Bureau of Lost Culture

This is the second part of our conversation with Joe Rush, the initiator, mentor, and driving force behind The Mutoid Waste Company, that extraordinary countercultural endeavour to turn the waste of our industrial civilisation into art, performance, street theatre - and a way of life.

If you haven’t heard the first part, you might want to start here:

https://bureauoflostculture.podbean.com/e/20th-century...

Beyond the official story, the myth, of the Second World War — its maps and medals, courage and sacrifice — there is another hidden narrative. Written in rare memoirs, or in letters and diaries never meant to be read by us, it tells of a kind of underground culture that was secret, transgressive, forbidden

With millions of young men and women on military service, the transitory nature of life under threa...

If you had been at the Glastonbury Festival in 1987,  you may have seen a familiar silhouette emerging in the dawn light  - upright monoliths arranged in a circle. Was it Stonehenge - magically transferred here across the Salisbury plain?

No, it was ‘Carhenge'- a circle of upright cars, their chassis standing like monoliths, the archaeology of the automobile age

And imagine ‘Tankhenge', a ...

In the heart of London’s Bloomsbury, behind a scruffy turquoise door, the world lies folded into drawers.

This is the second part of a conversation with Alaura O’Dell / Mistress Mix, formerly known as Paula P-Orridge.

In the first part, we traced Alaura’s journey from meeting the musician and cultural provocateur Genesis P-Orridge, as a 15-year-old schoolgirl in East London, to becoming a central actor in the underground art band Psychic TV and the occult network Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth (TOPY). 

Over the last century, the word Shaman has been embraced by artists, hippies, psychonauts and spiritual rebels.

In the 1960s and 70s, shamanism had become a kind of countercultural shorthand for altered states, secret, magical knowledge, and ways of seeing outside rationalism, capitalism, and institutional power.

Shamans appeared in underground books, on psychedeli...

For most of human history, the sea has been both a road and a riddle. It promises fortune and freedom — but it also swallows ships whole. And in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as Britain’s empire spread across ...

In early 1990s South London — a time when rave culture was mutating and London’s squats were pulsing with creativity, Aphex Twin, Global Communication, Nightmares on Wax, Autechre,Andrea Parker, Scanner — could be found DJ-ing and performing in spaces where a strange new sound-world was blooming.

This is the story of Telepathic Fish, the ambient afterparty scene created by the Openmind Collective. Telepa...

There are figures in counterculture whose names appear only in the margins of the story — whose influence is eclipsed, overshadowed, even dismissed, by more mythologised personalities.

Alaura O’Dell — known to many under her earlier name, Paula P-Orridge - is a musician, artist, occult practitioner, and was a co-conspirator in the band Psychic TV

For a long time, Alaura was described almost...

Tom Bolton went on an epic journey around the UK to explore the extraordinary, imposing locations in that landscape, from the 16 vast concrete cathedral...

When the filmmaker David Lynch died earlier this year, fans created shrines filled with coffee, doughnuts, cigarettes and blue roses; a level of spontaneous mourning more common for dead rock stars or royalty than filmmakers. His auctioned belongings sold for staggering sums, almost as if they were relics, showing how many people felt deeply connected to his work.

Why?

David was that unusua...

Penny Rimbaud , who has spent more than half a century living the ideals that most of us only talk about, has been described as an activist philosopher, an anarchist, a Zen Buddhist. Though he would likely not recognise those descriptions, he is certainly a poet, a musician, an artist.

Born Jeremy John Ratter in 1943, in the late 1960s, together with artist Gee Vaucher, he founded Dial House, an open com...

We walk the streets every day — and through parks, across squares and pavements and along beaches, and mountains, over 'The Commons' — without much thought for who really owns them.

These apparently public spaces have often been battlegrounds over public rights. From the rural enclosures that fenced off England’s open fields, through the city squares where protesters have clashed with police, to the gat...

Iceland is one of the last remaining Western countries where a substantial proportion of the population believes in the presence of other beings - The Hidden Folk.

For centuries, and until fairly recently, ghosts, revenants, trolls and elves were regarded as an integral part of everyday life. Their stories were shared during the long nights of winter gatherings, and they felt just as real to Icelanders ...

They called them the voices of the dead. Whispers in the static. Words in the hiss. Messages that—so believers said—slipped through the veil between worlds and onto magnetic tape

The story of Electronic Voice Phenomenon, or EVP begins in the late 1950s, when Swedish artist Friedrich Jürgenson was out in the countryside recording birdsong. On playback, he heard not only the birds but what he swore were vo...

Amongst its pages, there are many familiar names—Oscar Wilde, Quentisn Crisp, Sappho, James Baldwin, Freddie Mercury — but also many we might not expect: Florence Nightingale, Marlene Dietrich, Cary Grant, J. Edgar Hoover, Eleanor Roosevelt, Tchaikovsky, Greta Garbo, Richard the Lionheart, even Abraham Lincoln,  along with 1000 other stories of artists, generals, politicians, kings, despots and many more figures drawn...