Bright Lights and Cats with No Mouths

Bright Lights and Cats with No Mouths — Extended Edition, 2024

Bright Lights and Cats with No Mouths is a 300-page hardcover survey of John Balance's work on paper, published by Timeless Edition in 2024. This Extended Edition expands and redesigns the original publication, adding 40 pages of previously unreproduced works. The print run is limited to 400 copies.

What is new in this edition

The 2024 Extended Edition is not a reprint. It has been reformatted and redesigned throughout. The 40 pages of new art include works that have not appeared in any prior edition. Texts by Val Denham and Jeremy Reed are included, alongside a magico-critical appreciation by BC. The result is a substantially expanded object that stands apart from earlier versions of the book.

John Balance art on paper

The drawings and paintings collected here operate through private symbolic systems — recurring figures, dense mark-making, and an internal logic that resists easy categorisation. This is not illustrative work, nor is it subordinate to any other practice. It reads as a body of work with its own coherence and its own terms. Balance developed this visual language in parallel with his music, and the book treats it accordingly — as autonomous, not supplementary.

For those interested in Artbooks & Artist Publications from the post-industrial milieu, or in the broader field of Music Books & Sound Culture, this publication occupies a specific and considered position. It is not a document of Coil. It is a record of what Balance made when he worked with paper, paint, and ink.

Related titles

Further work by John Balance is available in The Abrahadabra Letters and The Cupboard Under The Stars - A Peek into the John Balance Notebooks.

Condition and handling

New copy. Clean and unused. Packed with rigid protection for safe transit. Dispatched from Germany.