Folklore of Plants Vol.II - The Venefic Garden

-Created by Sam McLoughlin
-Ten-inch record in reverse board sleeve
-Features in-depth essay
-Limited edition of 250

"Perhaps the best knowledge of antidotes lies not in any enchanted balm or chemist's receipt, but in the balanced and proper Devotion to Fear" Daniel A. Schulke.

Following on from the collective garden of earthly delights cultivated on the Folklore of Plants Vol.I...its time to wind down the path into a lesser spotted, shadier but no less verdant herbarium of poisonous wort.

Unlike the relatively safe visionary plants popular today these venefic plants lie on the border of hallucinogenic drug and fatal poison. During the medieval period their uses were numerous: as medicines, as recreational drugs, as weapons of physical and psychological harm and most interestingly - as potent agents of magic and divine knowledge. Their use is known to have formed the basis of many marginal folk practices, practices that at their most profound involved out of body travel, spirit contact and ritual possession.

With this record the plants and ideas involved in veneficium have been gathered, distilled and given voice. Recorded mainly using an array of homemade acoustic instruments, the music is a fitting depiction of the deep nocturnal delirium and various states of necromantic trance brought about by these plant poisons. it also goes someway to portray the genuine fear, respect and emotional gravity they still hold deep in our cultural memory. The music is also inspired by the living presence of the plants themselves, as their scents and character are known to the author through private cultivation. The Venefic Garden is offered as a soundtrack to the hidden history of this fascinating area of western folk-magic, an outer limit of occult herbalism that imparts visceral knowledge of the borderlands between life and death.