Heliograms by Jean Piché

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Heliograms (1982), an album of early digital music by Canadian composer Jean Piché has managed to stay resolutely off my electronic music radar until now following news of a reissue from Digitalis Recordings:

Jean Piché recorded “Heliograms” between the years 1977-1980 during his time at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, BC. The music on the LP consists of works for computer, digital synthesis and acoustic instruments, and most of it was composed using the POD Interactive Compositional System that Barry Truax had developed at SFU. The four compositions that make up “Heliograms” are often dense, harmonically rich pieces that slowly evolve through time. There is a strong use of tonality throughout which characterizes Piché’s work during this period. It echoes a fascination with the music of Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Lou Harrison, placing it firmly in a minimalist approach to electronic music, alongside the contemporary work of American composer Laurie Spiegel, then working at Bell Labs.

The screen grabs above are from Piché’s 18-minute sample video which gives an impressive taste of two of the tracks. There’s more of Piché’s “videomusic” at his Vimeo channel, ranging from an early Fairlight and video synthesizer piece to more recent work. Via FACT.

Previously on { feuilleton }
Creel Pone
Versum – Fluor by Tarik Barri

Max Klinger’s New Salomé

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The New Salomé (1887–1888) by Max Klinger.

The German Symbolist Max Klinger (1857–1920) is celebrated today for the etchings which comprise his Ein Handschuh (A Glove) series, ten prints that in their curious details and dream-like quality prefigure Surrealism and Giorgio de Chirico’s “metaphysical” paintings. During his life Klinger was highly regarded for his sculpture as well as his etchings: his Beethoven was a centrepiece of the Secession building in Vienna in 1902. His New Salomé is one of the handful of Klinger works at the Google Art Project where I still feel we ought to be able to view sculpture in the round. I’ve seen many photos of this piece before but hadn’t realised until now that the eyes were…what? Rubies? Amber? Whatever they are, their fiery cast ensures that his imperious female sits unequivocally with the Evil Women that proliferated in the late 19th century.

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Salomé (c.1910) by Julio Borrell Pla.

Klinger’s sculpture may have been fashionably misogynist but it was at least a serious piece of art. Twenty years later the Salomé theme had devolved to little more than titillating exotica, as with this vaporous painting by Julio Borrell Pla which I hadn’t come across before. The last gasp of this exhausted trend is William Dieterle’s 1953 film in which Rita Hayworth plays Herod’s daughter as all titillation and little else.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
The Salomé archive

The Standard Scroll Book

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One of the work-related searches at the Internet Archive this week was for scrolls…which I eventually realised should have been for ribbons since it was those text-bearing lengths of graphic ribbon I was looking for. I didn’t find anything useful but the search error did turn up this small book of borders, frames and scrollwork from 1876. The book scanners credit one David H. Moser as the person responsible although in what capacity—compiler, artist or both—we’re not told. I’m still being asked to create highly decorated designs so this will no doubt prove useful very soon. View or download the whole book here.

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Continue reading “The Standard Scroll Book”

Devils debris

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The Devils (1971).

There is only one English feature director whose work is in the first rank. Michael Powell is the only director to make a clear political analysis in his films, his work is unequalled. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is the finest English feature, and A Canterbury Tale and A Matter of Life and Death are not far behind. When he made these films he was heavily criticized for his treatment of serious themes. Blimp was banned by Churchill and remained in a savaged version for nearly forty years, a plea for tolerance and regard for the enemy as human made at the height of the war there is no more courageous English film. It is a tragedy he has made so few films in the last twenty years, none in the last ten, and a lasting condemnation of all those who make films. He was a major casualty of the spurious social realism of the sixties, whose practitioners have grown fat and invaded the media with their well-scrubbed minds.

Thus Derek Jarman writing in 1980. Ian Christie quoted Jarman’s sentiments in Arrows of Desire: the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (1985), pointing to the shared attitudes of the two directors, especially their outsider stance. There were other correspondences: both maintained an abiding interest in the artistic scope of cinema; both were marginalised by the British film world during their lives then lauded after their deaths. Michael Powell for years attempted to produce a film of The Tempest; Derek Jarman, of course, succeeded.

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Return to the Edge of the World (1978).

Then there’s this odd coincidence from Return to the Edge of the World, a short documentary made in 1978 in which Powell and actor John Laurie returned to the Scottish island of Foula where they’d made Powell’s first feature film, The Edge of the World in 1937. The film opens with shots of Pinewood studios and the very first things we see are this pair of abandoned statues which anyone who’s seen Ken Russell’s The Devils will recognise from an early scene. Derek Jarman was the production designer on The Devils so these would have been created according to his instruction. I only noticed this recently when watching Return to the Edge of the World again as it’s now an extra on the BFI DVD of Edge of the World. No need to dwell on the inadvertent symbolism of abandoned statues and languishing careers.

Powell and Pressburger’s marvellous The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp was reissued recently. John Patterson discussing its writer and director tells us why the most English of movies often benefit from an outsider’s perspective.

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Previously on { feuilleton }
Rex Ingram’s The Magician
The Devils on DVD
Derek Jarman’s music videos
Derek Jarman’s Neutron
Mister Jarman, Mister Moore and Doctor Dee
Powell’s Bluebeard
The Tale of Giulietta
The Tempest illustrated
In the Shadow of the Sun by Derek Jarman
The Angelic Conversation
The life and work of Derek Jarman

The art of Juan de Valdés Leal, 1622–1690

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In ictu oculi (1672).

Having castigated Somerset Maugham yesterday for a novel that even he professed to dislike, thanks can be offered for the passage in The Magician which draws attention to a painter I hadn’t come across before. With a scythe-wielding skeleton snuffing a candle flame, and a bishop rotting in his casket, these are a very Spanish take on the vanitas genre. Some of the subsequent works of Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel are less surprising when you see art that’s this grotesque.

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Finis gloria mundi (1672).

Previously on { feuilleton }
Alfred Rethel’s Totentanz
The art of Jacopo Ligozzi, 1547–1627
Massachusetts memento mori
Skull cameras
Walmor Corrêa’s Memento Mori
The skull beneath the skin
Vanitas paintings
Very Hungry God
History of the skull as symbol