You are hereby invited to a very special event taking place at Iklectik on Tuesday 19th September, where Ken Hollings and I will reunite as The Howling and celebrate the (un)official launch of our brand new album Incredible Night Creatures of the Midway with some brand new live material as part of this star-studded collective. See you there?
drøne, English Touring Opera and IKLECTIK present: Vox Interruptus
19 September 2023 | Doors: 7:30pm – Start: 8:00pm
Tickets: £10 adv / £12 otd – link here.
An evening of voice versus noise. Operatic soprano from Julia Marika alongside drøne (their UK premier), The Howling (Ken Hollings and Robin the Fog) talk trash over tape loops and distortions and Dale Cornish delivers south London keening in all its joy, horror and sadness. JTM is the overseas special guest – the mystery voice (What’s My Line for the 21st Century?) in this eclectic lineup.
Incredible Night Creatures of the Midway is the long-awaited sophomore album by THE HOWLING, that beguiling collision of text, tape and trash from the tangled minds of Ken Hollings + Howlround officially released 29th September on The Tapeworm’s sister label Wormhole. The album’s lead single, “veritable trash aesthetics checklist” and our first ever recording together: ‘David Gest, Liza Minelli, Michael Jackson and Elizabeth Taylor’ is out already, and comes as a free download when you preorder the album. Copies of the CD will also be available to purhase on the night – weeks in advance of its arrival in the shops!
The Howling is a collaborative project started by writer Ken Hollings and sound artist Howlround devoted exclusively to their shared love of text, audiotape and Trash Aesthetics. An intense collision of spoken word and analogue tape effects, The Howling provide the missing link between John Cage and Suicide. Their debut album All Hail Mega Force, released by The Tapeworm in 2022, was hailed by The Wire as a ‘mesmeric disorientation.’
One year later, and with some blistering live performances at Iklectik, The Horse Hospital and the British Film Institute under their belts, The Howling are back with a second album inspired by their passion for Trash Cinema. ‘Contents Warning’ pays tribute to the quantities of sex, horror and violence to be found in the genre as a whole, while ‘David Gest, Liza Minnelli, Michael Jackson and Elizabeth Taylor’ is a veritable Trash Aesthetics checklist.
Each of the remaining three tracks is devoted to a specific movie dear to The Howling’s hearts: The Skydivers is a deadpan exposition of a spectacularly lacklustre 1960s soap opera set on a California airfield, backed by the throbbing of a customised street rod engine; while ‘The Picture of A Picture of Dorian Gray’ is a pounding response to a 1970s Italian soft-core porn adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s classic novel. Finally, The Howling are joined by Beth Arzy of Jetstream Pony and composer/performer Ela Orleans for ‘Miss Frost Miss Leslie Miss Frost’, an exacting dismemberment of Miss Leslie’s Dolls, a creepy Florida-based slasher flick rumoured to have been produced with money smuggled out of Castro’s Cuba. We dare you to play it in the dark!
The whole package has been magnificently mastered by Steven McInerney with beautiful cover artwork by the great Stefan Fähler and design by Don Wyrm, so it’s really quite a team effort. Plus copy comes with a PDF download zine of the lyricas, so everyone can sing along!
Ken Hollings + Howlround = The Howling: ‘The First Name In Excitement!’
Robin The Fog 