David Keenan

This newly expanded edition of England's Hidden Reverse, the classic exploration of the English esoteric musical underground that includes the first, and only, biographies of Coil, Current 93, and Nurse With Wound, is based on exclusive interviews and unprecedented access to all three bands' personal archives.

Together, these genre-defying bands and their circles represent the English underground in all its cultural, artistic, and sexual variety. Over four decades, the three intertwined groups have maintained a symbiotic, yet uneasy, relationship with the mainstream of popular culture, even as their music, beliefs, and practices have repelled them from it. Theirs was a clandestine scene whose work accents the many occulted peculiarities of Englishness that flow through generations of outsiders, channeling personalities as diverse as Aleister Crowley, Arthur Machen, Joe Orton, Shirley Collins, Björk, and Marc Almond. The story of this Hidden Reverse has, necessarily, remained a secret. Until now.  

This new volume contains almost 100 pages of extra material culled from Furfur, a collection of interviews with musicians and artists whose careers intersected with the bands', initially published alongside Strange Attractor's first limited edition of the book.

Taking inspiration from the history and identity of the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in Cornwall, this series of books seeks dialogue with the culture and folklore of magical practice. A range of artists were asked to create new work and collaborate on four publications that take their shape through this fascinating alternative history.

‘Empty Aphrodite’ is a radical imagining of the gods of antiquity as archetypal powers and forces that people often encounter in their lives. Organised as an alphabetic poetic sourcebook, it combines magic and inspiration in a series of surrealist portraits. The encyclopaedia comes with five random stickers with which you can choose your fate.