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Volcanic Tongue: A Time-Travelling Evangelist’s Guide to Late 20th-Century Underground Music
Not yet published
Expected 2 Jun 26Volcanic 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, Paperback
Expected publication June 2, 2026
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157 people want to read
About the author
David Keenan
26 books166 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 - 3 of 3 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.
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.
July 19, 2025
Simply excellent, poetic, music journalism from a lad who is pouring his love of the art straight onto the page.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews