Tuesday 25 March 2025, 7.30pm
White Rabbit Books, in collaboration with Café Oto, present the launch of David Keenan’s Volcanic Tongue: A Time-Travelling Evangelist’s Guide to 20th Century Underground Music with a bill curated by Keenan that features some of the key musical and subcultural touchstones that have informed the book.
Volcanic Tongue is the document of a life in underground music, running from Keenan’s first, life-changing gig in 1987 (The Pastels at Fury Murrys in Glasgow) through to encounters with lifelong obsessions including the members of Throbbing Gristle, Coil, Nick Cave, Derek Bailey, My Bloody Valentine, Keiji Haino, Bill Orcutt, Pelt, Neubauten, Captain Beefheart, Pere Ubu, Folke Rabe, 13th Floor Elevators and more. The book takes its name from the legendary record shop that Keenan ran with his partner Heather Leigh from 2005-2015.
Headlining the night is Monopoly Child Star Searchers - aka Spencer Clark of cult duo, The Skaters. "[The Skaters] were absolutely central to the aesthetic of the Volcanic Tongue shop and to my own conception of what was possible on the furthest fringes of experimental underground music. They came out of a post-Angus MacLise zoned/drone mindset but that unravelled fairly quickly into them factoring in all sorts of cultural influences, cutting their massed vocal and keyboard ascensions with hypnagogic Fourth World stylings, cartoon soundtracks, heady occult ritual and wonked found sound." – David Keenan
Also on the bill are solos sets from Richard Youngs and Evan Parker.
“Richard and I have been friends since I scored a copy of his self-released solo debut LP, Advent, in the early 90s and then spotted him at a gig at the 13th Note, where I asked him if he was the Richard Youngs. No one has ever asked me that before, he said. I don’t think there is a comparable figure in the UK underground in terms of breadth of scope and vision. So many of his recordings mean so much to me, so it is a real honour, and makes perfect sense, that Richard would be part of the celebrations. Evan Parker is another musician who I have been a fan of since I was in my teens. Free jazz and improvised music absolutely broke my mind when I first encountered it and when I moved to London in the 1990s I was lucky enough to see Evan play many times at The Vortex in Stoke Newington. In recent years we have become good friends. He is one of the most original thinkers and most fascinating conversationalists and I am so proud that he has agreed to present one of his legendary solo saxophone performances as part of the night.”
In addition to the music there will be a special in-conversation between Keenan and long-term friend, writer and broadcaster Jennifer Lucy Allan. Allan and Keenan worked together at The Wire for many years and have done many events together, and this conversation should be a fascinating insight into the behind-the-scenes world of experimental music publishing and the mechanics of writing about something as nebulous as music.
Opening the night will be the novelist Richard Milward, one of Keenan’s favourite contemporary authors, reading from his masterpiece, Man-Eating Typewriter, quite simply one of the most jaw-dropping achievements in contemporary fiction.
DJ for the night is Matthew Jones aka Disciples, who alongside Keenan has compiled the special Tip of the Tongue CD that comes with the limited-edition Volcanic Tongue hardback as well as the special Volcanic Tongue 2xLP on Disciples that will also be on sale on the night.
David Keenan is the author of six critically acclaimed novels: the cult classic, This is Memorial Device, which won the London Magazine Prize and was shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize; For the Good Times, which won the Gordon Burn Prize and was shortlisted for the Encore award, Xstabeth/The Towers The Fields The Transmitters, which was shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award; Monument Maker, which was a Rough Trade Book of the Year and Industry of Magic & Light. He is also the author of England’s Hidden Reverse, a history of the UK’s post-punk and Industrial music scenes. He has been writing about music since he was 17 years old, most consistently for The Wire, and between the years 2005 and 2015 he co-ran the cult Glasgow record shop Volcanic Tongue.
Monopoly Child Star Searchers, Spencer Clark (The Skaters), is using top-of-the-line music imaging keyboards from the 80s and 90s to produce hallucinations of Past and Present Juxtaposed Eras, Far-OFF exotically composed tropical maladies, and wondrous inner-outer Ouspensky driven Fourth Dimensional Landscapes. He has recorded albums with a host of young modern musicians including Ducktails, Jan Anderzen of Kemialiset Ystvat, and Orphan Fairytale. His label Pacific City Sound Visions has ejected tape cassettes, Lp's, and Private Movies for several years. A frolicking and delightful musical aire combined with an aggressive alien monster backwards vocal hype, that will stun and awe and defrock.
"One of the darkest trawls through basement desire and alternately-visioned worlds of Spencer’s catalogue to date, absolutely dazzling, highly recommended!" - Volcanic Tongue, review of 'Pinhead In Fantasia'
Born in Cambridge and raised in the Fens, Richard Youngs began making music at the start of the seventies. His early work centred on the family piano. When this was sold in the late seventies, however, the classical guitar and cassette recorder became his instruments of choice, along with anything at hand that made a sound. From then on he has played any number of roles with bands such as Astral Social Club, Concrete Hedge, No Deserts, Jandek and Future Pilot A.K.A. Recent collaborative work with Andrew Paine, Heatsick, Kawabata Makoto and John Clyde-Evans also show him as a highly social musician.
His catalogue of releases wanders into all kinds of zones over a vast array of albums on various labels including his No Fans imprint: they include accapella, guitars, pipes or electronics and come out of solitude and in partnership with atmospheres that range from fragmental folk to all-out fuzz.
“THE iconic figure of the modern UK underground … Richard Youngs evolves in the shadows where most won’t look, but those who do will forever be dazzled and amazed” – The Quietus
"If you've ever been tempted by free improvisation, Parker is your gateway drug." - Stewart Lee
Evan Parker has been a consistently innovative presence in British free music since the 1960s. Parker played with John Stevens in the Spontaneous Music Ensemble, experimenting with new kinds of group improvisation and held a long-standing partnership with guitarist Derek Bailey. The two formed the Music Improvisation Company and later Incus Records. He also has tight associations with European free improvisations - playing on Peter Brötzmann's legendary 'Machine Gun' session (1968), with Alexander Von Schlippenbach and Paul Lovens (A trio that continues to this day), Globe Unity Orchestra, Chris McGregor's Brotherhood of Breath, and Barry Guy's London Jazz Composers Orchestra (LJCO).
Though he has worked extensively in both large and small ensembles, Parker is perhaps best known for his solo soprano saxophone music, a singular body of work that in recent years has centred around his continuing exploration of techniques such as circular breathing, split tonguing, overblowing, multiphonics and cross-pattern fingering. These are technical devices, yet Parker's use of them is, he says, less analytical than intuitive; he has likened performing his solo work to entering a kind of trance-state. The resulting music is certainly hypnotic, an uninterrupted flow of snaky, densely-textured sound that Parker has described as "the illusion of polyphony". Many listeners have indeed found it hard to credit that one man can create such intricate, complex music in real time.
