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Why Do The Heathen Rage? (2014) by The Soft Pink Truth. Cover art by Mavado Charon. Drew Daniel’s latest release as The Soft Pink Truth is Why Do The Heathen Rage?, a witty electronic riposte to the often reactionary attitudes of black metal music and the people who create it. (The album is dedicated to […]

Julian House artwork for Other Voices, a new singles series on the Ghost Box label. Other Voices 01 is a collaboration between Sean O’Hagan of the High Llamas and Jon Brooks of The Advisory Circle. Last week I linked to a copy Zadie Smith’s new introduction for Crash by JG Ballard. That piece could only […]

San Francisco Sound (1967). Art by Wallace Studio, Seattle. • RIP gay porn pioneer Peter de Rome. BUTT posted de Rome’s surprisingly daring Underground (1972), a film in which two men have an unfaked sexual encounter on a New York subway train. That film and others are available on the BFI’s DVD collection. Related: Brian […]

These photographs of Angkor Vat (sic), Angkor Thom, and some of the smaller Cambodian temples show the difference between the overgrown ruins of 1912 and today’s domesticated tourist attraction. Guide aux Ruines d’Angkor by Jean Commaille contains many more photos plus maps of the grounds and plans of the temple construction. The depredations of the […]

The ruined temple complex of Angkor Wat is another of those places for which I maintain a cult fascination despite never having been there. I’ve posted links to panoramas of Angkor Wat in the past but Google recently added the complex to their Street View catalogue, so you now have the opportunity to see the […]

Wolf City (1972) by Amon Düül II. Behold another favourite album cover by a favourite band, one of several superb designs for Amon Düül II by Falk-U Rogner who was also the group’s keyboard player. Rogner’s suitably hallucinogenic cover images are worth a post of their own but this one requires attention today since I […]

Limbroglio (URBS V). Drypoint prints by a French artist who also has a nice line in moody renderings of European cities—Paris, Venice, Rome—which occasionally stray into architectural speculation. Outright fantasia is more evident in these mysterious views more of which may be seen at the Velly gallery. Les grandes Manoeuvres. Paysage aux mollusques. Elsewhere on […]

Soundcarriers poster by Julian House. A new release on the Ghost Box label is always a welcome thing but Entropicalia by The Soundcarriers, out on May 20th, is one I’m especially looking forward to. Julian House has made a video for new song Boiling Point, and there’s also the poster above which can be downloaded […]

The Blue Girl (2013) by Sungwon. • “Meanwhile, in her parents’ room [Max] Ernst painted aardvarks eating ants and big human hands around the windows. ‘Sexual connotations, I think,’ she says shyly.” Agnès Poirier talks to Cécile Eluard about her childhood among the Surrealists. • “Thrilling and prophetic”: why film-maker Chris Marker‘s radical images influenced […]

For the past week I’ve been downloading more of the books at the Internet Archive illustrated by Matthäus Merian. Among the hoard there’s a two-volume set of Robert Fludd’s Utriusque Cosmi, Maioris scilicet et Minoris, metaphysica, physica, atque technica Historia (1617–1626), a remarkable work which attempts to cover all the metaphysical, scientific and artistic knowledge […]

More new work of mine has been unveiled in the past few days so I can show these here. The Buried Life and Cities and Thrones are a pair of fantasy novels by new author Carrie Patel being published by Angry Robot. I was asked to provide something in an engraved style set against a […]

Chthonic Cities by David Chatton Barker. One of a series of Folklore Tapes screenprints available from Bleep. • The original version of Kenneth Anger’s Lucifer Rising, the one with the Jimmy Page soundtrack that was completed in 1973, has always been described as lost/stolen/buried or otherwise gone forever. So you’d think the news that a […]

Nova Express (2014) by Paul Komoda. • Last week it was Kraftwerk, this week it’s Can in another astonishing 70-minute TV performance from 1970. For those who know where to look in the torrent world there are copies of these recordings circulating there. • JG Ballard: five years on. Extracts from introductions by John Gray, […]

Pages from the Official Souvenir Program for the Seattle World’s Fair, 1962. Very typical corporate design by RT Matthiesen and Associates but not bad for all that. The pages give an overview of the exposition, punctuated by ads from its sponsors, while the text sets forth the purpose of the event to give a taste […]

That observation tower again. Previous posts here have exhausted the Paris Exposition Universelle as a subject so it’s time to look elsewhere, and the Century 21 Exposition which was held in Seattle in 1962 seems as good a place to start as any. If you’re interested in old expositions then it’s always good to find […]

This is a few months old but I just discovered my bookmark of the page. The view is a panorama of Seattle but with a difference since this one encourages you to play hunt the artist. The streets are scattered with many of Seattle’s artists and performers, some of them easier to find than others. […]

Another treatise on perspective, and an older one than Pozzo’s so the drawings are somewhat cruder. Eyn schön nützlich büchlin und underweisung der kunst des Messens (A Fine, Useful Booklet and Instruction in the Art of Measurement) by Hieronymus Rodler was published in 1531, and features a number of full-page views where the perspective is […]

I’m working on more engraving collage at the moment so I’ve been delving into the scanned books at the Internet Archive once more in search of raw material. I still tend to use things scanned from paper volumes but the Internet Archive is useful for small details, and searches there also have the advantage of […]

Memorials of Old Northamptonshire (1903), a book edited by Alice Dryden, includes an entire chapter by M. Jourdain about Thomas Tresham’s Triangular Lodge. Descriptions of the building usually skate over the Catholic symbolism encoded in its structure but Jourdain goes into some detail describing the many inscriptions and numerological details. The engraved illustration is rather […]

Artwork & photography by Abbie Stephens, Zoë Maxwell. Design by Thomas Caslin. Passing through a record shop the day after looking at photos of the Winchester Mystery House I couldn’t help but notice this sleeve for the debut album by British band Temples. Yesterday I described Sarah Winchester’s house as a folly, which it is, […]