Cyclades

Limited edition of 47 hand numbered copies. Comes in a plastic bag with vinyl sticker cover and 7 A5 cards plus small insert advertising deluxe edition of this release.

 

Info by John Smith via https://siderealpressxtras.blogspot.com/2020/05/interchange-magazine-interchange-was_28.html

As I have stated elsewhere in my posts, Ward Phillips was the vehicle of my own musical offerings. I was very keen to distance my musical work from the magazine mainly because I liked the idea of the project being anonymous and that nobody I knew would feel obliged to say that they liked (or of course hated) it.      As I hope it is obvious, the name (and the titles) reflected my obsession with the life and works of the American author HP Lovecraft, Ward Phillips being one of Lovecraft’s own pseudonyms.      Lovecraft was undergoing something of a revival at the time and a number of artists were inspired by his work; for example there was Cthulhu records in Germany, the Uncommunity were producing cassettes directly inspired by the author and Coil’s own label Threshold House was a reference to him. Their record logo was designed by a member of an occult/literary group called the Esoteric Order Of Dagon which drew members (including myself) from a number of disciplines and was loosely associated with both the Typhonian and Chaos schools of Magick - which I also was involved with, either personally knowing members or by writing to them.      Lovecraft also had more personal resonances with myself and a number of my friends. For was he not, like ourselves, a gentleman of independent but impoverished means (we were unemployed or on student grants), nocturnal, a person who railed against contemporary society and it’s destruction of the old, and an author whose works were permeated with the unusual and bizarre? It is thus hardly surprising that his influence permeated my music.      Of the sound sources themselves I still prefer to say very little other than that locational ambience was important, and instead offer this contemporary (but I believe unpublished) sheet that I probably prepared as ‘publicity,’ though I don’t think I ever actually did any. The ’studio’ I mention was my living room. The illustration that accompanies it was a piece of ‘automatic painting’, a subject I was inspired to try after seeing the works of the Surrealists and especially those of the artist/occultist Austin Osman Spare. A few other pieces of mine are reproduced as part of the cassette package. My current book project Side Real Press is also a nod to Spare and its logo another piece of automatic artwork.