Volcanic Tongue

David Keenan
White Rabbit

For a decade or two from the end of the 90s through the 2010s I was an avid subscriber to The Wire magazine, eagerly pouring each month over descriptions of beautifully obtuse and brilliantly obscure music.  That magazine - which I became besotted with after spotting Lydia Lunch staring at me from the cover of issue 173 on the shelves of a small provincial newsagent - cost me a fortune in CDs but my god I got to hear some tunes and one of their writers most responsible for syphoning my bank acount was David Keenan.

'Volcanic Tongue', named after the record shop he ran with his partner, pedal steel guitarist and sound artist Heather Leigh, in Glasgow from 2005-2015, is a collection of articles, interviews, primers and portraits mostly taken from The Wire, that provide an extended snapshot of outsider music of the '90s, '00s & '10s and of it's heritage.  Through it's pages we catch Coil in '98 at the release of 'Time Machines', Einstürzende Neubauten in '04 in the wake of 'Perpetuum Mobile', the Klangbad Faust contingent in '03, Shirley Collins on the release of 'Lodestar' in 16, Carter-Tutti in '15 with a new name and with Cosey about to find a whole new audience with her autobiography and there are two very funny interviews with The Dead C on tour in Europe in '13 and with Marshall Allen waxing about the cosmic centrality of Sun Ra in '15.  These are paired with a trio of 'Invisible Jukebox' sessions - always my favourite section in the magazine - where songs are played, sight unseen, to a musician, in these instances to Eugene Chadbourne, Glenn Jones and Kevin Shields along with some 'Primers' on Noise Music, Sonic Youth, John Fahey, and Kosmische Musik.

I've been dipping in and out of this book for a few months now and truthfully there are still some chapters I've yet to read - there's even more in there that I haven't mentioned - but I'm at the point where I needed to share this with you all.  Keenan was always a very personable and engaging writer that seemed to get the best out of his interviewees and could cut to the core of his subjects and as such anyone with even a vague interest in the outer fringes of music will find much of interest here and an interesting companion piece to his essential exploration of the post industrial underground, 'England's Hidden Reverse'.

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