Our Edinburgh Art Festival exhibition
8 August – 24 August
Explore our project resources below.
A catalogue and vinyl record is available from our our online shop.
In 2024 Blackie House Library and Museum acquired a set of six illustrated leaves, purportedly 5th-6th-century Coptic manuscripts from Egypt, titled ‘Music of the Spheres’. Since their discovery at the turn of the 20th century these enigmatic scripts have intrigued and confounded experts – Egyptologists, musicologists and others. Investigations, both scientific and artistic, into these fascinating pieces and the myriad facts and fictions that have unfolded around them continue.
BHLM Creative Instigator, Alan Grieve has assembled a team of writers, musicians and visual artists to respond to these fascinating artefacts with an exhibition at Blackie House and events at its satellite venue, Garagespace.
Alongside the original artefacts and other related items selected by William Zachs from the BHLM collections, a team of musicians – Lucy Armstrong, Craig Coulthard, Helga Dorothea Fannon, Nurah Farahat, Luke Fowler, Jack Jelfs, Dave Maclean, Haroon Mirza, Kim Moore, Victoria Morton, Nick Colk Void – have recorded a vinyl album in response to the manuscripts. Artists Julie Johnstone, Edward Summerton RSA, and Alan Grieve in turn have produced a series of visual artworks.
Bill has selected a group of items from the Blackie House collection relating to and complementing these enigmatic works. Finally, medieval manuscript expert William Voelkle has written an essay outlining the story of these Coptic leaves, thought to originate from Egypt more than fifteen hundred years ago and said by some to represent the ‘Music of the Spheres’.
Watch the first single release from the album. Temple Dogs is the first single from the album SUN DOG FRAUD SQUAD, released on OUTPUTS:
Purchase the vinyl album and our catalogue in our online shop.
Purchase the digital single or order the digital album on Bandcamp.
The Great Egyptian Music Mystery
The manuscripts were recently the focus for the BBC Radio 3 Sunday Feature on 16 Nov 2025. You can listen to the programme on BBC Sounds (44 minutes).
New York, 1937. A set of strange manuscripts come to light. Cultural historian and Radio 3 New Generation Thinker Ellie Chan unravels the mystery, investigating what these mysterious manuscripts have meant to various people over the years, and asking what sense we can make of them today. Producer: Luke Mulhall
A free drop-in event was held at our satellite venue Garagespace, on Wednesday, 13 August 4-7pm – 6 George Square Lane EH8 9LJ
SUN GOD FRAUD SQUAD
Summer Listening Party
13th August 4-7pm, drop in, free
Garagespace, 6 George Square Lane, Edinburgh EH8 9LJ
Part of the RING OF TRUTH exhibition in partnership with EAF25, all are welcome to this free one-off event at Garagespace by the Meadows. This pop-up party celebrates the launch of the vinyl album, SUN GOD FRAUD SQUAD, which accompanies the main exhibition. This is a unique opportunity to meet the artists, musicians and writers involved with this project where the new album will be played in full alongside works by visual artists Eddie Summerton and Alan Grieve, with a DJ set by Volens Chorus to conclude the gathering.
From Pythagoras to Ptolemy, from Sun Ra to Shakespeare, the concept of interplanetary harmony as a soundscape, a spiritual symphony, has long fascinated scientists, writers, artists, musicians and everyday gazing people.
In the early part of the 20th Century, the Armenian-American musician H. Aram Gulezyan ‘discovered’ a series of images painted on leather, purportedly Coptic music manuscripts from Egypt, titled, ‘Music of the Spheres’. He would spend the best part of five decades researching their origins and promoting their authenticity – intriguing and confounding musicologists and Egyptologists in the process.
In 1952 six of the manuscripts were sold by Gulezyan at auction for the substantial sum of $7,500 and then hidden in the private collection of Cornelius Hauck of Cincinnati. Research continued nevertheless, culminating 1992 at the Fifth International Congress of Coptic Studies at the Library of Congress in Washington DC when the notation seemed to have been decoded and at long last the kind of music heard at the time of the Pyramids were being built could be heard.
Beyond the exhibition, related musical performances and other events, BHLM will publish a limited-edition box including a vinyl record and a descriptive exhibition book. The unique music recording will be played for the first time at the exhibition in Blackie House, alongside the original manuscripts, video and printed works.
There will be one-off performances during the exhibition run, to be held offsite at Garagespace on George Square Lane, by the Meadows in central Edinburgh. These will include live music and visual art by a selection of the participating artists. There is also a one-off boat trip planned (numbers limited), visiting Lamb Island in the River Forth which is currently owned by the mystic, Uri Geller. (Geller believes that the island contains hidden treasure, buried by Egyptian Princess Scota and that the group of islands of Lamb, Fidra and Craigleith share the same alignment as the Pyramids at Giza.)
PARTICIPANTS
Craig Coulthard (Scottish, born 1981 in Germany) is a painter and musician resident in Manchester, England. His work is primarily concerned with our relationship to our surrounding environments, how we traverse them and interpret them through both creative and destructive means. This commonly involves an excavation of the disparate strata of cultural production – for example indigenous architecture, folksong and ancient art, to printmaking, museum collections and renaissance painting – to create unified collages of surrealist elements that exist somewhere between diagrams and dreams.
Nurah Farahat is an Egyptian audio-visual/technical artist and VJ currently based in Bremen, Germany. She co-founded Mapping Possibilities AV Collective (EG) and Samander International AV Collective (DE). Her processes are strongly influenced by her work in club culture, millennia of stories and symbols, as well as her long-time collaboration with the artist M.I.A. She has been creating graphics and animations since 2018 and works as a VJ and coordinator for her super-dynamic live shows since 2022.
Luke Fowler is an artist, filmmaker and musician based in Glasgow. His para-documentary films have explored counter-cultural figures including Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing, English composer Cornelius Cardew and Marxist Historian E.P.T Thompson. With an emphasis on communities of people, outward thinkers and the history of the left, his 16mm films tell the stories of alternative movements in Britain, from psychiatry to photography to music to education. Whilst some of his early films dealt with music and musicians as subjects, his later works deal with the nature of sound itself.
Alan Grieve has an ear for language and a predilection for the strange. Like a latter-day bard, he explores through his work the unfamiliar turn of phrase or gem of information. From processing this raw material, he creates drawings, sculptures, installations and public events that teem with life. These pieces often employ humour, which, like the best of stories, can fly pretty close to the wind. They also contain a close reading of place, a love of landscape and a passion for gathering people’s personal histories.
Jack Jelfs Outputs is a London-based record label and club night dedicated to projects which overlap the worlds of music and visual art. Since its founding in 2020 it has released music across a range of formats by Seth Price, Rosa Barba, Cory Arcangel, GAIKA, Marianna Simnett, Fracture, Nik Colk Void and David Toop amongst others. Outputs is run by artists Haroon Mirza and Jack Jelfs.
Julie Johnstone is an artist and publisher based in Edinburgh. Working primarily in the field of artists’ books, her works explore visual perception, distillation and ideas of contemplative experience. Works are held in numerous national collections, including Tate Library, National Art library (V&A), Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Yale Center for British Art, New York and in private collections. Her Essence Press publishes a range of poets and artists, creating poem-objects and experimental book forms.
David Maclean is a music producer, drummer and electronic programmer with British art-pop group Django Django.
Haroon Mirza was born in 1977 in London, where he still lives and works. He has a BA in painting from Winchester School of Art, Mas in critical practice and theory from Goldsmiths College, London and in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art and Design. While evolving a multi-disciplinary practice, Mirza manipulates electricity, his primary medium to devise sculptures, performances and immersive installations that ask us to reconsider the perceptual distinctions between noise, sound and music. Preoccupied with waves of varying types, from sound waves to the electromagnetic spectrum, from neural oscillations to the ripples in water, he isolates frequencies drawn from antiquity to the present day that resonate with the human condition.
Edward Summerton RSA’s conscious decision to base his studio and practice in rural Scotland for the past 40 years has enabled an exploration of a fragile folkloric relationship with the non-human and natural world that is sympathetic and relational. His works, informed by an improvisation of materials moving between painting, object, print, film and neon, to the organisation of events, appear as mediums, giving voice to an otherly pastoral.
William Voelkle is the retired Curator of Medieval Manuscripts at the Morgan Library and Museum, New York.
William Zachs is Director of Blackie House Library and Museum, Edinburgh, Scotland.
Resources
These resources provide further opportunity to explore the subjects raised in the essay by William M. Voelkle in the exhibition catalogue.
Auction catalogue Parke-Bernet Galleries 1952
Auction catalogue Parke-Bernet Galleries 1956
Auction catalogue Wollheims’ Rosequist Galleries [1956? undated]
Article: ‘The Gulezyan Manuscripts: Possible remnants of ancient Coptic Musical Notation’, Acts of the Fifth International Congress of Coptic Studies: Washington, 12-15 August 1992, vol. II, part II, pp.355-367, 1992
