“Satan has been the best friend the Church has ever had, as He has kept it in business all these years!” Thus wrote Anton LaVey in his The Satanic Bible in 1969. And how true that has been all through the centuries since that dire Church Council in Nice in 375 AD, when human decency and civilization took a considerable turn for the worse. Without the Devil as a terrifying scapegoat figure, the (mainly) Catholic Church would probably not have been able to secure its imperialistic ambitions. No wonder then that Satan as a visual icon in our Western mythology comes mainly from a Catholic culture. From the Church-organized morality plays of the middle ages for the analphabetic proles, with villains lavishly dressed up as devils, and up until the massive Satanic onslaught in French 19th century decadent culture, there’s always been only one protagonist that really matters: le Diable. Two recent books have focused on a very interesting phenomenon: stereoscopic visions of...

Who ever said that quantity is not a quality? The past months’ veritable floodgate of Breyer P-Orridge-related material deserves a closer look. Or are you perhaps already aware of all of these things? The publishing of First Third’s monumental memory lane volume Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, containing hundreds of images of Genesis in formal transition over the decades, is an impressive feat. Not only is the project as such highly interesting and revealing (transition and morphing being one of Genesis’ main tools of the artistic trade). It’s also such a beauty of a book, with standards of production worthy of a Steidl, Rizzoli or Taschen. The underground in an overground package, so to speak. Mind boggling stuff! Dais Records in New York recently released an LP with COUM Transmissions. This isn’t all music per se but recorded sounds from the COUM era. It’s a nice release, and a must have for completists of course (read: Industrial Culture philatelists)...

Taschen re-issues Peter Beard’s mega volume with some added material and of course it’s a feast for the eyes and the adventurous at heart. The American psychedelic multiversalist presents a life-loving tour de force that almost leaves you with a bad conscience for not having achieved as much as he has. Well, there’s still time to change that, of course. And this magnificent book provides ample inspiration. This is a heavy book, although it’s shrunk in size from the original Taschen mega bumper XXL size that required a special table back in 2006. Now you can actually keep it on your lap, which will ache after a while though. There’s something psychologically smart about that. Because if you take in everything at once, you’re likely to be utterly swamped. Peter Beard’s palimpsestic mind is a beautiful whirlwind of a filter that us normals best handle in adequate doses. This is also a heavy book in the sense that it encompasses a lifetime of...