The Neon Hieroglyph
Tai Shani
80pp / 148mm x 210mm
9 colour plates
The Neon Hieroglyph is also available as a 12” vinyl
Limited hardback edition of 300 & artist edition of 50
Hardback / LP / Artist Edition
£22.00 / £20.00 / £375.00
With contributions from Amy Hale and Caspar Heinemann.
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We’ve teamed up with The state51 Conspiracy to co-produce Tai Shani’s mesmeric work of revolutionary pharmaco-poetics, The Neon Hieroglyph, in three editions, comprising a beautifully bound hardback book, an LP, and a hand-finished print folio.
The 40 minute album features a reading of the text by Molly Moody, backed with a captivating, hypnotic score for double bass and electronics by Maxwell Sterling (Warp Records).
For those who don’t want the vinyl LP a digital version of the Neon Hieroglyph album will be available to purchase separately via download.
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The Neon Hieroglyph collects a series of stories, loosely connected and even more loosely narrated. At times, more like dreams than tales. They are not strictly science-fiction, per se. Their settings in time and space range from the mystery cults of Ancient Greece to rural France in the mid-twentieth century. But the prose has the delirious quality that good sci-fi has. And listening to the stories narrated by Molly Moody on this new record from the State 51 Conspiracy, it feels like science fiction. Partly – not only – that is due to the electronic score by Maxwell Sterling, a sinuous, swirling soup of sound in which no timbre recalls any known solid body, and no pitch is ever quite stable. It is music that slurs and squelches, creating its own imaginary spaces and undoing them, erasing and unravelling them, in the same breath
- Robert Barry, The Quietus
Shani’s feminist recasting of the psychedelic genre rejects the heroic journey of the rugged individualist, reinjecting themes of communality and of psychedelically envisioned conditions of welfare and care.
- Amy Hale
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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 Paleolithic 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.
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About the author
Tai Shani is an artist living and working in London, UK. Shani’s artistic practice, comprising performance, film, photography and installation, uses experimental writing as a guiding method. Oscillating between theoretical concepts and visceral details, Shani’s texts attempt to create poetic coordinates in order to cultivate, fragmentary cosmologies of marginalised non-sovereignty. Taking cues from both mournful and undead histories of reproductive labor, illness and solidarity, her work is invested in recovering feminised aesthetic modes—such as the floral, the trippy or the gothic—in a register of utopian militancy.
In this vein, the epic, in both its literary long form and excessive affect, often shapes Shani’s approach; her longterm projects work through historical and mythical narratives, such as Christine de Pizan’s allegorical city of women or the social history of psychedelic ergot poisoning. Extending into divergent formats and collaborations, Shani’s projects examine desire in its (infra-)structural dimension, exploring a realism that materially fantasises against the patriarchal racial capitalist present.
