'Vic Hyland is a consummate artist: musician, songwriter, teacher, community-builder, spirit-medium, dowser, trickster and sage - a veritable Renaissance Man! I'm so pleased to have him on to talk about his new book, Music, Magic, and NLP, which is an incredible compendium of Vic's ideas, theories, techniques, and a thread of personal memoir in which he recounts his rich and strange life, and how it has brought him to where he is now, and the snapshot of his work that this text represents.

It's a wild ride through the history of Western music, the behind-the-scenes workings of 20th century pop, the insights of Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP), and the ways that we make meaning out of myths, symbols, and the random elements of our everyday lives. The techniques of Cut Up and remix and sampling, as practiced by William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin in the context of the Beat Movement, are shown as methods to spark creativity and make songs, but also as a fundamental method of creating meaning out of the Chaos of the World. With a soundtrack of the magical music of the great Players - the Beatles, Bowie, Hendrix, Joni Mitchell, or George Michael, and many more besides - Vic offers here a tool-box, a performance, an experiential course of study, with lessons, Thought Experiments, and spells and rituals woven through the text.'

Mark Fitzpatrick - The Hedge School podcast