LISTEN ON SPOTIFY

LISTEN ON APPLE MUSIC

A collaboration between Turner-Prize winner Tai Shani, The state51 Conspiracy and Strange Attractor Press: a  beautiful  collection of music, image and text presented  across a fabulous cherry marble 12" vinyl wrapped in an arresting gloss sleeve,  stunning accompanying  hardback book and a very small number of folio prints.

The 40 minute album features a reading of the Shani's text by Molly Moody, backed with a captivating, hypnotic score for double bass and electronics by Maxwell Sterling.

Mastered by Rashad Becker.

The Neon Hieroglyph:  a series of painterly and poetic considerations on a feminized history of the rye fungus Ergot, the chemical basis of LSD, from the author of Our Fatal Magic.

From the cellular to the galactic, via Palaeolithic cave markings to the trace impressions left by drone photography on our mind's eye, incorporating dancing plagues, communist psychedelic witches, hyper-sexual fungi, chthonic descents, and skyward ascents, The Neon Hieroglyph weaves together a series of painterly and poetic considerations on a feminized history of the rye fungus Ergot, the chemical basis of LSD.

The Neon Hieroglyph constructs a house of lyrical reflections for our ghosts to inhabit, a place where the gothic and the hallucinatory collide, where gothic affect and fractal dread form a mausoleum for psychedelic specters. And also the Sun! The Sun is a ghost that haunts the night! Framed with new essays by artist and writer Caspar Heinemann and anthropologist Amy Hale, Tai Shani's The Neon Hieroglyph continues a journey into the post-patriarchal fictions that animated her first collection, Our Fatal Magic.

Sterling  and Shani have a shared specific sensibility when it comes to atmosphere. They have worked together on a number of projects over the years & there’s something in the tone of Sterling's sound which mirrors many things Shani is articulating through her texts and images. Along the process Sterling will often send some ‘sketches’ and Shani will write while listening to the compositions on repeat - in this way the tonal register of the music is also influencing the development of the text.