The Howling Plays Manchester's Rainy Heart Thursday 24 July

I am very pleased to announce that The Howling are performing in Manchester next Thursday, 24 July. This will not only be the first time The Howling visits Manchester, but it also the first time I have been in front of an audience there in over 15 years. I’m sure very little has changed. Many thanks to Graham Massey for inviting us to take part in such a fabulous spoken-word evening. Robin and I both looking forward to having a more meaningful contact with some of our favourite tongues.

 

Hosting us is the Rainy Heart Film Club – tickets and details are available here.

 

And here’s the press release for the longer version: Thursday 24th July

 - House of Tongues - An Evening of Spoken Word, Sound and Images guest curated by 808 States Graham Massey. Biting Tongues - the pioneering Manchester post-punk band who released music on New Hormones and Factory records was made up of members with expansive creative practices, who originally formed to record the soundtrack to a film. Graham Massey brings together various Biting Tongues members for an evening of performances that show the range of those creative practices; from art writing, to carousel slides to experimental sound work:

 

- The Howling - is a collaborative project by Ken Hollings and Robin The Fog. Ken Hollings is a writer and broadcaster who has been featured on BBC Radio 3, BBC Radio 4. His numerous books are all published by Strange Attractor/MIT Press with his latest book for them being The Trash Project Volume Three: Paradise. Robin The Fog is a sound designer and radio producer, who also creates recordings, performances and installations entirely from manipulating magnetic tape on a quartet of vintage tape machines. Described in The Wire as ‘the missing link between John Cage and Suicide’, The Howling serves up intense collisions of spoken word and pounding analogue tape effects. Collaboratively they have released 3 albums, with their latest LP, Be Quiet In This Church, due from The Tapeworm in summer 2025.

 

- I Looked Into Their Eyes And I Saw Only Pixels - A new performance work by Howard Walmsley. An filmmaker, artist and anthropologist living in Manchester, where for the last ten years in particular, there has been considerable redevelopment: an explosion of new buildings and reconfigured public space. These construction sites are surrounded by hoardings printed with giant illustrations of the proposed structure, complete with images of digital citizens inhabiting the space. Imagined people presented in yet-to-be places. This performance, made up of 35mm slide Carousel presentation, commentary and live soundscape takes the figures from these hoarding - known as entourage cutouts, which are printed onto acetate and dissected, corrupted, scalpel sliced and layered into the frames of 35mm glass slide mounts. In these slide collages, the figures overlap and collide, become framed in new relationships and chance meetings. Illuminated in a new world, they begin to reflect the chaos of the city.

 

- Meadow - an ongoing text based project by Flo Goodliffe, an artist and writer, previously published by: Worms, Spam, Travesties, Deleuzine. She is a graduate of the Royal College of Art Master’s Writing programme. This performance of Meadow samples sections of material from a longer work of writing-in-progress. The project relates to the imagined interiority of the character Meadow Soprano, of The Sopranos TV show, in fan-fic style. Meadow is reframed in this work as a protagonist. Her perspective is inter-sliced with a speculative account of the experience of actor Jamie-Lynn Sigler, who reckoned in secrecy with diagnosis of Multiple Sclerosis during the filming of The Sopranos. Flo’s voice rounds out the cast participant in this heady work of auto-fiction and biography. The work describes experience of chronic illness and performance. Its choral narration projects yearning for community. Meadow probes thinking on narrative ownership, intellectual property and of capacity for perception, sharing and understanding. 

 

- Four Winds - Graham Massey presents an exploration of his bespoke woodwind collection in 4 parts:

WIND 1 - A 1950s Noblet Alto Clarinet with Jupiter 8 Synthesizer - I Chun Ling (traditional arr)

WIND 2 - A modified Selmar Clarinet with Maestro Woodwind System - Sweet Song Of Summer by Bee Gees 

WIND 3 - The Iguarglaphon -A homemade Chalumeau used on many recordings since the 70s - Norfolk Lightning

WIND 4 - The Reed Cornet -A Woodwind /Brass Hybrid - Tripolis from Kicked From The Stars

 

House of Tongues 

18.30 – 23:00

Thursday 24 July

Rainy Heart Film Club

The Bungalow

Kampus 

Aytoun Street

Manchester M1 3DA

Admission £6.50 – cheap

 

Pictured above

KH at the Horse Hospital by Rachel Hollings, Graham Massey IG post with details, Robin the Fog and The Howling in full effect at Café OTO by Beth Arzy 

 

 

The Howling does Bad Punk Friday 25 April

 

Hello fight fans! Absolutely thrilled to announce that the wonderful Johny Brown has invited The Howling, AKA Howlround and me, to appear on his late-night Resonance 104.4 show ‘Bad Punk’ this Friday 25 April. 

In fact, thanks for Johny’s kindness, for 90 minutes The Howling will be the ENTIRE show. 

I haven’t done any live radio in many years, not since my 'Hollingsville' series for Resonance back in the day, so am looking forward to it with that old familiar mix of exhilaration and sheer terror. 

The Howling will be presenting a version of a track from our upcoming album from The Tapeworm, ‘Be Quiet In This Church’ and will also be performing a one-off live collaboration with members of The Band of Holy Joy. There may be other surprise guests – it’s live and spontaneous, so anything can happen – but anyone who’s seen The Howling perform will know that. I didn’t really have suitable pictures to go with this post, so here are a few extra shots of me and Howlround performing at the launch event for my Strange Attractor Press book Paradise at The Horse Hospital a few months back. We will be playing a recording of this reading/performance as part of the show.

'Bad Punk' starts at 22.00 on Resonance 104.4 FM on Friday 25 April and finishes at 23.30 – so turn on, tune in and pass out. We’ll probably be right behind you. 

You can find Resonance 104.4 FM by clicking here

Pictured above:

KH and Howlround at The Horse Hospital - photos by @lahollings 

The Trash Project Does Little Atoms

 

I was recently given the opportunity by Neil Denny to appear on his show Little Atoms to not only talk about my latest book from Strange Attractor Press, Paradise: The Psychoanalysis of Trash, but to discuss The Trash Project in its entirety. With Neil’s kind encouragement, I was able to go over the origins of Inferno, how it developed into the alchemic arcana of Purgatory and then ended with a protracted meditation on the relationship between sovereignty and waste in Paradise. There was also time to outline the complex generative relationship between The Trash Project and Dante’s three-part Divine Comedy. The result was a lively hour of conversation, which you can either download here as a podcast – or if, like me, you still think of radio as an event, a slightly shorter version of this episode of Little Atoms is being broadcast by Resonance 104.4 FM on Monday 13 January at 11.00. Feel free to listen in. And a Happy New Year to all my readers, to Resonance 104.4 FM and to everyone involved with Little Atoms.

 

Pictured above: obligatory packshots – The Trash Project, Inferno, Purgatory, Paradise and The Trash Concordance 

 

'Paradise' Launch at The Horse Hospital, Friday 6 December

 

On Friday 6 December, I'd be delighted if you could please join me and Strange Attractor Press in celebrating the completion of my monumental Trash Project with the publication launch for Paradise: The Psychoanalysis of Trash at The Horse Hospital. The event will also celebrate twenty years since Strange Attractor’s first book event at this most blessed and favoured venue.

I will be reading from Paradise, alongside a performance from Howlround’s Robin The Fog on reel-to-reel tape recorders. You will of course know us better as The Howling.

Copies of all three volumes – Inferno, Purgatory and Paradise – will be on sale, along with their companion volume The Trash Concordance; and I will be signing copies of all four titles while stocks last.

‘Virtuosic in its scope…never less that compelling in its sheer erudition’ 

Chris Hill, Fortean Times

‘Energetic and enthusiastic, Hollings’ conception of trash is poetic, exaggerated and true to the conceptual and ultimately confrontational nature of the underground.’

Laura Jacobs, Art Monthly

In the third and final volume of his personal reflections on Trash Aesthetics, Ken Hollings tells the story of three kings who squandered everything they had in a grandiose spectacle of waste. King Ludwig II of Bavaria, ‘King of Rock ‘n’ Roll’ Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson, the ‘King of Pop,’ all shared the same doomed innocence. Their lives and early deaths were connected through individual displays of unfettered extravagance that brought them to the very edge of ruin. Each of them lived out their personal ideals of beauty and pleasure – even after the money was gone. In his reworking of Dante Alighieri’s Paradiso, Hollings presents Heaven as a place of rebellious but tragic self-indulgence.

 

Here are the details

December 6th
Doors 7pm
The Horse Hospital
Colonnade
London 

Free Entry

Ken Hollings, The Howling and Howloween at Margate Caves

 

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

Ludwig II of Bavaria: The Movie King

 

I was recently invited by Adam Alston, the editor of Staging Decadence, to contribute an essay to this remarkable online platform. I was told that it could be about anything I wanted. This gave me a welcome opportunity to write about a subject that has interested me for quite a while. The movies made in the twentieth century on the life of King Ludwig II of Bavaria have long fascinated me. Ludwig is a major presence in my latest book, Paradise: The Psychoanalysis of Trash, which is the third and concluding part of my Trash Project. Ludwig II is a supreme example of aesthetic sovereignty attained through spectacular extravagance and waste: the castles that proved to be his ruin are magnificent Baroque follies stranded in time towards the end of the nineteenth century. He had these fairytale dream palaces built at a time when modernism was already making its first technological incursions into contemporary society and culture. 

 

Although frequently photographed during his reign, Ludwig did not live long enough to appear in even the earliest moving pictures. This means that he never personally encountered what would become the modernist artform.  However, it didn’t take long for an emergent movie industry to start portraying Ludwig’s colourful life. The first surviving film depicting scenes from his life appeared in 1920, released with an early Tarzan movie from Hollywood. Another silent movie from 1930 met with official disapproval. Later in the century came Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s low-budget masterpiece Ludwig: Requiem for a Virgin King, first released in 1972. This was the same year in which Luchino Visconti released his lavish retelling of the king’s life in Ludwig, starring Helmut Berger in the title role. 

 

I had wanted to write more about Ludwig as a modern cinematic obsession in Paradise, but the very strict ordering of the text, determined by the structure of Dante’s Divine Comedy, meant that I had to set this intriguing theme aside for another day. Well, another day has finally come, and you can find my essay ‘Projected Fairy Tales: The Life of Ludwig II of Bavaria as Revealed in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ by clicking here.

 

To coincide with the posting online of this new essay, I have been informed by the wonderful Lady Liminal, AKA Rebecca Lambert, that Sky History has recently shown a film documentary on the death of Ludwig II, which features extracts from an extensive filmed interview I gave on the subject some years ago. Rebecca tells me that the doc can also be found on Amazon Prime if you know where to look. The film was part of a series on Royal Murder Mysteries, so you can only imagine.

 

There will be other events and occurrences to celebrate the launch of Paradise: The Psychoanalysis of Trash in the coming weeks, and I will be posted advance information on social media in due course. To order an advance copy, please click here.

 

Pictured above

Ludwig II posing for the court photographer (Joseph Albert)

Neuschwanstein’s inner courtyard (Rachel Hollings)

Inside The Venus Grotto at Linderhof (Rachel Hollings)

KH wearing black on TV for Ludwig II (Rebecca Lambert)

'Paradise' is Here - And It's Brought a Friend

I’m very happy to announce that Paradise: The Psychoanalysis of Trash, the third volume of my journey into the domains of trash culture and trash aesthetics, is available now Strange Attractor Press.This volume completes a trilogy of works that began with the publication of Inferno: A Genealogy of 1960s Trash Culture back in 2019, and continued with Purgatory: Towards The Decay Of Meaning in 2022. 

Customers who buy the book directly from Strange Attractor Press will also receive a complimentary copy of The Trash Concordance: A Guide to The Divine Comedy, The Trash Project, Dante and Me. And you can find that offer by clicking here. 

Here’s a quick overview of Paradise: The Psychoanalysis of Trash taken from the back of the book: 

In the third and final volume of his personal reflections on Trash Aesthetics, Ken Hollings tell the story of three kings who squandered everything they had in a grandiose spectacle of waste. King Ludwig II of Bavaria, ‘King of Rock ‘n’ Roll’ Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson, the ‘King of Pop,’ all shared the same doomed innocence. Their lives and early deaths were connected through individual displays of unfettered extravagance that brought them to the very edge of ruin. Each of them lived out their personal ideals of beauty and pleasure – even after the money was gone. In his reworking of Dante Alighieri’s Paradiso, Hollings presents Heaven as a place of rebellious but tragic self-indulgence

 If you’re new to The Trash Project, Strange Attractor are happy to offer, for a limited time only, the complete set of works at a discounted price of £45.00 plus P+P. Check out their webstore here while stocks last. This will bag you all four books, ie the three main titles, plus The Trash Concordance, a fully-illustrated limited edition bonus volume that maps connections between the Trash Project and its structural inspiration, Dante's Divine Comedy. 

The bundle includes: 

 - Inferno: A Genealogy of 1960s Trash Culture (2019) 

 - Purgatory: Towards The Decay Of Meaning (2022) 

 - Paradise: The Psychoanalysis of Trash (2024) 

- The Trash Concordance: A Guide to the Divine Comedy, The Trash Project, Dante and Me (2024)

 The whole of The Trash Project has been beautifully designed by Tihana Sara assisted by Baphorock on Paradise and The Trash Concordance.

There will be some very special launch events coming up in the autumn, so look out for these - announcements will made in all the usual places on social media. 

 The long journey is nearly over - the end is in sight. 

Paradise

The Psychoanalysis of Trash 

by Ken Hollings 

 £17.99 

 ISBN: 9781913689858 

 352 pp. | 130x 182mm 

 35 illustrations 

 Pack shots above by Rachel Hollings