David Keenan is an author, critic and musician. He is the author of This is Memorial Device (2017), a novel which the Guardian called “one of the most acute, affecting and aphoristic novels in recent years” and England’s Hidden Reverse, a biography of Coil, Current 93 and Nurse With Wound.

He has been a regular contributor to The Wire since 1995, and proprietor of Volcanic Tongue, a shop, distributor, record label and mailorder business that he runs with his partner, the musician and artist Heather Leigh Murray.

His work for The Wire has been highly influential, helping to focus the magazine more towards coverage of new experimental rock, noise, folk, industrial and psychedelic music. His most frequently cited article is a cover story that appeared in the August 2003 issue entitled “New Weird America”, where Keenan coined the phrase ‘Free Folk’, later bastardised to include ‘Freak Folk’ and ‘Wyrd Folk’ and used to describe everyone from Jack Rose and Charalambides through Devendra Banhart

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