Liam O’Gallagher (1917-2007) was a painter, sound artist, writer, art teacher and spiritual seeker who was influenced by people as varied as Aldous Huxley, Hans Hofmann, Marcel Duchamp and Krishnamurti. O’Gallagher was a free-spirited and socially engaged artist, as much interested in crossing the borders between various art disciplines and art and life as in mystical experience and bringing about social change. He played an important part in the creation of foundations and centres for human growth, such as Feathered Pipe Ranch, The Ojai Foundation and the Beatrice Wood Center for the Arts. In the mid-1950s the studio that he shared with his life partner Robert Rheem in San Francisco’s Chinatown became a meeting place for writers and poets like Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman. O’Gallagher experimented with LSD in Mexico and psilocybin in San Francisco, where the experiment was filmed by Michael McLure. O’Gallagher’s collaboration with choreographer Anna Halprin resulted in ‘Ceremony of Us’ (1969), an encounter between African-American dancers from the Watts district of Los Angeles and Halprin’s own – primarily white – San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop. That same year his collection of concrete poetry ‘Planet Noise’ was published by Jan Herman’s Nova Broadcast Press. In 1970 and 1971 O’Gallagher conceived several experimental audio works involving the use of telephones, transistor radios, a found LP, cut-ups and traditional musical instruments, several of which were composed and broadcast live on radio. His ‘People’s Opera aka Aerosol / or the Computer That Couldn’t Hear: An Inter-Media Opera (1970)’ was released on LP by Jan van Toorn’s Slowscan label in 2014. You can order it now!

Sea Urchin has launched a series of slim editions dedicated to young and promising artists. The series is called THE BACON MIRAGE. The first edition contains drawings by RUTGER BLOM (1994) done between the ages of 14 and 18, most of them during various lessons at Rutger’s secondary school in Rotterdam. The Bacon Mirage #1 brings together this fine collection of school dirt for the first time. Only 30 copies available for retail.

The album Detroit Invasion documents Kim Fowley‘s last USA performance with a live band. In March 2012 Kim Fowley’s Psychedelic Dogs reunited friends who had met fifteen years earlier in Detroit during the making of Fowley’s ‘Michigan Babylon’ album. Matthew Smith (Outrageous Cherry) is one of the musicians who played with Fowley on both occasions,so are Troy Gregory and John Nash. ‘Detroit Invasion’ contains recordings at The Magic Stick in Detroit, The Polish Alliance Hall in Hamtramck, and in Matt Smith’s studio. The gigs and the studio session were memorable occasions, Smith remembers, and took place only a couple of days after Fowley had undergone cancer surgery in his hometown Los Angeles; cancer which would eventually kill him early in 2015.

Kim Fowley was the embodiment of rock ‘n’ roll as producer/songwriter of Gene Vincent, Them Belfast Gypsies, The Runaways, the Germs and many other musicians and bands, and as an outstanding improvisational solo artist himself. Fowley lived rock ‘n roll to the extreme and even managed to give his sickbed and deathbed a rock ‘n’ roll edge. ‘Detroit Invasion’ was Fowley’s last album. According to Cary Loren (Destroy All Monsters), who supplied the artwork and photos for the sleeve and released the album on The End Is Here, a first copy of the LP was sent to Fowley in hospital, where he died of bladder cancer shortly after.

This LP is a rock ‘n roll testament and a rock ’n roll jinx.