I am very excited to announce a very special site-specific show taking place at Margate Caves on Thursday 31 October. Thanks to Seadog Books, I am happy to announce Howloween, an evening of clammy weirdness and strange darkness that none of you should even dream of missing. You can find more details and order tickets by clicking here.
As part of Howloween, I will be giving the first public reading ever from Paradise, my latest book for Strange Attractor Press, on a suitably subterranean theme: namely, the fabulous Venus Grotto of King Ludwig II. Seadog Books will be selling copies of Paradise at the Caves, along with complete sets of The Trash Project for all you completists, and I will also on hand to sign copies.
My reading will be followed by the premiere of ‘Be Quiet In This Church’, the latest live performance by The Howling. This is an ambitious project inspired by a bizarre series of texts posted as comments under a YouTube video, where they were discovered by Robin The Fog. Either produced by a chatbot or in response to a homework assignment, the texts offer a set of grammatical permutations on the same remarkably similar sentences. Who wrote them or how they ended up as comments posted under an old music infomercial remain a mystery. We decided not to alter or edit the texts in any way but simply arrange them for five speaking voices. The result is a fractured meditation on repetition and variation in which every sentence is transformed into a haunting subterranean experience. The performance will feature the additional voices of Claire Breach, Xanthe Horner, Hamzah Aldimi and Martyna Wielgopolan, to whom The Howling would like publicly to express their gratitude.
Some of the BQITC crew visited Margate Caves during the summer to experiment with voices and acoustics to see what would work in this cavernous space. Xanthe also brought her gong, which will be featured in the 31 October performance. You can see from the pictures above that we will be performing in a fabulous set of vaulted spaces that was once an old chalk mine. Due to the size and capacity of Margate Caves, there is a strictly limited audience capacity, and we are already down to the last twenty tickets. If you’re in the Margate area or in the mood for a Halloween excursion, this may be exactly what you are looking for.
Pictured above:
Two views of the Margate Caves interior
Xanthe, Claire and Robin reacting to some of the Cave Paintings
More Cave Paintings
Xanthe + gong
Robin + cassette recorder
Paradise + back cover