'Love Among the Shadowed Things' now on iTunes

Poetry, sound & music for 'Weird Tales for Winter', a collective radio series curated by Jonny Mugwump for his Exotic Pylon radio show on Resonance 104.4 FM

Now on iTunes

Broadcast January 31st 2010
Total playing time 30 minutes

Other featured artists contributing to the "hauntological dream project": Moon Wiring Club West Norwood Cassette Library and Matthew de Abaitua Dolly Dolly Belbury Poly and Lawrence Norfolk Radio Joy Mordant Music John Foxx

Featuring 'Snow':

Collin Kelley on 'Love Among the Shadowed Things'

"You simply must listen to (or download) Vanessa Daou's brilliant, Love Among the Shadowed Things, recorded for the Weird Tales for Winter show curated by Jonny Mugwump on UK radio station Resonance 104.4FM. Poetry, ghostly jazz, sinister choirs, footsteps, trains clacking on tracks, a needle endlessly circling the lead-out of a record and Vanessa's unmistakable voice -- it's like the soundtrack for a film David Lynch has yet to make. Brava!"

Collin Kelley

Weird Tales for Winter: Newsletter #10

Weird Tales for Winter: Newsletter #10

"I first encountered Vanessa Daou in the strangest of situations. I had been aimless and adrift for a few years in Manchester in the north of England. In fact, I'd been forced to abandon Manchester for the vacant industrial satellite town of Bolton as I made a final attempt at finishing a bachelors in Philosophy. A shopping centre had been opened- pure chrome and harsh electric light, a giant bunker, a 'designer' fortress dropped in the abandoned heart of Salford. The launch and subsequent management of the centre had been entirely botched so that my 10 hour shifts would involve contact with only 10 customers a day (and that was on a good day). Nobody ever showed. I spent nearly 2 years in a bleakly over lit trance- you see, I have my reasons for obsessing about Ballard.

There was a music store there specialising in discounted music- the usual array of budget classics, nothing unexpected- no surprises. One day, bored to the point of dementia, I wandered off my patch to leaf through the same cod’s just for something to do and this one fortuitous time, I found a new neon-blue artefact staring back up at me. Zipless by Vanessa Daou.

I recalled seeing something favourable about it in The Wire magazine. There was one copy, it looked out of place, surely some mistake... A collaboration between New Yorkers Vanessa and her then husband Peter with words adapted by Vanessa from Peter's aunt Erica Jong, Zipless is a beautiful trove of sublime erotic electronic pop. And as anybody who loves pop music knows, there can be more subversiveness in the space of a 3 minute adrenaline shot of pop than in vast swathes of avant-garde investigation. What gave the album an edge was the sheer surreal intimacy of Vanessa's voice and delivery- like an Yves Tanguy painting, every vocal shape seemed to take on an alien quality- strange and familiar all at once.

Cut to 2010, with a succession of always morphing productions exploring a weird ambient hinterland between pop, jazz, soul and electronica, Vanessa has moved into multimedia production, dance, computer coding and released her first self-produced album Joe Sent Me, a strange riff on the speakeasy that spirals into explorations of love and loss...

Tonight's penultimate Weird Tale is a gothic tone poem from a wintry New York City- a blurring of song, poetry, sound with her trademark intensely soft intimacy. You can check Vanessa's own web hub for the Weird Tales series here.

I look forward to joining you at the witching hour..."

jonny mugwump

Weird Tales for Winter & things that go Mugwump in the night

Weird Tales for Winter

airing Jan 25 - Feb 1 2010
every night at midnight


(tones by the time attendant)

WTFW newsletter #1

WTFW newsletter #2

Vanessa Daou: 'Love Among the Shadowed Things', new music & poetry for 'Weird Tales for Winter', a collective radio series on Resonance 104.4 FM, UK

Vanessa Daou: Love Among the Shadowed Things

Coming soon: New poetry, sound & music for 'Weird Tales for Winter', a collective radio series curated by Jonny Mugwump for his always mind altering Exotic Pylon radio show on Resonance 104.4 FM

Broadcast January 31st 2010
Total playing time 30 minutes

Other featured artists contributing to the "hauntological dream project":

Moon Wiring Club
West Norwood Cassette Library and Matthew de Abaitua
Dolly Dolly
Belbury Poly and Lawrence Norfolk
Radio Joy
Mordant Music
John Foxx

follow me on Twitter & Facebook & my new myspace poetry, sound & art site for updates, news & links

follow WeirdWinter on Twitter

full site pending - subscribe to exoticpylon for updates, images, resonances

radio's new paradigm_jonny mugwump & the exotic pylon

"I think that it's time for a new adult art."
Donal Kuspit

Neoteric realms of philosophy & sound, sonic streams-of-subsciousness, future-past sound wave vestiges, music's sublime resonances... Jonny Mugwump and The Exotic Pylon is equal parts accident and alchemy, a weekly "palette cleanser", War-on-Terror's sonic aftershock: a reflection, a recitation, a sonic projection on the scrim of our collective imagination.

"All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born." With these words, Yeats, in 'Easter, 1916', brings to life and reifies our awful suspicion that sometimes what is terrible lives alongside what is beautiful. Violence, terror, tragedy, catastrophe, have left past poets intrepid but disconsolate. Post-modernists have taken refuge in frivolity as a way of escaping hopelessness, but we are seeing the burgeoning of a new era of artists, museum goers and radio listeners have begun to reject Mass Media's rapacious maw for feel-good art and music.

"Categorization is not to be taken lightly."
George Lakoff, 'Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things'

A byproduct of the commodification of music has been its categorization. The silent edict is: if it doesn't fit, it doesn't fit in. This has led to a whittling down of choices for the consumer, a kind of creative censorship. What's left is the lowest common denominator, a homogeneity of sound which for the artist, hungry for newness and nuance, is at once fettering and freeing.

Since the forbidden cannot be suppressed - lessons learned from Storyville, Prohibition, the Recording Ban of the 1940s, and History's banned books - these constraints have historically been not a bane, but a boon for artists who are armed with the knowledge that what is hidden is, like all mysterious things, the most seductive, and inso being, the most desired.

"A number of artists to-day set out to create no more artworks. Instead they want to get out of the museum, and provoke modifications of the space of everyday life, giving rise to new forms of relations."
Jacques Ranciere, ' Aesthetic Separation, Aesthetic Community: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art'

"It's a question of the authority of things," says Anne Veronica Janssens. 'The Exotic Pylon' questions this authority, and takes refuge in the hybridity of contemporary experience, foraging Art, Philosophy & Radio history for context while forging a new sonic language. Beyond playing music, Jonny Mugwump is proposing a new perspective on the world, one that denies the doctrine of categorization. One listen to his show and you'll be jarred into the recollection that music is an Art that has the capacity to be sublime as well as subversive, and enlighten as well as entertain.

Like love and desire, the term 'sublime' refers to a feeling which by its nature cannot be defined; it is felt in the half-light, in the moonlight, both fearful and beautiful, it moves imperceptibly toward some intuited infinity, away from the known, part of a hidden continuum that with each generation keeps tuning in to a new auricular frequency.

Luke White writes about "the strange 'after echoes' ... of the idea of 'the sublime'..." Today's handful of Artists, Musicians, Poets and Sound Alchemists are shaping a new paradigm, a 'sublime' that can be digitized, widgtized, Googled, YouTubed, streamed and forever archived, a new sublime that is felt in the resonance of their 'after echoes'.

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Forthcoming interview with Jonny Mugwump + links tba