Catalogue of contemporary artistic Ironwork accompanying the 2019 exhibition Meta-Formation: Experiments and Rituals. Curated, compiled and edited by Rachel David. Contributors and artists include Andy Cooperman, Sarah Darro, Hoss Haley, Daniel Miller, Jeffrey Funk, Monica Coyne, and Patrick Quinn. 30 North American and International artists represented.

This is the first extensive scholarly study of drone metal music and its religious associations, drawing on five years of ethnographic participant observation from more than 300 performances and 74 interviews, plus surveys, analyses of sound recordings, artwork, and extensive online discourse about music. Owen Coggins shows that while many drone metal listeners identify as non-religious, their ways of engaging with and talking about drone metal are richly informed by mysticism, ritual and religion. He explores why language relating to mysticism and spiritual experience is so prevalent in drone metal culture and in discussion of musical experiences and practices of the genre. The author develops the work of Michel de Certeau to provide an empirically grounded theory of mysticism in popular culture. He argues that the marginality of the genre culture, together with the extremely abstract sound produces a focus on the listeners' engagement with sound, and that this in turn creates a space for the open-ended exploration of religiosity in extreme states of bodily consciousness.

This volume documents and evaluates the changing role of fibre crafts and their evolving techniques of manufacture and also their ever-increasing wider application in the lives of the inhabitants of the earliest villages of the Ancient Near East.

The fifth and fourth millennia BCE saw major cultural changes in the southern Levant and Northeast Africa: the spread of agriculture; developments in animal husbandry; increased contact between cultures; and the use of alloy bronze. 'Metal, Nomads and Culture Contact' integrates archaeological data from across the Chalcolithic period to contextualise these changes. The book examines the introduction of metal to the southern Levant, Egypt and Lower Nubia and the role of pastoral nomadism in cultural interaction and exchange. 'Metal, Nomads and Culture Contact' will be valuable to scholars of archaeology and anthropology.

"David Conway is the most powerful and distinctive writer of horror fiction since Clive Barker ... " -- Grant Morrison, Arkham Asylum, The Invisibles, The Filth. " -- An authentically Lovecraftian marriage of contemporary science and the cosmic ... " -- Ramsey Campbell. "Metal Sushi drags HP Lovecraft's piscatorial congeries squirming and thrashing into Blade Runner dystopia to tremendous effect ... " -- John Coulthart, World Fantasy Award Winner, Lord Horror, Reverbstorm, Hardcore Horror. "In Metal Sushi Conway treats the unification of Gothic and science fictional impulses as a chimerical marriage with the potential to produce an unprecedented new form ... " Mark P Williams, Gothic Science Fiction: 1980-2010. "Like a hybrid monstrosity spawned from an unholy alliance between William Burroughs, Ignatius Loyola and the Marquis de Sade, David Conway's stories will take you to a dimension of absolute nightmare ... " DM Mitchell, A Serious Life, The Seventh Song of Maldoror

The exotic and impressive grave goods from burials of the ÔWessex CultureÕ in Early Bronze Age Britain are well known and have inspired influential social and economic hypotheses, invoking the former existence of chiefs, warriors and merchants and high-ranking pastoralists. Alternative theories have sought to explain the how display of such objects was related to religious and ritual activity rather than to economic status, and that groups of artefacts found in certain graves may have belonged to religious specialists. This volume is the result of a major research that aimed to investigate Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age grave goods in relation to their possible use as special dress accessories or as equipment employed within ritual activities and ceremonies. Many items of adornment can be shown to have formed elements of elaborate costumes, probably worn by individuals, both male and female, who held important ritual roles within society. Furthermore, the analysis has shown that various categories of object long interpreted as mundane types of tool were in fact items of bodily adornment or implements used in ritual contexts, or in the special embellishment of the human body. Although never intended to form a complete catalogue of all the relevant artefacts from England the volume provides an extensive, and intensively illustrated, overview of a large proportion of the grave goods from English burial sites.