Weekend links 358

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Painted beetle (2016) by Akihiro Higuchi.

David Horbury: The Tate’s Queer British Art exhibition ignores the pioneering scholarship of Emmanuel Cooper, author of The Sexual Perspective: Homosexuality and Art in the last 100 years in the West (1986).

L’Androgyne Alchemique is an exhibition at the Azzedine Alaïa Gallery, Paris, by pascALEjandro, a collaboration between Pascale Montandon-Jodorowsky and Alejandro Jodorowsky.

• At Strange Flowers: an interview with DJ Sheppard, biographer of poet Theodore Wratislaw (1871–1933), one of the models for Max Beerbohm’s hapless Enoch Soames.

Eloise or, the Realities is a new 122-page comic book by Ibrahim R. Ineke “inspired in part by Children of the Stones and The Owl Service“.

• Cormac McCarthy hasn’t published a novel for over ten years now but this new piece of writing addresses the mysterious origin of language.

• “…she invented a kind of symbolic code that channelled the occult and the Renaissance masters”. Yo Zushi on Leonora Carrington.

John O’Reilly on the Samuel Beckett cover designs created by Russell Mills and Gary Day-Ellison for Picador.

Porter Ricks (Thomas Köner & Andy Mellwig) have announced their first album in 18 years.

• At The Daily Grail: Alan Moore on science, imagination, language and spirits of place.

• All 66 issues of Performance Magazine (1979–1992) are now available online.

• The Throbbing Gristle catalogue is being reissued (again).

Lost Soul In Disillusion (1967) by The Power Of Beckett | Liquid Insects (1993) by Amorphous Androgynous | Biokinetics 2 (1996) by Porter Ricks

Die Buecher der Chronika der drei Schwestern

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Die Buecher der Chronika der drei Schwestern (The Books of the Chronicles of the Three Sisters) is a German fairy tale set down by Johann Karl August Musäus, and presented here in a 1900 edition illustrated by Heinrich Lefler and Joseph Urban. Lefler and Urban were brothers-in-law who worked as set designers as well as illustrators; Urban was also an architect who later moved to the United States. One of his extant buildings is the Mar-a-Lago in Florida but he can’t be held responsible for its current use or its present owner.

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Looking at the excellent illustrations the pair produced for this volume I’d guess that Urban concentrated on the building design which is much more elaborate and inventive than you generally see in children’s books. The selections here are mostly full-page pieces but the book is illustrated throughout, with the text flowing into and around the drawings.

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Continue reading “Die Buecher der Chronika der drei Schwestern”

Weekend links 357

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Ruth St Denis (2010) by Agnieszka Brzezanska.

As Above, So Below: Portals, Visions, Spirits & Mystics is an exhibition of occult-oriented art at IMMA, Dublin. “An alternative history of art of the last century,” says Aidan Dunne.

THIS IS THE SALiVATION ARMY: a Tumblr archive of Scott Treleavan’s queer-pagan-punk zine, 1996–1999.

• Mixes of the week: Secret Thirteen Mix 219 by Paper Dollhouse, and a Mika Vainio Tribute Mix by broken20.

• Valdimar Ásmundsson’s Icelandic translation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula has been translated back to English.

• First evidence for higher state of consciousness found (thanks to psychedelic drugs).

• At Bibliothèque Gay: Narkiss (1908) by Jean Lorrain.

Boyd White on finding Arthur Machen’s bookplate.

Barry Adamson’s favourite albums.

John Waters: By the Book.

Dread: Lustmord in dub.

XXY Oscilloscope

Vampire (1976) by Devon Irons | Keep On Dubbing (1976) by Augustus Pablo | African Dub (1977) by The Silvertones

The Restless Field

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The advent of Spring brings a new CD release from A Year In The Country. The Restless Field is another themed compilation, and one of their best to date, the theme this time being the British landscape as a site for political resistance:

The Restless Field is a study of the land as a place of conflict and protest as well as beauty and escape; an exploration and acknowledgment of the history and possibility of protest, resistance and struggle in the landscape/rural areas, in contrast with sometimes more often referred to urban events. It takes inspiration from flashpoints in history while also interweaving personal and societal myth, memory, the lost and hidden tales of the land.

References and starting points include: The British Miners Strike of 1984 and the Battle Of Orgreave. Gerrard Winstanley & the Diggers/True Levellers in the 17th century. The first battle of the English Civil War in 1642. The burying of The Rotherwas Ribbon. The Mass Trespass of Kinder Scout in 1932. Graveney Marsh/the last battle fought on English soil. The Congested Districts Board/the 19th century land war in Ireland. The Battle Of The Beanfield in 1985.

Track list:
1) Ghosts Of Blood & Iron — Field Lines Cartographer
2) Mortimer’s Cross — Vic Mars
3) [ fears ] avaunt! upon “the” hill — Bare Bones
4) 3am M5 Field Raid — Assembled Minds
5) Agrarian Lament — Grey Frequency
6) Beneath The Cherry Trees — Endurance
7) Congested District — Listening Center
8) Badby 80 — Pulselovers
9) Ribbons — Sproatly Smith
10) Graveney Marsh — Polypores
11) Last Best West (circ. 1896) — Depatterning
12) Black Slab — Time Attendant
13) A Mutable History Under A Bright June Sky — A Year In The Country
14) Beyond Jack’s Gate — David Colohan

All of the compositions this time are instrumentals so the degree to which the music relates to the theme depends upon the interpretation of the listener; some pieces, such as 3am M5 Field Raid, offer an overt clue in the title. The success of the collection as a whole is also open to question; it may be that the artists are becoming more confident—many of the people here have appeared on previous AYITC releases—or that the theme this time was more stimulating than others have been.

For the past week or so I’ve been listening to Coil almost exclusively so I hear a lot of Coil echoes in these pieces. I doubt that these are intentional—although given shared concerns, some of them may be—but by 2000 Coil’s music had moved away from the urban orientation of the 1980s to a pastoral mysticism that also had a political impetus: “The forest is a college / Each tree a university”. Late Coil also involved the construction of fields of sound, the products of fields of another kind: electrical and (possibly) psychical. I can’t speak for the latter quality but there’s plenty of the former in this collection of restless fields.

The album will be released on 2nd May, and is available for pre-order now.

Previously on { feuilleton }
The Marks Upon The Land
The Forest / The Wald
The Quietened Bunker
Fractures

Weekend links 356

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Im Hag by ToiToiToi will be Ghost Box 027, available from 12th May. Poster and album design, as always, by Julian House.

• The week in the electronic outer limits: The Haxan Cloak recorded a new piece of music using Moog’s Mother-32 modular synths; The Herzog Tapes is a new album by The Electric Pentacle; and Drew McDowell (ex-Coil, etc) has a new album, Unnatural Channel, out next month. (Vinyl-only, unfortunately, like his previous album.)

• More from Vinyl . Album . Cover . Art: The Complete Hipgnosis Catalogue by Aubrey Powell: How to design a record cover in 1977. The feature is a duplicate of Storm Thorgerson’s account in the first Hipgnosis book but since that volume has been out of print for decades it stands repeating.

• Talismanic Bookseller: Erik Davis talks to occult-book dealer and musician Richard Bishop talks about modern grimoires, scorpion gods, Orientalist imagery, and hunting down physical books in the age of the Internet.

Arbery Books, “the UK’s leading online dealer in rare and secondhand books and ephemera of gay, lesbian and transgender interest”, is closing its website at the end of May so there’s a sale on.

Amours Secrètes: Dans L’intimité Des Écrivains, an art book about the secret loves of five French writers: Marcel Proust, Pierre Loti, Renaud Icard, Roger Peyrefitte and Jean Genet.

• Ancient Methods and Futuristic Visions: Mark Pilkington & Michael J. York of Teleplasmiste answer 15 questions.

• Mix of the week: Homer Flynn, spokesperson of The Residents, compiles a playlist for The Wire.

Adrian Searle on Queer British Art 1861–1967 at Tate Britain: “strange, sexy, heartwrenching”.

Strange Flowers on August Endell (1871–1925) and the trees of spring.

Urania (1995) by Panasonic | Pan Finale (2010) by Pan Sonic | 5′ 42” (2014) by Pan Sonic