On the Journal of Psychick Albion

Cormac Pentecost’s latest issue of the Temporal Boundary Newsletter chimed with me in many ways.

For those who haven’t come across this newsletter before, Cormac runs Temporal Boundary Press, a small press that publishes a number of zines including Undefined Boundary: The Journal of Psychick Albion (in which, I should state in the spirit of full disclosure, I had an article of mine published last year), Man is the Animal: A Coil Zine, and Waiting For You: A Detectorists Zine, as well a couple of books (I’ve mentioned one of them—Albion's Eco-eerie by Phil Smith—here before).

The zine Undefined Boundary: The Journal of Psychick Albion has a lot in common thematically with the Rituals & Declarations zine that I used to publish 2019–2022, and Cormac’s definition of the term “Psychick Albion” is both useful and interesting:

The moment that set me on this path was my discovery of the phrase ‘Psychick Albion’. That term captured everything that I had been intuitively working towards previously, and set a template for how to explore it further. Psychick Albion refers to a state of mind and a specific location but it is important to emphasise that the conjunction of those two words allows the possibility of something much more expansive.

Cormac goes on to say later in the same issue of the newsletter:

To me, the idea of Psychick Albion is a continuation of Mark Fisher’s stillborn project of Acid Communism. Fisher died before completing his essay on Acid Communism but it is still well worth reading. Fisher had realised that one of capitalism’s greatest cons was in persuading us that it leads to much greater innovation, excitement and satisfaction than other economic systems.

Long term readers of this blog will probably already be seeing the connections between Cormac’s concept of “Psychick Albion” and my own Acid Renaissance series of artwork (which is why I presume that Cormac decided that my article about my artwork was a good fit for volume 2 issue 2 of Undefined Boundary: The Journal of Psychick Albion).

I need to start writing about my artwork and the ideas behind it again—something I used to do on this blog a lot—because I feel like it might help unblock my creative process, which has been fairly non-existent over the past few months. Maybe once I’ve got back into the habit of writing more about it here then I’ll test Cormac’s patience with another submission to the journal.