Slipknot - Slipknot Star Crahan To Launch Photo Book At South By Southwest Festival

The masked drummer, known as Clown, will launch The Apocalyptic Nightmare Journey at the South By Southwest music and arts festival in Austin, Texas on Thursday (15Mar12), when he'll host a panel discussion with fans.

The tome will be the rocker's first book and will feature "explorations in darkness and light from Shawn's experimental photography," according to a press release.

The statement continues, "Weird, wired, paranoid, endlessly imaginative and cancerously prolific, he's created thousands of dangerous representations of reality through eye-gouging Polaroids in numerous artistic styles throughout this hand-picked collection of images."

Metallica star Lars Ulrich has written foreword for the book.

An excerpt reads, "Throw yourself into clown's world, throw yourself into clown's book, throw yourself into clown's images, throw yourself into the whole f**king thing. Let go of the bungee cord, do away with the safety net. Just go for it, and let the journey take you wherever the journey's going to take you. And as you're going on that trip through this book, occasionally imagine clown next to you. Imagine hearing his voice in your head talking about what these images and experiences have meant to him and where he was going with it."

Ulrich goes on to guarantee fans leafing through the pages of the book will be "spellbinding and potentially life altering," adding, "This book is everything that art should be."