Incredible Night Creatures of the Midway

The Howling is a collaborative project started by writer Ken Hollings and sound artist Howlround devoted exclusively to their shared love of text, audiotape and Trash Aesthetics. An intense collision of spoken word and analogue tape effects, The Howling provide the missing link between John Cage and Suicide. Their debut album All Hail Mega Force, released by The Tapeworm in 2022, was hailed by The Wire as a 'mesmeric disorientation.'

One year later, and with some blistering live performances at Iklectik, The Horse Hospital and the British Film Institute under their belts, The Howling are back with their second album release. Inspired by their passion for Trash Cinema, Hollings and Howlround have come up with Incredible Night Creatures of the Midway, which celebrates some of their favourite exploitation movies. 'Contents Warning' pays tribute to the quantities of sex, horror and violence to be found in the genre as a whole, while 'David Gest, Liza Minnelli, Michael Jackson and Elizabeth Taylor' is a veritable Trash Aesthetics checklist. Each of the remaining three tracks is devoted to a specific movie dear to The Howling's hearts. 'The Skydivers' is a deadpan exposition of a spectacularly lacklustre 1960s soap opera set on a California airfield, backed by the throbbing of a customised street rod engine. 'The Picture of A Picture of Dorian Gray' is a pounding response to a 1970s Italian soft-core porn adaptation of Oscar Wilde's classic novel. Finally, The Howling are joined by Beth Arzy of Jetstream Pony and composer/performer Ela Orleans for 'Miss Frost Miss Leslie Miss Frost', an exacting dismemberment of Miss Leslie's Dolls, a creepy Florida-based slasher flick rumoured to have been produced with money smuggled out of Castro's Cuba. We dare you to play it in the dark!

Ken Hollings is a writer and broadcaster. His work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, and he has written and presented critically acclaimed features for BBC Radio 3, BBC Radio 4 and Resonance 104.4 FM. His books include Welcome to Mars, The Bright Labyrinth, The Space Oracle and Inferno all available from Strange Attractor/MIT Press. His latest book for them is The Trash Project Volume Two: Purgatory.

Howlround was founded by sound designer and radio producer Robin The Fog in 2012 to create recordings, performances and installations entirely from manipulating magnetic tape on a quartet of vintage tape machines, with all additional effects and artificial reverb strictly forbidden – a process that has been described by Electronic Sound magazine as 'conjur[ing] magic'. Several albums later, his initial attempts to become a 'one man Radiophonic Workshop' have morphed into using closed input tape-loops to create blistering noise and primitive techno, which is quite a long way from where he started.