,

Location: The Venue, ICMP (Queens Park Campus), NW6 6PA 

Time: 7pm 

Conversation with Rudy Tambala (A.R. Kane)

Followed by audience Q+A and book signing

Get tickets here

Friday 19 - Leeds - Waterstones 

Location: 93-97 Albion St, Leeds LS1 5AP 

Time: evening, details TBC

In conversation with David Hesmondhalgh (Leeds University / author Why Music Matters)

Followed by audience Q+A and book signing.  

Get tickets here

Saturday 20 - Brighton - Resident

Location: 27 - 28 Kensington Gardens, North Laine, Brighton, BN1 4AL 

Time: evening, TBC

Conversation with Simon Raymonde (Cocteau Twins / Bella Union) 

Followed by audience Q+A and book signing  

Get tickets here

INTERVIEWS, PODCASTS, AND OTHER MEDIA APPEARANCEs, PLUS  ARTICLES BY ME RELATED TO THE BOOK

Word In Your Ear podcast - a really fun conversation with Mark Ellen and David Hepworth (airs this week)

My essay for Vice's "Self-Destruction" issue - connecting Velvet Underground's "Heroin" to the oblivion-thru-obliteration aesthetic of narcotic neo-psych bands like Spacemen 3 and other late '80s bliss-rockers. (published imminently)

To Here Knows When podcast - excellent chat with Paul McDermott (airs imminently)

Quietus news story by Christian Eede on Still In A Dream, with comments from myself and from the cover designer Henri Holz 

FIFTY LOST TREASURES bonus zine

For the U.K. only, the Record Store Special Edition comes with a limited-edition fanzine, Fifty Lost Treasures dedicated to "lost treasure from the lost generation", artists not covered or only glancingly mentioned in the book.  

You can get it here at Gnostic Sonics or here at Resident or here at Stranger Than Paradise or here at Norman Records

TRANSLATIONS

Spanish language version is due from Caja Negra Editora in Argentina. Date TBA.

Italian version from Minimum Fax.  Date TBA.

German version from Ventil Verlag. Date TBA.

French version from Audimat. Date TBA.

Turkish version from Ayrinti. Date TBA

ENDORSEMENTS

Still in a Dream is more than just a celebration of some enduringly wonderful music - it's a great book full stop, Reynolds' best yet. Bringing together the sugar hiccup enthusiasms of his music press youth with the harsh wisdom of his extremely online old age, it covers everything from the sensual sublimity of the Cocteau Twins to Big Black and the genesis of edgelordism, from the little undergrounds of C86 and shoegaze to the pyrrhic overground victories of Grunge and Britpop. It's warm, funny, sometimes startlingly honest, and a very timely reminder that 'withdrawal in disgust is not the same thing as apathy'

- Owen Hatherley, author of Militant Modernism and The Alienation Effect

"Still in a Dream is as important a work of art as any of the records that inspired it. Simon Reynolds's erudition and judgement is at the service of the music he so passionately loves, his words meeting the songs on an equal footing thanks to an innate lack of ego which allows his insights to float amidst the notes in an ether of sonic luminosity

- Tariq Goddard, founder of Repeater Books and author High John the Conqueror

'Much like the melodies of the music itself, this book feels like a story which has been waiting to burst out and shine for an eternity. Every band detail is fascinating but the real joy lies in Reynolds being entirely enraptured by a scene, the tales of someone blissfully caught in the heart of a storm'

- Daniel Avery, deejay and producer

‘The alternative guitar rock of the late 80s was imaginative, expansive, experimental, and ultimately - and perhaps unexpectedly - proved to have a lasting impact on the way pop sounds in the 21st Century. Simon Reynolds was there, filing dispatches from rock's cutting edge: part-memoir of a lost world of music journalism, part critical analysis, Still In A Dream brings an important and exhilarating era vividly to life’

- Alexis Petridis, The Guardian

ROUGH TRADE SPECIAL OFFER 

pre-order here

Hauntology Parish Newsletter - "Feint May" Edition: Kilkenny Electroacoustic Research Laboratory; Boards of Canada; Keith Seatman; Fil OK / We're in the Water; Naomi Elizabeth; Haunted Generation; A Year in the Country

Goodness, but it's been glorious out there in the parish lately.

The combination of all that heavy rain earlier in the year - and the spell of cloudless skies and midsummer heat in late April -  resulted in a virulent verdancy I've never seen before.

What did the poet say? 

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

    It will flame out, like shining from shook foil

Dancersend was incandescent last week.

And then, the other day, driving past the station and through those four or five fields of rape (such an unfortunate name) I was floored, overawed, by the flaming fluorescence of yellow stretching out in every direction as far as the eye could see. 

A vibrancy of hue I've never seen before. 

This photo - of a different field, at a less bright time of day -  doesn't nearly do it justice. 

And of course the bluebell woods -  again, so hard to capture on camera, the gaseousness of that peak-bloom purple haze.  

But I've gushed about this time of year in England before. 

So - even though the birdsong is our surroundsound symphony these days - we turn now to musical happenings of note in the parish.

From our Emerald Isle twin town Kilkenny, something really special:

Kilkenny Electroacoustic Research Laboratory Anthology Vol. 3 - The Stray Sod.

The latest - and last - installment of the compilation series documenting this Irish institution for electronic music composers active in the 1970s and 1980s.  

But what a way to go out - it's a gorgeously varied selection of pieces, ranging from miniature electronic radio-plays to tone poems woven out of chimes and drones to dulcet folk songs.

You can buy it here either as a digital download or as a compact disc that comes with a beautifully illustrated and intricately informative 70-page book about the Kilkenny Electroacoustic Research Laboratory's history,  a pull-out A3 poster of the Ireland Pavilion Expo '74, a Radagast's Allotment Macpaint design by Johnny Donnelly, and a special thank you letter from the Label Director.

Release irrationale:

In this third, and final, volume of the Kilkenny Electroacoustic Research Laboratory Anthology, we focus on several disparate yet conceptually linked topics, many of which connect to the Kiely cousins, Owen and Tom, who have been briefly mentioned in previous volumes. The first half of the book focuses largely on the foundations which led to the events of the second half. The second half of the book will focus largely on the arts, crafts and lifestyle collective founded by the Kielys, Radagast’s Allotment.

In our first chapter we cover the creation and publication of the 1971 children’s book and accompanying audio cassette Upon the Air. Written and produced by Gerry Duggan and Jacinta Delaney and illustrated by the renowned Irish equine artist Johnny ‘Ding Dong’ Donnelly, Upon the Air, was the first and only children’s book made in the lab. It was intended to disseminate Delaney’s early-years sound studies research to a wider audience, though was a commercial failure.

The second chapter of the book covers an ill-fated, government funded, immersive art installation which had been planned for the Irish pavilion at the 1974 World’s Expo in Spokane, Washington, U.S.A. In this chapter we cover the development of the installation, which was a collaboration between K.E.R.L. founding member, Eoghan Comerford and the Dublin-based artist duo Beamish and Watson. We also explore the government in-fighting which led to the ultimate failure of the project.

Chapter three documents the musical works of the Kilkenny folklorist and composer Maeve Scully (1947-2011), her connection to the Radagast’s Allotment and K.E.R.L., and the rediscovery of her work by a younger generation of composers, musicians and improvisers throughout the world. Maeve would go on to become a key member in Radagast’s Allotment and would frequently make use of the facilities in the Electroacoustic Lab to realise her ‘Mayday Dew’ series of compositions.

The radio adaptation of T.V. Delaney’s, post-apocalyptic ecological science fiction novel The Capsules of Posterity – The Aurochs, is the topic of our fourth chapter. Initially published in ’76 by Tamhóg Press, the book was adapted into a radio play by Antrim Productions and K.E.R.L. It was produced by Tony Quinn, Tom Kiely and Eoghan Comerford and broadcast in 1981. The production process of this adaptation is often cited as the origin for the ideas which later became the formalised Radagast’s Allotment.

At this halfway point of the book, we have included several pages from the first edition of the Radagast’s Allotment Almanac, which came out in the summer of ’85 and was designed by Johnny Donnelly using MacPaint. It gives an insight into the activities and interests of the group, which we will then explore in the second half of the book.

Next, we have an interview which I conducted in a pub in London with the Radagast’s Allotment founding member, Owen Kiely, last year, where we talked at length about Dian Cécht and his band after Dian Cécht, The Triskelion. Owen does not suffer fools lightly, though we have printed the interview in full as it gives an insight into the culture and condition which led up the founding and eventual collapse of Radagast’s Allotment and the Kilkenny Electroacoustic Research Laboratory.

In chapter six we cover the activities of the Radagast’s Allotment, an arts, crafts and lifestyle organisation described by Hannah Sheppard-Noonan, in her book Bards, Binaural Beats, and Borderline Personality Disorder – Mental Illness in a Rural Arts Community as showing ‘all the signs of being a new religious movement, though lacked anyone with basic, never mind effective, organisational skills, which fundamentally prevented the group from fully actualising into a cult.’

Socracht Rothlach, which was a collaboration between one of the guitarists from The Triskelion, Stevie Larkin, and the K.E.R.L. member Packie Bolger, is the topic of chapter seven. The release was the second in K.E.R.L.’s Relaxation Series and was, like most things released by the lab, a commercial failure. In the chapter we cover the process of making the album, its musical qualities and the life and death of Stevie Larkin.

Our final chapter is about Tom Kiely and his group The Small Green Hand, who had splintered off from Radagast’s Allotment in the mid-80s, and who, inspired by Italian Futurists and the Viennese Actionists, attempted to poison a significant amount of the Kilkenny public in an attempt to ‘herald a new Irish techno-feudal utopia.’

Vivere Solem Et Oppositum,

Neil P. Quigley

April ‘26

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The Kilkenny release has understandably and deservedly overshadowed everything else going at the moment.

But I do want to shine a spotlight on some other parish activities that may have escaped your notice.

For instance, those secretive brothers behind Boards of Canada have been shyly, slyly, hinting at a forthcoming release, their first in an absolute age. 

It would be a shame if they were so coy about it that Inferno didn't get the attention it probably merits. 

Fresh from their epic BoC treatise "Corduroy Psychedelia", Split Infinities has another essay that interpretatively irradiates BoC's teaser releases so far: Boards of Canada’s ‘Prophecy at 1420 MHz’: Spinoza, Bataille, Nasr, and the Aesthetics of Prophetic Transmission -

Susurrations of Cosmic Consciousness or Notes Toward a Hydrogen Communism

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Talking of things getting overlooked... I fear that I missed the Keith Seatman album, owing to the long gap since the last newsletter - Counting To Ten Then Back Again came out in February and now there is a remix of a track off the LP, "Clip Clop", done by Simon Heartfield. 

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Conversely, I am a little early in drawing your attention to a new album by Fil OK, titled The Belltower, and out in June.

Well, not really early, actually -  as it is part 2 of a trilogy of LPs released this year, with The Steeple already out and hearable here, and the final installment, The Dome, due in the autumn. 

The trilogy is under Fil's alter-ego We're in the Water and it's sweetly spooky electro-pop in the vicinity of John Foxx and the Belbury Circle 

Naturally, I'm all in favor of ecclesiastical electronica. 

Although going by the release-rationale, this second installment of the trilogy is less about the ethereal and spiritual and more about the corporeal:

"The concept of the album is how our bodies constantly guide us: through instinct and movement we are attracted to pleasure, beauty, nourishment, relief, connection and survival, and intuitively away from pain, discomfort, danger, excess and the grotesque. These impulses can be gentle or relentless, welcome or intrusive. We call them needs, instincts, desires – but, at their core, they are simply the language of the organism itself. To live is to inhabit this system: to navigate and direct a restless, vivid machine of nerves and muscles as it carries us forward through life....  Where The Steeple leaned into cerebral electronic textures, The Belltower brings guitars and beats into sharper focus, emphasizing the resonance and vibration of bells and twanging guitar refrains on tracks like "Nothing Is Certain But Death", "The Headaches" and "Not Sleepy", as well as rhythm and distortion on "Not Quite Naked" and "Storm Before The Calm" – the latter a dark electro murder ballad inspired by David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. Lyrically, the new album explores a range of bodily states and experiences - waking, breathing, seeing, identifying, enjoying, suffering, escaping, fornicating, violating, dying and the peculiar theatre of cohabiting... 

"The three new works planned for this year each interpret the lyrics and music of the songs literally as architectural spaces, placing them conceptually in these three grand, holy places of worship, celebration and contemplation.

"Whereas The Steeple imagined the mind as a place of elevation and introspection, The Belltower represents the body - vibrating in visceral resonance - tunes and rhythms designed to make the blood flow and the body move."

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Talking of "sweetly spooky" - not really hauntology, and not a new release, but newly nailed to my brain - is year-abroad student Naomi Elizabeth, currently studying Instagrammatology at Pendley  Manor Arts Institute, but I for one think she should go back to making tunes like these...

Wet Leg goes hyperpop

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Bob Fischer's latest Haunted Generation column has a bunch of haunty activity, names mostly unfamiliar to me. Like this fine fellow

and this atmospheric, shortwave radio inspired audio-drama 

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The supernaturally prolific Stephen Prince of A Year in the Country has yet another book out  (how does he do it?! Surely he is now in double figures? My refractory period for a new all-new tome seems to be a decade!).

Ghost Signals: The Shadowlands Of British Analogue Television 1968-1995

Full information about its scope and contents, and how to buy it, is at the A Year in the Country blog. 

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A Year in the Country brings us back to where we started - the English countryside, succulently ablaze this month, a vernal inferno

And for all this, nature is never spent;

    There lives the dearest freshness deep down things

reading matters 2: keeping it in the Family

Our Kid with a Rabbit Holed about the wacky world of the Young Wikipedians who are frenziedly  writing the second draft of music history.  (The first draft being the journalism that these shadowy aliased individuals cite and source).  Kieran's piece takes you inside the sausage-making process of how decisions get made on what is "real" and who deserves an entry.....

This reminded me of my own peek behind the curtain, when I was tipped off about in camera deliberations on whether hauntology was a real music genre or not: a discussion led, unbelievably, by someone whose Wiki-editor moniker was PhantomSteve, and who steered the cabal towards "consensus is to delete". 

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Over at the sporadic L.S. Trackhead, the mysterious blogger takes a rich 'n' ripe delve through the dense discography of Family. 

First time I ever did hear the group's name was from the lips of a recently acquired friend. Quite a bit older than me, Martin was incredulous - perhaps perturbed, or maybe offended -  that I had never heard of Family. Probably it felt like a whole world that he'd once inhabited as a young man and that was super-important  to him - it was disappearing, thanks to a new generation of ignoramuses indoctrinated to believe unquestioningly that the early '70s had been a virtual wasteland. 

So Martin snorted something scornful along the lines of "only one of the most important U.K. Underground bands of the late '60s,'early 70s'".  This was 1987, though, and I wonder now how could I have come across the name? Family =  surely one of the most spectacular examples of Dropped Away Syndrome, even more so than The Edgar Broughton Band, who in the Eighties still trod the boards and flickered in the corner of your eye as you perused the gig guide with its adverts for upcoming concerts. 

I promptly forgot about Family again until about a year later, when a musician friend made me a cassette, a guide to the lost treasures of the pre-punk era. And there they were: Family, represented by the off-kilter boogie of "Burlesque", which had actually been a modest chart hit I discovered much later (no doubt thanks to Wikipedia). 

I loved it and picked up the parent album Bandstand...  and then a few other records. 

But I never found anything quite as appealing as the hairy-palmed lurch of "Burlesque". Roger Chapman's voice is an acquired taste and especially in its psychedelic-era incarnation on Music In A  Doll's House, the phlegm-y rattle of that juddering vibrato is too pungent for my palate. L.S. Trackhead does write alluringly -  almost aromatically -  about the records, though. Enough to make me entertain another attempt on the urrrrv. 

This got to #4 in the hit parade during that pre-glam lull 

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Another post from "abstract cinema" fan John Coulthart of { feuilleton }, this one pointing to Doodlin', an old documentary that's resurfaced on YouTube about "visual music" pioneer Len Lye. 

Visual Music being a subject I recently posted on at Dreams, Built By Hand - resurfacing a lecture I did at the Tate Modern wouldyafuckinbelieve (a mixed anointing, in the event)

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The Impostume a.k.a. Carl Neville has a really interesting conversation with Claude about the sensory impoverishment of AI.... the way it works with language without any somatic experience of  language's referents.... and the assymetry of the exchange between embodied and disembodied entities that then ensues:

"You can't generate from pure linguistic interpolation, and I can't generate from a body...  I am language without world, talking with someone who has world, and the exchange takes place across that gap."

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Torpedo the Ark's Stephen Alexander has further reflections on the work of Mark Fisher - now turning to the big fat K-punk collection of bloggige, and looking initially at my preface and Darren Ambrose's introduction.

Stephen has just added another post about how, with some of the central writers in K-Punk's Pantheon, he's never read them or doesn't get on with them - and then the mystery of why some books touch us, some writers attract us, and but others don't. (Same here re. some Markfaves:  never read Spinoza, only read about 10 pages of Kafka, and am currently reading for the first time Margaret Atwood (specifically her Fisher-favored Oryx and Crake). (Which is  really absorbing but I'm not quite seeing as yet how it fits the K-punkian vision. Will have to go back to his chapter on it in The Weird and the Eerie, after I've finished the novel).  (I've also never quite seen the Kubrick-worship thing, despite the excellence of specific films. The Shining in particular elicits a big shrug from me. But each to their own god, eh?).

And another K-punk post from Torpedo the Ark, this time on Mark's enduring sense of wonder. 

Earlier in the year, Stephen extended a similarly generous gaze towards Retromania, starting here. I always meant to blog some annotations to his annotations, but the moment escaped me.

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Circling back within the extended family to my own scribblings.... I did a liner note for the Superior Viaduct vinyl reissue of Flipper's debut album Generic Flipper. 

Despite buying the record at the time and playing it a great deal, I had never noticed the running joke of the pharmaceutical packaging until doing the essay....

Here's a review I did of the second album Gone Fishin' in 1987... I think the record had already been out a year or two by this point, but perhaps had only just become available in the U.K. for the first time as a domestic release. Who knows, and who cared - I certainly was not going to miss the opportunity to rave on account of a technicality like the record's release date. 

(Several months after the Flipper review I gushed about Saint Vitus's Born Too Late, unaware that it had come out a couple of years earlier - Reviewed Too Late, more like! . Except it was totally timely, given the massive surge in Sabbath-influence within underground rock.). 

Again, talk about not seeing what is right in front of your eyes, but I never fully clocked that the album packaging is designed so that you can cut out and assemble a cardboard model of Flipper's tour van, along with figures of each band member.  

Yes myopia aside, I was pretty fucking keen on Flipper. On my first visit to America, earlier in '87, I picked up a Flipper T-shirt. Here I am wearing it to that year's Melody Maker Party. 

And here is the T-shirt itself, looking a bit dingy.  I wonder if it is worth anything? 

Alas am no longer skinny enough to wear it. 

Years later I finally saw Flipper in the flesh, when they played New York during the tour for their Def American comeback album American Grafishy. 

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