The M.O.P. Radionic Workshop

Teleplasmiste will be performing at this year’s Leigh Folk Festival, and also participating in Justin Hopper’s audio-visual feast of music and folklore, I Made Some Low Inquiries. Tickets are free. More info here

Churchtown is happening again, and Rainbow Unit, Urthona’s West Country acid wonk alter ego, will once again be playing live, along with many other great performers and DJs. This is a private event so contact me if you would like more details.

I’m baaaaack!!
After almost a couple of years of inactivity – largely due to feeling too busy to update this page and also being brainwashed by Facbok – I’ve realised that it’s best not to rely on that particular system to keep you informed of what I’m up to, and am thus reclaiming the relative independence of a blog.

If you’re new – hi! While there may be occasional writings up here, it’s mostly a place to keep track of events, gigs, talks and suchlike that I and friends are doing, though I won’t generally be including Strange Attractor work as that’s well covered elsewhere.

For the time being it’ll largely be detailing the activities of Teleplasmiste, my synthesiser and wind duo with Michael J York, as we have a number of gigs planned over the next few months.
So watch this space….

A special, extended 2-disc version of the film is now available on DVD for only £10!

It includes the full length feature, an 8-page booklet with essays by the filmmakers on ‘The Genesis of Mirage Men’, ‘Tricksters, Saucers and Cyber Magicians’, ‘The Enigma of Richard Doty’ and ‘The Unreliable Narrator’, plus over an hour of previously unseen additional material, comprised of 22 short films giving background history, extra interviews and an exclusive Urthona music video.

Buy it here!

Magic, Deception & The Abuses of Enchantment
The London Fortean Society
Thursday 29 May 2014
The Vaults Bar, Dirty Dicks, 202 Bishopsgate, City of London EC2M 4NR
8pm (doors 7.30pm)
£3 / £2 concessions

In an epilogue of sorts to Mirage Men, Mark looks at two formerly secret documents, published six decades apart, that reveal the methodologies of psychological manipulation and deception practised by American and British intelligence services. The Art of Deception, Training for a New Generation of Online Covert Operations, an internal presentation for the UK’s GCHQ, was leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden earlier this year, while The Exploitation of Superstitions for Purposes of Psychological Warfare was published by USAF’s RAND Corporation in 1950.

The similarities between the two papers demonstrate that while the world we live in has changed dramatically in the intervening years, the human mind, and the techniques for manipulating it, have remained very much the same; both papers discuss the exploitation of belief systems and fortean phenomena.