David Keenan | |
|---|---|
 Keenan in 2019 | |
| Born | 21 April 1971 Scotland |
| Occupation | author |
| Notable works | This Is Memorial Device, For the Good Times, Xstabeth, Monument Maker |
| Notable awards | Gordon Burn Prize |
David Keenan (born April 1971) is a Scottish writer and author of four novels.
He used to run the Glasgow record shop, distribution company and record label Volcanic Tongue.
His work for The Wire (for whom he wrote from 1996 to 2015) was highly influential, helping to focus the magazine more towards coverage of new experimental rock, noise, folk, industrial and psychedelic music. His most frequently cited article is a cover story that appeared in the August 2003 issue entitled "New Weird America", where Keenan coined the phrase "free folk", later bastardised to include "freak folk" and "wyrd folk" and used to describe everyone from Jack Rose and Charalambides through Devendra Banhart.[ citation needed ]
In an August 2009 piece for The Wire, Keenan coined "hypnagogic pop" to describe a group of musicians whose work resembled "pop music refracted through the memory of a memory". His article incited a slew of hate mail that derided hypnagogic pop as the "worst genre created by a journalist". [1] Keenan became disenchanted with the movement once it homogenized with the mainstream. [2]
A 2009 quote of Keenan cited by Karl Shaw, reproduced in his article in Wall Street Journal (Review, 24–25 Sept 2011), on The Beatles: "The Beatles are the absolute curse of modern Indie music...my favorite Beatle is Yoko Ono; without Yoko's influence, I don't think there would be any Beatles music I could listen to." [3]
His debut novel, This Is Memorial Device (Faber, 2017), [4] won the Collyer Bristow Award for Debut Fiction [5] and was shortlisted for the 2017 Gordon Burn Prize. [6] His second novel, For the Good Times (Faber, 2019), [7] won the 2019 Gordon Burn Prize. [8] Edna O'Brien described reading his third novel, Xstabeth (White Rabbit, 2020), as "feel[ing] like being cut open to the accompanying sound of ecstatic music". [9] [10] His fourth novel, Monument Maker, was published by White Rabbit in 2021. [11] [12]
He is also the author of England's Hidden Reverse, a biography of Coil, Current 93 and Nurse with Wound. [13]
Yoko Ono is a Japanese multimedia artist, singer, songwriter, and peace activist. Her work also encompasses performance art and filmmaking.
Andrew O'Hagan is a Scottish novelist and non-fiction author. Three of his novels have been nominated for the Booker Prize and he has won several awards, including the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
Peter Paphides is a British journalist and broadcaster.
Nicholas Laird is a Northern Irish novelist and poet.
Benjamin Myers is an English writer and journalist.
Alan Clayson is an English singer-songwriter, author and music journalist. He gained popularity in the late 1970s as leader of the band Clayson and the Argonauts. In addition to contributing to publications such as Record Collector, Mojo and Folk Roots, he subsequently established himself as a prolific writer of music biographies. Among his many books are Backbeat, which details the Beatles' early career in Germany, Ringo Starr: Straight Man or Joker?, and biographies of Jacques Brel, the Yardbirds, Serge Gainsbourg and Edgard Varèse. Clayson has also contributed to The Guardian, The Sunday Times, The Independent and Rock 'n' Reel.
Psychedelic music is a wide range of popular music styles and genres influenced by 1960s psychedelia, a subculture of people who used psychedelic drugs such as DMT, LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin mushrooms, to experience synesthesia and altered states of consciousness. Psychedelic music may also aim to enhance the experience of using these drugs and has been found to have a significant influence on psychedelic therapy.
Canongate Books is an independent publishing firm based in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Gordon Burn was an English writer born in Newcastle upon Tyne and the author of four novels and several works of non-fiction.
Adelle Stripe is an English writer and journalist.
Gwendoline Riley is an English writer.
Anna Burns FRSL is an author from Northern Ireland. Her novel Milkman won the 2018 Booker Prize, the 2019 Orwell Prize for political fiction, and the 2020 International Dublin Literary Award.
John Rhys Harris is a British journalist, writer and critic. He is the author of The Last Party: Britpop, Blair and the Demise of English Rock (2003); So Now Who Do We Vote For?, which examined the 2005 UK general election; a 2006 behind-the-scenes look at the production of Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon; and Hail! Hail! Rock'n'Roll (2009). His articles have appeared in Select, Q, Mojo, Shindig!, Rolling Stone, Classic Rock, The Independent, the New Statesman, The Times and The Guardian.
Chillwave is a music microgenre that emerged in the late 2000s. It is characterized by evoking the popular music of the late 1970s and early 1980s while engaging with notions of memory and nostalgia. Common features include a faded or dreamy retro pop sound, escapist lyrics, psychedelic or lo-fi aesthetics, mellow vocals, slow-to-moderate tempos, effects processing, and vintage synthesizers.
Experimental rock, also called avant-rock, is a subgenre of rock music that pushes the boundaries of common composition and performance technique or which experiments with the basic elements of the genre. Artists aim to liberate and innovate, with some of the genre's distinguishing characteristics being improvisational performances, avant-garde influences, odd instrumentation, opaque lyrics, unorthodox structures and rhythms, and an underlying rejection of commercial aspirations.
David Szalay is a Hungarian-English writer.
Hypnagogic pop is pop or psychedelic music that evokes cultural memory and nostalgia for the popular entertainment of the past. It emerged in the mid to late 2000s as American lo-fi and noise musicians began adopting retro aesthetics remembered from their childhood, such as radio rock, new wave pop, light rock, video game music, synth-pop, and R&B. Recordings circulated on cassette or Internet blogs and were typically marked by the use of outmoded analog equipment and DIY experimentation.
Phyllis Bray was a British artist and illustrator known for involvement in the East London Group of artists, for the murals she produced and for illustrating children's books. During her career she also exhibited at the Royal Academy and at several leading London galleries.
Max Porter is an English writer, formerly a bookseller and editor, best known for his debut novel Grief is the Thing with Feathers.
Hauntology is a music genre or a loosely defined stylistic feature that evokes cultural memory and aesthetics of the past. It developed in the 2000s primarily among British electronic musicians, and typically draws on British cultural sources from the 1940s to the 1970s, including library music, film and TV soundtracks, psychedelia, and public information films, often through the use of sampling.
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