Weekend links 486

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Magma concert poster, 2017. Art by Jofre Conjota.

The Dream Foundry is a new venture with a mission “to bolster and sustain the nascent careers of professionals working in the field of speculative literature.” This includes artists as well as writers, and to this end I was asked to answer a few questions about my work as a creator of book covers. I also offer some advice about visibility as an artist which I tried not to hedge with too many caveats. Related: my cover for The Resurrectionist of Caligo by Wendy Trimboli & Alicia Zaloga was one of the covers of the month at Muddy Colors.

• “…for a band that were so compositionally advanced, they were adept at producing primordially insistent and hypnotic rhythms.” John Doran on Magma (again), appraising the band’s music and history before presenting Christian and Stella Vander with questions from appreciative musicians.

• Mixes of the week: FACT mix 731 by Meemo Comma, mr.K’s Soundstripe vol 2 by radioShirley, The Ivy-Strangled Path Vol. XIX by David Colohan, and The Pumpkin Tide by Haunted Air.

• At Dangerous Minds: Roddy McDowall reads HP Lovecraft’s The Outsider and The Hound. Related: David McCallum reads HP Lovecraft’s The Dunwich Horror and The Haunter of the Dark.

• “Mathematics is not unique in drawing out charlatans and kooks, of course…” David S. Richeson on cranks, past and present.

• “I plan to take psychedelics again…” Helen Joyce, the finance editor of The Economist, takes a trip.

• The City of Light and its shadows: Brassaï’s Paris.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Dennis Hopper Day.

Paris (1958) by Perez Prado And His Orchestra | Paris 1919 (1973) by John Cale | Paris 1971 (1971) by Suzanne Ciani

Something from Below

My first encounter with author, editor and Lovecraft biographer ST Joshi was in the form of an artwork request that arrived out of the blue in the late 1980s. My comic-strip adaptation of The Haunter of the Dark had just been published in a large-format edition by Caermaen Press, a small imprint run by Roger Dobson and Mark Valentine, and this prompted a flurry of interest among weird-fiction enthusiasts in Britain and the USA. Joshi was editing Lovecraft Studies for Necronomicon Press at the time, and asked if I’d be willing to contribute illustrations, something I ended up not doing for a variety of reasons. I always felt bad about this, and admitted as much when we eventually met at the Providence NecronomiCon in 2015, so my cover art for his new cosmic-horror novella may be regarded as a kind of recompense.

Something from Below is horror with an industrial setting and a Lovecraftian slant, hence the sinister coal mine dominating the artwork:

When 22-year-old Alison Mannering returns to her home in northeastern Pennsylvania after college, she finds a troubling situation. Her father, Guy Mannering, a longtime coal miner, has died recently under suspicious circumstances, and her mother refuses to provide any details of his passing. Alison feels she has no option but to investigate the matter herself, enlisting her high school sweetheart, Randy Kroeber, as well as Randy’s twin sister, Andrea called Andy, to assist her… (more)

The brief for this one was to create a wraparound cover without showing anything overtly monstrous, something I was happy to do since I dislike horror covers that reveal too much. In addition to the wrap I also produced a black-and-white piece for the inner boards. As is evident from the pictures above, the artwork was flipped around in the design but that’s okay, it works both ways. The coal mine is the central location, however.

Something from Below is published this month by PS Publishing in signed and unsigned hardcovers.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
The Lovecraft archive

Weekend links 485

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Art by Augustus Jansson for the Queen City Printing Ink Company (c.1906).

• Much of my music listening for the past couple of weeks has been the compositions and soundtracks of the late Jóhann Jóhannsson, so these links are pertinent: Jóhannsson and ensemble live at KEXP in 2010, and a memorial performance of Virdulegu Forsetar from last year.

• “[Her] approach to making electronic music was hard work, too, but it was less about controlling sounds and more about surrendering to them.” Geeta Dayal on Éliane Radigue whose Chry-Ptus has been reisssued by Important Records.

• Safe From Harm: Tim Murray on how Coil helped AIDS awareness on VHS. The video in question, The Gay Man’s Guide to Safer Sex, may be viewed at the Internet Archive.

• In the LRB podcast Ian Penman and Jennifer Hodgson discuss Penman’s new collection of essays, It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track.

• “A land of fog and emotional nightmares.” Oliver Wainwright on why Britain booted out the Bauhaus.

• Mapping Scotland’s Grim History of Witch-Hunting by Feargus O’Sullivan.

• Long-Haired Stars & the End of the World: John Boardley on comets.

My Will by Minimal Compact, a new version of an old song.

• La Danse Des Comètes (1970) by Nino Nardini | Kohoutek-Kometenmelodie 1 & 2 (1973) by Kraftwerk | Cometary Wailing (Valley Plateau) (1981) by Bernard Xolotl

Exlibris (Bucheignerzeichen)

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I don’t use bookplates, and don’t know anyone who does, but the conjunction between art and literature is a fascinating one. Exlibris (Bucheignerzeichen) (1909) by Walter von Zur Westen explores the history of the bookplate, and would no doubt answer some of my questions about the form if it wasn’t in German throughout, and also typeset in the semi-legible Fraktur style that used to be de rigueur for all German texts.

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We still have the illustrations, however, and these range from woodcut engravings to contemporary works in pencil and ink, with many of the later contributions being from established artists whose names are familiar today; among the examples below are works by Symbolists Max Klinger, Fernand Khnopff and Felicien Rops. There’s also an especially fine example by Charles Ricketts. The latter are a reminder that bookplate commissions were a common thing for 19th-century artists, although their efforts are seldom seen outside collections such as this. Much of Zur Westen’s history is devoted to the German regions but later chapters cover other European countries and the United States.

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