Alan Moore conceived of the material on this CD as "a fusion of Shamanic Magic and performance poetry." The hour-long monologue, a lively spectacle of intellect and creativity, was performed just once in London in 1994. Moore’s firm, articulate delivery is backed by an entrancing soundscape designed by David J (of Love and Rockets and Bauhaus) and Tim Perkins.

Moore begins in character as a carnival crier or mountebank, trying to raise an audience, beckoning passersby to attend the Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels and witness the extensive freak show and various horrors and magical wonders therein--all collected and displayed for our delight. This builds to an eerie mystical chant: "Wake the snake!" Then the curtain parts, and we are ushered inside.

With the reptilian agent of forbidden knowledge now quickened, tracing a magical ring around the audience, Moore unveils the backdrop for his show. Here, in a section of the monologue entitled "The Map Drawn on Vapour," Moore evokes London as a mental construct. Whole streets and neighborhoods are erected before the eyes of our collective imagination--a collage of art, architecture, history and geography. We see a city composed of morose and untamed detail, promising something greater than the sum of its cataloged parts:

"By Wapping Wall, I watched a human pelvis bob downriver--old, plaque-colored, flecked with algae and a fierce viridian rash. And there was nothing to be done. It looked like any other pelvis I have seen, a calcius outline sketch of Mickey Mouse's head. It turned and ducked and drifted then--drifts now in memory, mine, and your imagination. Twisting slowly through the cold suspensions at the river's edge, where pirates hung in chains until the tide stuffed their repenting throats with silt… The bone was tumbling like a dice at the conclusion of a long and rattling throw commenced with birth--crapped out, snake's eyes. The clumped weed clings to it, nostalgia for a lost pudenda. Swerves now, sinks, is gone. Leave it behind us, almost buried, jutting from the beds of sleep and recollection. Move on to the City Hypothetical, the virtual London scaped from essence where past schemes and mildewed visions show, old wallpaper behind a peeling present...."

From here our abstract survey of London develops into a wandering tour of personal, subjective histories, and the Theatre's first exhibits parade before us. We observe the carnage of Jack the Ripper in the Whitechapel district. We meet London underworld celebrities Ronnie and Reggie Kray and their henchman Tony Lambrianou, as well as Moore himself at work on a Channel 4 documentary / mystery play, and Princess Di suffering from a vague unease arising from London’s longstanding metaphysical turf warfare, a unresolvable feud between her namesake the Goddess Diana and Saint Paul, characterized here as a "proto-Mason" and "staunch misogynist," enemy of womankind.

Then we face "The Stairs Beyond Substance." By some magician's trick, everything we've seen now disappears--the walls of the carnival tent fade away. Our virtual London, "town of light," is replaced by a plane of pure thought, the infinite and perilous frontier of Mind which faces each individual subject who seeks to define the word "I." From here we proceed to the "Spectre Garden" and finally meet the main attractions, three chilling entities: the Enochian Angel of the 7^th Aethyr, the demon-regent Asmodeus, and the Roman snake deity Glycon. We have never before seen anything like this, ever.

When our hearts have stilled after the passing of these terrible beings, Moore relates to us "The Book of Copulation," and we witness reality as a product of magic-as-sex, and that in galactic proportion. Moore invokes quantum theory and semiotics in the service of magical consciousness, giving his audience one final glimpse at a form of the Unknown. Here is the infinite macrocosm. Reality springs into being from the jostling, doubled loins of a titanic archetype, a primordial beast with two backs. The slaves of an ageless dichotomy, dueling opposites, rage against their boundaries, defy their own definitions, threaten to cross essential boundary lines and invade the skin of their opposing partners. Subject and object, mind and body, consciousness and matter copulate with awesome ferocity and--cause meeting effect--give birth to a matchless wonder, this singularity we call Life. The idea… the hope of cosmic beneficence ("there is such a thing as a free lunch!") struggles with nihilistic materialism ("there is no such thing as magic"), leaving only one possible response: a desperate declaration regaining surprise-in-spontaneity each time it is pronounced: "I-love-you."

Finally the show comes to a close, ending with a musical finale, a song in praise of the London of our imaginations. Moore steps down from his role as darkling harbinger and, in the tone of a more propitious herald, declares, "Behold the town of lights."

* A selected bibliography of supplemental reading matter: "From Hell" by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, "Lights out for the Territory: 9 Excursions in the Secret History of London" by Iain Sinclair, "Inside the Firm" by Tony Lambrianou, "The Magus" by Francis Barrett, and--for added spice--"The Poetics of Space" by Gaston Bachelard. Films of related interest are Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell’s "Performance" and (provided you can find it) Chris Petit and Iain Sinclair’s "The Cardinal and the Corpse," this last part of a trilogy of made for the UK’s Channel 4.