I was alerted to a series of lectures happening at the ICA over the next four weeks. The first one, about voodoo on vinyl, on is happening tonight and is alas already sold out. But the rest of the series also looks really interesting. It’s partly organized by Strange Attractor journal which I hadnt heard about till now – set up by Mark Pilkington in 2001, the latest issue is just about to come out. Amongst its pages you can “discover the secrets of madness in animals; voodoo soul and dub music; ancient peacock deities; Chinese poisoning cults; the history of spider silk weaving; heathen mugwort magic; sentient lightning; Jesuit conspiracy theories; junkie explorers; Dali’s Atlantis” etc. In short, it’s even more obscure than SHOOK and exactly the sort of offbeat, esoteric cultural marginalia that excites us… You can buy it here and book tickets for the ICA talks here. Here’s the list of events…

10 March – Stephen Grasso: Haunted Soundsystems

Writer and witchdoctor Stephen Grasso digs through the crates to present an overview of the influence of African Diaspora magico-religious traditions on music, from New Orleans jazz to JA dancehall.

17 March – Robert Wallis: Exorcising ‘Spirits’ – Animism, shamanism and Rock Art
Dr Robert J. Wallis, Professor of Visual Culture at Richmond University, London, talks about new thinking on shamans, animists and prehistoric rock art.

24 March – Eleanor Morgan: Spinning with spiders

Artist and researcher Eleanor Morgan examines the mythical and material entanglements between humans and spiders, incorporating the history of our use of spiders’ silk, the courtship and mating of spiders, and spiders’ attraction to human music and song.

31 March – Phil Baker: The Life and Legend of Austin Osman Spare

Artist, visionary and occultist, Austin Osman Spare’s career began in Edwardian celebrity and ended in Fifties obscurity. Spare’s biographer Phil Baker considers the success and failure of Spare, with special reference to demonology and interior decoration, and discusses Spare’s life, roots and obsessions, setting them against Victorian ideas about the power of the unconscious and the nature of familiar spirits.

7 April: Mark Blacklock: Charles Hinton, Pioneer of the Fourth Dimension

How Victorian Britain discovered the joys of multi-dimensional reality, and the man who brought it to them. Mark Blacklock is a writer and contributor to SAJ Four.

14 April : Dr David Luke – Psi, Mind and Time

Remembering the future and other anomalies from the annals of parapsychology: the forbidden science. Dr David Luke is President of the Parapsychological Association and a contributor to SAJ Three and Four.

21 April : Tom Bolton – London’s Lost Rivers

Over 20 rivers once ran through the city – where were they and what happened to them? Tom is the author of the forthcoming Strange Attractor Press book London’s Lost Rivers: A Surface Dweller’s Guide.

28 April : Amanda Feilding – Heartbeat in the Brain

In a rare presentation, Artist and activist Amanda Feilding discusses the long history of trepanation, from the neolithic to the present, including her own self-trepanation in 1970. Amanda’s film of her self-experiment, ‘Heartbeat in the Film’, has rightly achieved somewhat mythical status and will be discussed as part of tonight’s presentation.

5 May : Ken Hollings – Living in Space

The Welcome to Mars author on adaptations to life in space, with a live synthesiser soundtrack by The Asterism.

12 May: Antony Clayton – Legends of Underground London

From swine in the sewers, to cannibals on the tubes via Jack Cade’s cavern and the bunkers under the ICA – what lies beneath the city streets? Antony Clayton is the author of Subterranean City and The Folklore of London.

Weirding Modules

On 15 April Strange Attractor will also host Weirding Modules, a night of musical ensembles exploring inner and outer space, featuring Alexander Tucker Decomposed Orchestra, Amal Gamal Ensemble and Raagnagrok Allstars. More info on this coming soon.