Tag Archives: Sevgi Aksoy

A History of Cowboy Psychedelia

Wide-brimmed dreams, desert reverb, and the strange saddle between country & mind-expansion… “A History of Cowboy Psychedelia” traces the strange, dust-blown intersection between country music and psychedelic experimentation. From the mythic melancholy of Gram Parsons to the surreal duets of Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra and onwards to the captivating urgency of Jeffrey Lee Pierce and The Gun Club, this long-form essay maps a hidden aesthetic that runs through outlaw country, cosmic Americana, and outsider folk. It’s not a genre you’ll find in the record bins, but it lingers like a mirage on the edge of American sound. This is music for the lonely, the altered, and the in-between.

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West Midlands Cyber Hub Diaries: Day One (Or Perhaps Day Sixty)

The West Midlands Cyber Hub marks a long-held ambition to give the region a central home for cyber. Building on the rebooted West Midlands Cyber Working Group (WM CWG), the Hub is designed to strengthen community coherence, increase investment, and connect students, SMEs, enterprises, and universities in a neutral space. Supported by DSIT, Innovate UK, Aston University, TechWM, and the Innovation Alliance for the West Midlands, the Hub will open its first phase at Enterprise Wharf in Birmingham, forming the core of a hub-and-spoke model across the region. The project team, led by Sevgi Aksoy and I (Wayne Horkan), with Rebecca Robinson as PM, is preparing for a pre-launch event on 30th September 2025.

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Innovation Incoming in Space: Notes from the Royal Academy of Engineering Panel, 31 March 2025

The Royal Academy of Engineering’s Innovation Incoming in Space (31 March 2025, Prince Philip House) offered an insightful and fact-rich exploration of the technologies shaping the future of the space economy. With topics ranging from space-based solar power and crystallisation in orbit to modular infrastructure and lunar habitation, the panel discussed how innovation is driving space from the experimental to the operational. Set against the backdrop of geopolitical shifts and commercial competition, the event underscored the UK’s strategic opportunity to lead in agile engineering, cyber resilience, and space-enabled industrial capability. A dawning theme throughout the evening was the growing realisation that space is becoming commercial, contested, and critically dependent on cyber resilience.

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