Take two polymaths, add a microphone, hand out some free passes for philosophical pretension, academic allusion, an interest in the occult and spirituality (and where they meet art) and you have the delightful indulgence that is the long-running art and philosophy podcast Weird Studies. 

Dissecting and reframing the culturally obtuse and bizarre since January 2018, music professor Phil Ford and author, screenwriter and director JF Martel’s heavyweight long-form series is something akin to spending a boozy night with the smartest (most loquacious) guy-critic conversationalists in town. Their chat grows and blows the mind in that way that only mildly perverse cultural theorists can. 

For almost seven years, Martel and Ford have been turning out these 90-minute wonders on everything from expressionism in cinema; Alan Moore’s From Hell and graphic novel representations of serial killers; the post-war Greenwich Village scene and the cinema of John Cassavetes; and of course Aleister Crowley and the idea of ‘magick’. 

Utilising the monetisation platform Patreon with a rigour and energy that is unusual in this rarefied cluster in the podcast sky, Martel and Ford also offer digital courses (Fairy Tales And The Weird, anyone?) within their Weirdosphere learning community, plus links to all manner of extras including a bookshop of anything mentioned in the episodes. They also use many of their episodes to wrestle with some of the premier voices in alternative cultural theory in the US at the moment, among them spiritual and cultural theorist Erik Davis (High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica And Visionary Experience In The Seventies), writer, critic and memoirist Victoria Nelson (The Secret Life Of Puppets) and anthropologist and folklorist Amy Hale (Ithell Colquoun: Genius of the Fern-Loved Gully). 

Weird Studies is a brave attempt to promote independent scholarship, occult and spiritual cultural theories and/or to simply abide the strangeness of it all. 

New episodes of Weird Studies are available fortnightly on Wednesdays.