The Seven Heads of Gog Magog

Sound works and blog, 2014.

Archived version of the website hosted by Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge is here: https://sevenheadsofgogmagog.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk

From 14th October to 4th November 2014, every Tuesday and Friday, self-styled poly-myth-storian EF Bausor (Paul Rooney pseudonym) uploaded seven mysterious recorded songs to a website. She named these recordings The Seven Oracles of Gog Magog. She also attempted to elucidate each of these songs in an accompanying blog post.

Bausor writes: “I call these tracks ‘oracles’ because they are premonitory or prophetic emanations that seem to have issued from – or through – seven objects, or ‘Seven Heads’, from museums in Cambridge. I call these objects The Seven Heads of Gog Magog. This may all seem a bit of a fanciful notion, but in the course of my blog I have attempted to comprehend what this idea could mean, primarily by engaging with the words of the oracles themselves. I request that you visit Cambridge and the seven museum objects in order to play each recording in their presence, new-creating the moment of the oracle’s original ‘utterance’. Each of my seven mythologically polymorphous blog posts does not reveal the ‘true’ meaning of each recording, rather it attempts to speculate on the nature of it’s enigma. With the help of my ‘beast-mates’ and the stories of Jane Ellen Harrison, Orpheus, Syd Barrett, Rat and Mole, TC Lethbridge and others, the blog as a whole explores the possibility of a return to a golden age of the ‘real gods’, and to life itself. The seven heads have spoken.” Thanks to EF Bausor, Kerry Devine, Spike T Smith, University of Cambridge Museums and Metal.

The sound works appear on the The Seven Heads of Gog Magog album The Seven Oracles of Gog Magog on Owd Scrat Records: https://owdscratrecords.bandcamp.com/album/the-seven-oracles-of-gog-mag…