Volcanic Tongue: A Time-Travelling Evangelist’s Guide To Late 20th-Century Underground Music
David Keenan
White Rabbit Hbk 544 pp

David Keenan is now known primarily as a novelist, but those with longer memories will be familiar with his role as an influential music writer and particularly his stint as a regular Wire contributor from the mid-1990s to 2015. This collection presents a swathe of his favourite features, extended reviews and think pieces, mostly written for The Wire, plus a few other scattered missives, with the latest from 2021.

Volcanic Tongue was also the name of the record shop and mail order service Keenan ran out of Glasgow together with Heather Leigh from 2005–15, which served as a vital outlet for alternative music located deep underground. The nod to time travelling in the book’s subtitle could be another name for nostalgia for that fertile period.

One major theme is an enthusiastic appreciation of noise music, which Keenan identifies as “a formula for resuscitating rock”. An extensive Primer locates noise’s origins in Throbbing Gristle and Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music, while other pieces focus on later practitioners such as Hair Police. Indeed, while genres like free jazz, improv and English folk are explored, these can be seen as loci of aesthetic elements that fed directly into noise and adjacent early 21st century underground musics. Along the way, there are some highly entertaining character studies of major figures associated with these tributaries: Jandek the unreliable trickster; a grizzled and forthright Peter Brötzmann; Shirley Collins as indefatigable earth mother; David S Ware the warily ecstatic visionary; Derek Bailey’s desert-dry wit; Marshall Allen’s cosmic hoodwinking.

Several artists are described as pursuing a “hermetic” artistic vision, and Keenan is an insightful guide in breaching these hitherto impenetrable worlds. There’s a sense here of peering into and decoding occult workings, and some of this volume’s most arresting writing leans more heavily into that idea. In Ellen Fullman’s Through Glass Panes “the nebulous depths of a scratchy 78 are reimagined as a black scrying mirror”. Pocahaunted generate “transformative gateways personal enough to allow direct access to subconscious states and dormant personas”.

The apotheosis of this impulse is found in Keenan’s daringly straight-faced proposal of hypnagogic pop as a post-noise development using drone, improvisation and tapes as means to effect time travel. James Ferraro and Spencer Clark, quoted at length, offer gloriously overblown gnomic pronouncements while struggling to conceal their tongues in their cheeks: Ferraro’s claim that membership of the first church of Lenny Kravitz in West Hollywood is enabling him to access alternative states of consciousness takes some beating.

In scene reports like this, Keenan’s considerable mythopoeic gift is given free rein. His 2003 Wire feature on the Brattleboro Free Folk Festival, which coined the term New Weird America, positions a loose network of artists including Sunburned Hand Of The Man and Six Organs Of Admittance as a Pynchon-esque cell of ragtag resistance to bludgeoning monoculture with irresistible countercultural allure.

Volcanic Tongue is, in many ways, an unapologetically old-fashioned endeavour – and not just in its manifestation as a sizeable hardback artefact containing writing that is not too hard to find online. Though Keenan claims never to have thought of himself as a rock critic, his marrow-deep love for the music bursts forth. In a memorable phrase, he describes rock ’n’ roll as “breathless yea-saying” – a term that could just as easily be applied to his own generous ebullience.

This review appears in The Wire 494 along with many other reviews of new and recent records, books, films, festivals and more. To read them all, pick up a copy of the magazine in our online shop. Wire subscribers can also read the issue in our online magazine library, where they can also browse all the articles David Keenan contributed to the magazine.