Monthly Link Dump: April 2025

This is my monthly link dump, a regular monthly series containing a mix of links to interesting blog posts I’ve read from the past month covering arts & culture, myth, folklore, landscape punk, hauntology, anarchism, utopianism, the gothic, neo-fabulism, and the Weird - all discovered through my RSS feed reader (another reason why you should get a feed reader too).

We Are All Boundaried by Wansdyke and The West
by Mark Nemglan

For his entire career, Julian Cope has cast himself as an outsider; a troubadour-seer circling the boundaries of this Electric Eden, agitating and invoking and accusing and hallowing and carousing. He is very much his own man, but can legitimately be included in the synomosy of non-conformist cultural eccentrics, from William Blake to Syd Barrett; John Toland to Alan Moore; Austin Spare to Kevin Ayers. More specifically, their breed represents a tradition that probably could not have emerged from anywhere other than Britain, being characterised by a braid of influences embodied in the idea of ‘Albion’ – a mythic Utopia and place of unique and otherworldly atmospheres, acknowledged since antiquity and maintained in various mysteries; a hidden Britain of the imagination; a refuge from modernity; a secret garden of inspiration where all the golden ages characterising Britain’s self-image can still be felt.

Folklore and Landscape: Environmentalism in England’s “Folkish” Fiction
by Lydia Waites at Lincoln Gothic Group

This idea and image of stories buried beneath our landscape exemplifies the inextricable connection between folklore and landscape; its intersection with literature and storytelling. Immersion in rural landscapes is central to many folktales and in particular to the folk horror genre, which is undergoing its own distinct resurgence. Myriad reasons for the current turn to folklore and the landscape in fiction have been identified by theorists across disciplines, ranging from social and political turmoil and uncertainty on a local and global scale, the rise of far-right nationalism (and resistance against this), and the effects of neoliberalism and late capitalism, particularly the climate crisis.

Music Criticism’s Lost Futures
by Mattie Colquhoun at Xenogothic

Fisher had very particular targets for his ire in the mid-2000s, most of which were the stunted offerings of zombified indie rock, epitomised by the Arctic Monkeys. But the specificity of Fisher’s considerations is ignored here, painting him as someone wholly out of touch with the moment he was living through. This, above all else, could not be further from the truth. Fisher already came in for critique, via Alex Williams in 2008, with regards to the viability of “good postmodernism” (self-aware postmodernism; hauntology), and how it wasn’t really all that different to the “bad postmodernism”, and he took this critique firmly on board. This is the discussion that accelerationism emerged from, after all, and Fisher took up the mantle and wrote about it regularly for the rest of his short life.

Resonant Architectures
by Anton Spice at Caught by the River

It is a grey Saturday morning in February 2025 and I have come to Bidston to spend a weekend with vocal collective NYX in preparation for the release of their debut album, whose synthesis of drone and electronic influences feels as though it is both recalling ancient spirits and ushering in new ones. The observatory is a forbidding structure in this light, its façade blackened by a century of industrial pollution rising up the hill from Birkenhead shipyard. As I wait to enter, I catch the uncanny strains of choral warm-ups reverberating through the thick stone walls.

Doctor Who is the best show ever made. Here's why.
by Ben Werdmüller at Werd I/O

In this piece, I will try and convince you that Doctor Who is the best TV show ever made, explain to you why it matters, and why it’s particularly important in our current context. In a time when cruelty and fear dominate headlines, it’s worth celebrating a show that insists on the power of kindness, intellect, and hope.

The Fascist, The Democrat, and the President
by Kevin Currie at Cathode Ray Zone

When your president quotes Napoleon approvingly on social media, it’s easy to be pessimistic about a lot of things: human nature; democracy; our ability to live together and self-govern. Can procedural democracy, with all of its potential limitations, properly check executive authority? Given that people can so easily become tribal, how does this fit with liberalism and its demand for tolerance? No matter how we romanticize it, will politics forever be a jockeying for power between conflicting interest groups?

AI Occult-Pneuminosity Notes
by Graham Freestone at the Centre For Experimental Ontology

The pneuminous theory suggests that vectors (objects underlying concepts) become at some level more like the concept they have been identified with. This is at a level often called magickal and results in phenomena of the synchronistic nature, rather than actual ontological transformation. Thus a mouse that looks like a stone and that is recognised as such might attract some mouse related activity to it, though the stone/mouse itself will not actually move or turn into a mouse (probably).

Renewal
by Chris at Uncountable Thoughts

I’ve been involved with wildflower meadow restoration in the Cotswolds for six years. There are many joyful aspects of this project, but the annual activity lifecycle provides structure to the year and a sense of renewal as each new season approaches.

Until We Meet Again
by Matthew Graybosch at StarBreaker

The plain fact is that when I was doing my best to keep it together and do my job while supporting my wife and getting over an illness of my own, nobody was there for me. Nobody human, at least. Most of my emotional support came from my cats. The rest came from listening to heavy metal. While I had gotten a couple of emails from online acquaintances, none of them knew what was going on, and I didn’t tell them.

Pan: The Great God's Modern Return
by Ian Holloway at Wyrd Britain

I've long had a quiet obsession with all things Pan, fed, over the years, by occasionally stumbling over another Pan based story or fleeting reference hidden in the pages of a supernatural anthology. Of late though I've been spoiled by a couple of exemplary books focussed on the goat-footed God, Michael Wheatley's excellent collection for the British Library's Tales of the Weird imprint, 'The Horned God: Weird Tales of the Great God Pan' and now this fascinating study of the history and the many reinventions of Pan in art, literature, music and magic.

35 letters to my brother
by Hannah Elizabeth Caney

It’s been 70 days since my brother died, I’ve written him 35 letters since, one for every year of his life.

The day he died I began writing him letters ending in a blind drawings of his favourite childhood toy (which has been treasured by my daughters for the last four years).

Directions for the limo driver
by Paul Graham Raven at Velcro City Tourist Board

Do you long for a more economically left-leaning paradigm of governance? Well, good luck with that; British readers may wish to recall the rallying of the autopoietic troops that attended even the partial prospect of a Corbyn government, while anyone reading from outside of the Global North (or whatever we’re supposed to call it this week) likely has a more local version of the same story. Do you long for a clear but gentle bending of the arc of economic history toward a mode less rooted in relentless extraction and consumption? Same—but I know it ain’t gonna come from me voting for it.