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Volcanic Tongue: A Time-Travelling Evangelist's Guide to Late 20th-Century Underground Music.
Volcanic Tongue presents the first ever collection of multi-award-winning author David Keenan's music writings. Keenan has been writing about music since publishing his first fanzine, inspired by The Pastels and by Glasgow (and Airdrie's) DIY music scene, in 1988. Since then, he has written about music for Melody Maker, NME, Uncut, Mojo, The New York Times, Ugly Things, The Literary Review, The Social and, most consistently, The Wire. Volcanic Tongue was also the name of the record shop and mail order that Keenan ran with his partner, Heather Leigh, in Glasgow from 2005-2015.
Volcanic Tongue features the best of his reviews, interviews and think pieces, with exclusive in-depth conversations between Keenan and Nick Cave, members of legendary industrial bands Coil and Throbbing Gristle, krautrock legends like Faust, Shirley Collins, the first lady of English folk, Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine, German auto-destructives Einstürzende Neubauten, as well as discographical analysis of the back catalogues of groups like Sonic Youth and musicians like John Fahey, extensive writings on free jazz and obsessive in-depth digs into favourites like Pere Ubu, Metal Box-era Public Image Ltd, Sun Ra, guitarist and vocalist John Martyn and many more. It is an essential addition to any music fan's bookshelf.
This first collection of his legendary criticism functions as an extended love letter to the revolutionary music of the 20th century and the incredible culture that sustained it.
Volcanic Tongue features the best of his reviews, interviews and think pieces, with exclusive in-depth conversations between Keenan and Nick Cave, members of legendary industrial bands Coil and Throbbing Gristle, krautrock legends like Faust, Shirley Collins, the first lady of English folk, Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine, German auto-destructives Einstürzende Neubauten, as well as discographical analysis of the back catalogues of groups like Sonic Youth and musicians like John Fahey, extensive writings on free jazz and obsessive in-depth digs into favourites like Pere Ubu, Metal Box-era Public Image Ltd, Sun Ra, guitarist and vocalist John Martyn and many more. It is an essential addition to any music fan's bookshelf.
This first collection of his legendary criticism functions as an extended love letter to the revolutionary music of the 20th century and the incredible culture that sustained it.
- GenresMusic
544 pages, Hardcover
Published March 6, 2025
About the author
David Keenan
26 books175 followersDavid Keenan is an author and critic based in Glasgow, Scotland. He has been a regular contributor to The Wire magazine for the past twenty years. His debut novel, This Is Memorial Device, was published by Faber in 2017.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
April 15, 2025
Evangelist is in the title and Keenan's writing here is largely celebratory. I'm already an acolyte so no great convincing is needed for me but these collected pieces are very enjoyable.
The musical artists in the book are visionaries. People who got there first or saw things differently. That's the unifying principal. I'm sure it's no accident that a lot of the same people appear across the articles through the span of time.
The musical artists in the book are visionaries. People who got there first or saw things differently. That's the unifying principal. I'm sure it's no accident that a lot of the same people appear across the articles through the span of time.
July 19, 2025
Simply excellent, poetic, music journalism from a lad who is pouring his love of the art straight onto the page.
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July 30, 2026For a year or two, a friend and I would alert each other to David Keenan appearances with 'Going to the cult meeting?' And yes, it probably helped that the launch for his magnificent Monument Maker was the closest thing to a club I'd attended in a year or more, thanks to the Event, but I do stand by his fiction. This collection of music writing, though...well, the launch did a pretty good deprogamming job. Cafe OTO had always been somewhere I was glad London had more than somewhere I much wanted to go myself, and boy, it did not prove me wrong with the special selection of acts that night. Yeah, maybe that saxophonist did work with Scott Walker, but solo he felt a lot like being in a Jazz Club sketch that went on far longer than The Fast Show would ever have allowed, and the others suggested an Experimental Club twist like that week they did Indie Club. But, my word, the looks we got when we giggled!
The suspicion of a spoof lingers when one starts reading, with subjects suffering Spinal Tap injuries like the guy who blows so hard he collapses a lung, or another who falls prey to a fatal massage accident. Extensive pieces offer guides to the vast discographies of acts I've never heard of, elucidated by reference to other acts I've never heard of, and it's not unlike reading The Ballad Of Buttery Cake Ass except with far fewer laughs, and more annoying writing. Keenan appears to be influenced mainly by the inferior, American strand of music journalism, so he talks about 'sides' and 'sets' a lot, capitalises genres that really don't need it like 'Improv' and 'Metal', sometimes gets into that really irritating habit of trying too hard not to repeat 'says' and, in the course of it, ends up with one interview where he repeatedly uses 'defers' to mean pretty much the opposite of what it does. Plus, regardless of their already questionable merits as artists, a lot of the musicians Keenan meets seem like absolute wankers. Frequently he's just indulging cantankerousness, incoherence and stoner muddle, but then when they do come out with a plain statement it can be worse, like one of Tortoise saying it's not as if Gore would have been much better. A position I remember being deeply annoyed with at the time, but all this way down the Dubya fork and with the planet burning...
Occasionally, through the infinite strange connections even an exhausted universe can now and then generate, the music Keenan likes and the music I like do match up, and I enjoyed the chats with Nick Cave and Bill Drummond but, come on, anyone can get an interesting article out of sitting down with either of them. Faced with a discography I do recognise, his takes are frequently identifiable as the sort I forgive in snotty youngsters but find trying in grown-ups: oh, nothing PIL did after Metal Box is worth bothering with? Yes, you're definitely the most post-punk, well done, have a lollipop. It's hilarious when, towards the end of the book, as part of corralling together a genre called hypnagogic (sorry, 'Hypnagogic') pop, he snookers himself into having to concede that Boys Of Summer is amazing. Between which, and said genre also encompassing Zola Jesus, I did give another act discussed, Vodka Soap, a go, and found the apparently key album quite pleasant as background music. But my goodness, attempting a second was a mistake.
So why did I persevere? Well, writing about music is always going to be other than a 1:1 match, to the annoyance of some. But those of us around for the last hurrah of the music press, and familiar with The Critic As Artist (the high point of critical theory before continental pseuds messed it up, come at me) know that sometimes that's a boon, if the writer is good enough: I get much more from reading Keenan's phrase "the sound of steel angel wings circling on tiny puffs of feedback" than I would from listening to the doubtless terrible Sonic Youth side project it's ostensibly describing. On one of the occasions the interviewees actually come across as having accessed something transcendent, instead of merely fried, New Jersey saxophonist David Ware (nope, me either) talks about somewhere all music exists at the same moment, and even if I don't want to listen to Ware, it still sheds a sidelight not just on that wonderful central scene in Sinners, but on one of the vast engines at the heart of Keenan's own Monument Maker. So even after all this, I guess count me as a lapsed member of the cult, rather than wholly free.
The suspicion of a spoof lingers when one starts reading, with subjects suffering Spinal Tap injuries like the guy who blows so hard he collapses a lung, or another who falls prey to a fatal massage accident. Extensive pieces offer guides to the vast discographies of acts I've never heard of, elucidated by reference to other acts I've never heard of, and it's not unlike reading The Ballad Of Buttery Cake Ass except with far fewer laughs, and more annoying writing. Keenan appears to be influenced mainly by the inferior, American strand of music journalism, so he talks about 'sides' and 'sets' a lot, capitalises genres that really don't need it like 'Improv' and 'Metal', sometimes gets into that really irritating habit of trying too hard not to repeat 'says' and, in the course of it, ends up with one interview where he repeatedly uses 'defers' to mean pretty much the opposite of what it does. Plus, regardless of their already questionable merits as artists, a lot of the musicians Keenan meets seem like absolute wankers. Frequently he's just indulging cantankerousness, incoherence and stoner muddle, but then when they do come out with a plain statement it can be worse, like one of Tortoise saying it's not as if Gore would have been much better. A position I remember being deeply annoyed with at the time, but all this way down the Dubya fork and with the planet burning...
Occasionally, through the infinite strange connections even an exhausted universe can now and then generate, the music Keenan likes and the music I like do match up, and I enjoyed the chats with Nick Cave and Bill Drummond but, come on, anyone can get an interesting article out of sitting down with either of them. Faced with a discography I do recognise, his takes are frequently identifiable as the sort I forgive in snotty youngsters but find trying in grown-ups: oh, nothing PIL did after Metal Box is worth bothering with? Yes, you're definitely the most post-punk, well done, have a lollipop. It's hilarious when, towards the end of the book, as part of corralling together a genre called hypnagogic (sorry, 'Hypnagogic') pop, he snookers himself into having to concede that Boys Of Summer is amazing. Between which, and said genre also encompassing Zola Jesus, I did give another act discussed, Vodka Soap, a go, and found the apparently key album quite pleasant as background music. But my goodness, attempting a second was a mistake.
So why did I persevere? Well, writing about music is always going to be other than a 1:1 match, to the annoyance of some. But those of us around for the last hurrah of the music press, and familiar with The Critic As Artist (the high point of critical theory before continental pseuds messed it up, come at me) know that sometimes that's a boon, if the writer is good enough: I get much more from reading Keenan's phrase "the sound of steel angel wings circling on tiny puffs of feedback" than I would from listening to the doubtless terrible Sonic Youth side project it's ostensibly describing. On one of the occasions the interviewees actually come across as having accessed something transcendent, instead of merely fried, New Jersey saxophonist David Ware (nope, me either) talks about somewhere all music exists at the same moment, and even if I don't want to listen to Ware, it still sheds a sidelight not just on that wonderful central scene in Sinners, but on one of the vast engines at the heart of Keenan's own Monument Maker. So even after all this, I guess count me as a lapsed member of the cult, rather than wholly free.
March 29, 2025
David Keenan deserves a full five stars for this collection of essays because it's rare to find a stunning novelist duplicate his talents in journalistic essays, and because the talents he brings to publications like The Wire, in which he has written about outsider music for several decades, place this collection in the realm of compiled works by authors such as Lester Bangs and Greil Marcus. However, the fifth star carries a caveat, which may be important to some: This is not a chronological history of the past 50 years of outsider music, and everyone is bound to find their own missing artists or changes in emphasis. Various noise and freak-folk strains can be difficult to follow in a serial manner, where one can choose a Sunburned Hand/Sun City Girls/Starving Weirdos thread, a Pelt/Keyhole/Jack Rose/Black Twig Pickers thread, a Throbbing Gristle/Psychic TV/Coil/Chris & Cosey thread, a Cage/Buchla/Derek Bailey thread.... well, you get the picture.
The maddening aspect of all this is that outsider music needs a detailed chronological history, and I'm not sure anyone (but Keenan, if he's willing to do it) is qualified to write one. Keenan in this instance may be as close as we get, and he's done a damned fine job from that perspective. I have worried for quite a while that collective memories of many of these scenes are fading, and except for obsessive collectors of obscure sub-genre works, there will be no one left to tell the tale. Because of this, even though Keenan's observations float at 30,000 feet and occasionally take deep dives in an apparently random manner, it gives the patient reader a good sense of decades of experimentalism going back at least as far as post-WW2, and occasionally even longer.
Yes, the infamous Brattleboro essay on "New Weird America" is here, as are expansive essays on critical personalities like Bill Orcutt and John Fahey. At times, the decision as to who and what to focus on seems partially based on what scene Keenan was able to attend, which is perfectly legitimate - the view of The Dead C based on a short European tour is a prime example. Sometimes, the focal point seems partially based on who his partner, Heather Leigh, might have been gigging with. In the case of a giant like Peter Brotzmann this is more than legitimate, but the number of pages devoted to Jandek (in whom I have but a mild interest), might be better served by longer essays on Jack Rose, Tom Carter, or Marcia Bassett (and the latter two are virtually absent from this book).
Keenan hints at certain questions that seem relevant to the noise scene, albeit almost unanswerable: Why did the 1980s give rise to TG spinoffs and castaways like Coil and Current 93? Why did the 1990s lo-fi world give us the great Siltbreeze roster of artists? Why did the prolific crazies of the early 2000s - Sunburned, Charalambides, Starving Weirdos - all seem to drop of exhaustion around 2010, with most released recordings falling by a factor of ten or more during that period? What was it about those decades that turned outsider music in those directions? In the final essays of Bill Orcutt, hypnogogic pop, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and "leaving meaning," Keenan pulls us tantalizingly close to an answer, but in the end, we have to draw our own conclusions.
Even assuming that a traditional serial chronological history of outsider music might be written one day, Keenan's essays are critically important for a reason that is hinted in his essay on William Basinski. Just like the deteriorating musical tapes Basinski was working on on Sept. 11, 2001, the knowledge of Deterioration Loops could pass from the scene. I have my own experience in this. The original CDRs Sunburned Hand released for their first 30 or so titles are deteriorating slowly over time, and now play only the first few tracks before fading into a sea of white-noise static. Over time, it's conceivable that all of Sunburned's works except the professional CDs and LPs could fade into background noise. At that point, we'd be left with only Keenan's collection of essays to remind us of a history that perhaps happened, or maybe not.
The maddening aspect of all this is that outsider music needs a detailed chronological history, and I'm not sure anyone (but Keenan, if he's willing to do it) is qualified to write one. Keenan in this instance may be as close as we get, and he's done a damned fine job from that perspective. I have worried for quite a while that collective memories of many of these scenes are fading, and except for obsessive collectors of obscure sub-genre works, there will be no one left to tell the tale. Because of this, even though Keenan's observations float at 30,000 feet and occasionally take deep dives in an apparently random manner, it gives the patient reader a good sense of decades of experimentalism going back at least as far as post-WW2, and occasionally even longer.
Yes, the infamous Brattleboro essay on "New Weird America" is here, as are expansive essays on critical personalities like Bill Orcutt and John Fahey. At times, the decision as to who and what to focus on seems partially based on what scene Keenan was able to attend, which is perfectly legitimate - the view of The Dead C based on a short European tour is a prime example. Sometimes, the focal point seems partially based on who his partner, Heather Leigh, might have been gigging with. In the case of a giant like Peter Brotzmann this is more than legitimate, but the number of pages devoted to Jandek (in whom I have but a mild interest), might be better served by longer essays on Jack Rose, Tom Carter, or Marcia Bassett (and the latter two are virtually absent from this book).
Keenan hints at certain questions that seem relevant to the noise scene, albeit almost unanswerable: Why did the 1980s give rise to TG spinoffs and castaways like Coil and Current 93? Why did the 1990s lo-fi world give us the great Siltbreeze roster of artists? Why did the prolific crazies of the early 2000s - Sunburned, Charalambides, Starving Weirdos - all seem to drop of exhaustion around 2010, with most released recordings falling by a factor of ten or more during that period? What was it about those decades that turned outsider music in those directions? In the final essays of Bill Orcutt, hypnogogic pop, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and "leaving meaning," Keenan pulls us tantalizingly close to an answer, but in the end, we have to draw our own conclusions.
Even assuming that a traditional serial chronological history of outsider music might be written one day, Keenan's essays are critically important for a reason that is hinted in his essay on William Basinski. Just like the deteriorating musical tapes Basinski was working on on Sept. 11, 2001, the knowledge of Deterioration Loops could pass from the scene. I have my own experience in this. The original CDRs Sunburned Hand released for their first 30 or so titles are deteriorating slowly over time, and now play only the first few tracks before fading into a sea of white-noise static. Over time, it's conceivable that all of Sunburned's works except the professional CDs and LPs could fade into background noise. At that point, we'd be left with only Keenan's collection of essays to remind us of a history that perhaps happened, or maybe not.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews