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Talking In My Sleep
Orbital Operations for 27 April 25
Warren Ellis
April 27, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 10 minutes
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Hello from out here on the Thames Delta.
The next Orbital Operations will be on May 17th.
I need a bit of space to catch up, and, furthermore, the weather forecast just shifted and I’m going to get a week of sunlight and warmth. So I’m going outside.
This week, then, I’m sweeping up
In this letter:
Londonbound
Around And About
Observations
Bystanders Dreaming
LTD
Letters about the creative life by Warren Ellis, a writer from England. Was this forwarded to you? Subscribe here for free.
OUTDOORS
LONDONBOUND
On Friday, I went to London for the first time in over five years, and went to a gig for the first time in five years and two months. I can place that precisely: in February 2020, my partner and my daughter took me to an Amigo The Devil gig in Brighton for my birthday. A few days later, I posted my partner and her friend off to India for a few weeks, and they got home a day or two before lockdown one. All kinds of shit happened over the decade, and suddenly it was five years and I hadn’t been out. So when I saw Laura Cannell was playing at the Cafe Oto, I bought a ticket.
Got the train into London, and my god, they’ve changed all the trains on the Southend Victoria line. Whole new rolling stock. I started to feel like I’d emerged from suspended animation into the future. Got to London, walked up to Spitalfields to the expensive dinner I’d booked for myself. Now, here’s a thing most of you won’t get, but “expensive dinner in Spitalfields” is not a sentence we used to type. Come out of Liverpool Street Station, turn left just past the Bishopsgate Institute, walk straight up Brushfield Street. See the white spire of the haunted Christ Church Spitalfields built by Hawksmoor?
FROM HELL, Alan Moore & Eddie Campbell
Head towards that. That’s on Commercial Street. Get to the corner and look to your left. There’s the Ten Bells pub, where Jack the Ripper’s victims all drank. It’s been a shithole for a hundred and fifty years. But now it has been heavily gentrified. To the point where I saw a sign over a food place reading WE DIDN’T GENTRIFY SPITALFIELDS SO YOU COULD MICROWAVE YOUR DINNER.
Only one thing remains the same. You still can’t get a fucking cab out of Spitalfields. So I had to break the habit of a lifetime and Uber out to Dalston, which I hate doing. I taught my daughter two things about London cabs - if at all possible, always use a proper Hackney carriage, and always tip your cabman. But it turns out London cabbies still avoid Spitalfields like the plague. I’m still disgusted with myself.
The Cafe Oto has taken out a lot of its seating, and I grabbed the corner of a wooden block that turned out to be next to some toilets that weren’t in use last time I was there. It seemed to me that the rest of the audience was on diuretics, because that door was banging every fifteen seconds throughout the entire night, during all the performances. And, of course, chatting away and using their phones while people were playing music.
The night started with Jennifer Lucy Allan, author and BBC Radio 3 presenter, playing some records. I heard something new that was so striking that I had to go and ask her what it was (this is why we carry notebooks, folks).
Silvia Tarozzi - turns out I knew her work, because she played on OCCAM OCEAN 3.
Silvia is a violinist, composer and improviser. The oral transmission of music and the form created through a deep immersion into the sound are traits of her musical research and find expression in several collaborations with composers as Éliane Radigue, Pauline Oliveros, Pascale Criton, Cassandra Miller, Martin Arnold, Pierre-Yves Macé, Philip Corner.
Her releases are listed with links on her website here.
Lucy Gooch was the support, and, live, she occupies a space roughly around Julianna Barwick, mid-period Cocteaus and early solo Bjork. Here’s her Bandcamp page. She builds up layers of looped vocals like Barwick, but colours it all with electronic sound, some of which arrives in bitter stormclouds. Fascinating.
The main event, as I say, was Laura Cannell. There was a moment in the middle where she conjured a hauntedness I’ve only ever experienced live before in a Philip Jeck performance. But different. This time it was ancient music, an early wind instrument and the front of the audience humming a single drone note. Cannell walked around, playing her instrument into different spaces of the room, and there was a sense of slipping back into the past, or the past reaching back out for us through ritual performance.
An acquaintance sent me a text afterwards saying “It can be nice out there.”
ORBITAL
AROUND AND ABOUT
Renowned comics artist Tyler Jenkins is looking for new projects. You can contact him via his X. He’s done too many major pieces to count, but I would specifically call out GRASS KINGS and HAIRBALL.
The LOVECRAFT INVESTIGATIONS: CROWLEY audio drama Kickstarter from Julian Simpson and his team goes live in four days.
Friend of the newsletter Ed James has a new novel out in his DI ROB MARSHALL crime series. It’s one of the stronger ones in the run. Which is saying something because there are no bad novels in this sequence.
Friend of the newsletter Raven Belasco has a new short story up on Amazon. She writes dirty historical vampire stories in an extremely relaxed, conversational and fluent way.
Now: THE DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT audio drama podcast, DESOLATION JONES: THE BIOHZARD EDITION, THE STORMWATCH COMPENDIUM. 2025: FELL: FERAL CITY new printing, THE AUTHORITY Compact Edition, the LIGHTS OUT Anthology.
OBSERVATIONS
OTHER
BYSTANDERS DREAMING
Ben Percy’s got another novella coming out from Neotext, hot on the heels of the excellent HUMAN BULLET.
Our first instinct these days is not to run into the burning house or stop the fistfight on the plane or check on the person who fell down the stairs—it's to pull out our phones. It's to record.
When a group of college students witnesses something terrible, they do the same. But upon reviewing the videos later, they discover something has glitched and bled through their phones. Something that looks real. But can't be. A vision of their own individual deaths—dark prophecies they may or may not be able to avoid.
Out on May 6th, digital only, read all about it here.
I never got around to reading ALBION DREAMING, and I saw the other day that the excellent Psychedelic Press is releasing a revised edition.
Doctors believed LSD was a panacea for disorders of the mind. The Secret Intelligence Services and Ministry of Defence were confident they could harness the drug's powers for interrogation and the battlefield. Countercultures celebrated acid as not only a hotline to spiritual experience, but also a wonderland of the senses. Governments decried it. LSD remains protean.
Andy Roberts' Albion Dreaming tells the extraordinary story of how LSD helped shape British society and culture since its introduction in the early 1950s. First published in 2008, this new and revised edition benefits from the author's many years of continued research into psychedelic history and the addition of several appendices.
So I guess I have no reason not to read it, maybe next to a re-read of STORMING HEAVEN.
Here’s the publisher page, and it’s probably gonna be available elsewhere.
A little late, but I only just saw this: Halloween Songs: Professor Elemental & Tom Caruana - Tales Of Wrong (Dir. Jenny Handorf).
GOT MORE TIME?
LTD
Morning Computer: some useful things first thing in the day
Nine Bells: evening notes.
And a bunch of other bits and pieces you may like.
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Okay, my main whiteboard has almost no space on it and the Pending board is filling fast, so I need to get down to work and finish clearing the place up. I’ll see you soon. Look after yourself.
W
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