MacGillivray launches ‘The Nine of Diamonds: Surroial Mordantless’ with Special Guests Damian Le Bas, A.R. Thompson, Niall McDevitt and with music by Teleplasmiste.

7PM - 9PM TICKETS £5 on the door

MacGillivray is a poet and musician who is published by Bloodaxe. A recent nominee for the Scottish New Performer Awards, she has released seven albums and in this event launches ‘The Nine of Diamonds: Surroial Mordantless’, a surrealistic book in nine parts in which she plays back the ‘butcher’ or the Duke of Cumberland. Currently working on a Gaelic album for electric autoharp, MacGillivray’s recent work has appeared on BBC Radio Scotland and SPILL Performance Festival and she will be reading at the Edinburgh International Book Festival this year.

Damian Le Bas is a writer from the chalk downs and flint shores of Sussex, a tiller of high hill paths, a Romany speaker and writer and an atavistic neopagan poet. He has just spent a couple of years living in old Gypsy stopping places in the back of a Transit van, and is writing his first major book about the experience, 'Stopping Places', to be published by Chatto and Windus in Spring, 2018. Damian is looking forward to reading a couple of short, wyrd, candlelit bits of this book at the Horse Hospital - a very first public airing.

Writer A.R.Thompson will be reading excerpts from his forthcoming novel ‘GreyWater’, following a series of nights ‘Underground City’ he recently curated in Edinburgh. As writer in residence for the live art ‘Parlour Collective’, Thompson has written on acts performed in Norway as part of the Kunstbanken Biennale, Hamar, the Freud Museum and the House of Dr. Johnson. He has read at the Royal College of Art and a contributed to a psycho-geographic walking of tour of Pound and Woolf’s London. www.arthompson.org.uk

Niall McDevitt is the author of three poetry collections, b/w (Waterloo Press, 2010), Porterloo (International Times, 2013) and Firing Slits, Jerusalem Colportage (New River Press, 2016). His recent walking explorations of the poetic history of London have included Chaucer, Marlowe, De Quincey and David Gascoyne. Having performed at the Babylon Festival in Iraq in 2016 he is currently working on modern adaptions of ancient Babylonian poems. poetopography.wordpress.com

Teleplasmiste are Mark O Pilkington and Michael J York whose music explores the sounds of nature and electricity through a combination of vintage and contemporary synthesisers and acoustic pipes, extending the ‘heavy ambient’ continuum of minimal and kosmische musics that includes Kluster, La Monte Young, Tangerine Dream, Conrad Schnitzler, Coil and Lichens.