May 23, 2013

Catching up with more recent work, this was a quick collage for Fatality, a single by US musician OCTiV. This has been out for about a month. The main track—a kind of dubstep/metal hybrid—can be heard here. The request was for something on the cosmic horror spectrum which would also incorporate geometric elements, hence the [...]
May 22, 2013

A welcome arrival in the post recently was two issues of Abraxas, the book-format journal of esoteric studies from Fulgur Esoterica. I’ve always observed the contemporary occult scene from a distance, being more interested in cultural spin-offs whether those happen to be music-oriented—as was the late, lamented Coil—or art-oriented. Something I always enjoyed about Kenneth [...]
May 21, 2013

The latest post at Strange Flowers reminded me of some work of mine that appeared earlier this month which I can finally mention. Fenella Fielding reads Colette is another of those long-gestating recordings from Savoy’s audio division which has been released at last after a lengthy hiatus. This is a double-disc CD set of Fenella’s [...]
May 20, 2013

This poster for Massimo Dallamano’s 1970 updating of The Picture of Dorian Gray was featured here several years ago, and it’s taken me all this time to finally discover the name of the artist responsible, Ted Coconis. Better late than never. It could be argued that the illustrations below for Nabokov and Goldman tend more [...]
May 19, 2013

Collage by Jeneleen Floyd. • “…slowly, block-by-block, pedestrians are starting to take back the streets.” Wayne Curtis on the hazards of being a pedestrian in a world of cars. • Michael Hann looks back at LA’s Paisley Underground, and also talks to some of its key members. • Meighan O’Toole interviews JL Schnabel about her [...]
May 14, 2013

Presenting an interview by John Wisniewski with William E. Jones, author of Halsted Plays Himself (2011). The subject is gay filmmaker and performer Fred Halsted (1941–1989) whose 1972 film LA Plays Itself was a pioneering piece of low-budget cinema which combined a fragmented view of Los Angeles with explicit liaisons between several men, one of [...]
May 12, 2013

El Banquete Magnético (2011) by Cristina Francov. • Did Vertigo Introduce Computer Graphics to Cinema? asks Tom McCormack. He means Saul Bass’s title sequence which mostly uses still harmonographs but also features some animated moments by John Whitney. • Temple of the Vanities by Thomas Jorion. “Pictured here are political monuments and munitions depots, hulking [...]
May 10, 2013

As is often the case, I keep intending to post various lengthy pieces but pressure of work is preventing that for the moment. So here’s another illustrated book courtesy of the Internet Archive. I linked to this in an earlier post about Walker’s work but hadn’t looked at all the illustrations until now. Dream Boats [...]
May 5, 2013

Pan II (2012) by Fredrik Söderberg. • “Aubade was a surprise success, selling some 5000 copies and going into a second printing and an edition published in America. Martin was immediately a minor celebrity, being interviewed for articles that couldn’t mention what his book was actually about.” Rediscovering the works of Kenneth Martin. • “I [...]
May 2, 2013

The Charles Perrault fairy tale given an Arts and Crafts interpretation by British artist Joseph Southall (1861–1944). This is a slim volume from 1895 with illustrations very much in the manner of Walter Crane’s work for William Morris. As with all such stories from the Victorian era, the grim nature of the tale is buried [...]
Apr 28, 2013

Elektrik Karousel, a new release on the Ghost Box label by The Focus Group. “For a clue to its moods, think Czech animation, Italian Giallo, early Radiophonics, HP Lovecraft stories, 1960s underground cinema, Lewis Carroll and baroque psych.” Julian House’s package design is “heavily inspired by 1960s underground press and conceived as a kind of [...]
Apr 26, 2013

Ghosts in Gaslight, Monsters in Steam is a forthcoming anthology in the Gay City Anthology series from Seattle’s Gay City Health Project and Minor Arcana Press. The publishers describe it as “a multidisciplinary anthology of amazing queer monster and ghost fiction, poetry and art.” I’ve created a cover design for the book, and also have [...]
Apr 21, 2013

Le Vampire (c. 1903) by Agathon Léonard. Via Beautiful Century. • Two masters of rumbling atmospherics interviewed at The Quietus: Bobby Krlic aka The Haxan Cloak talks to Maya Kalev while Thomas Köner talks to Joseph Burnett. Discussions about the arts now have an awkward, paralyzed quality: few judgments about the independent excellences of works [...]
Apr 19, 2013

Wish You Were Here (outer and inner sleeve, 1975) by Pink Floyd. Whenever people ask questions about your work at some point the subject of influences always turns up. Influences for me are usually few, they’re those things which skew your perception to such a degree—or which enlarge the range of possibilities—that they make you [...]
Apr 16, 2013

Another fine book for us collagists, Libro estraordinario di Sebastiano Serlio bolognese : nel quale si dimostrano trenta porte di opera rustica, mista con diuersi ordini, & uenti di opera dilicata di diuerse specie : con la scrittura dauanti, che narra il tutto (1566) is a guide to “porte rustiche”, or old doorways. There are [...]
Apr 15, 2013

The more I look at the work of Austrian artist Julius Klinger (1876–1942), the more I like what I see. This Pinterest sample shows his versatility, equally at home with detailed illustration, often with a Beardsley-like quality, as he was with more Modernist design. Sodom (1689) (aka The Farce of Sodom, or The Quintessence of [...]
Apr 14, 2013

Poster design by Mishka Westell for this month’s Austin Psych Fest. Billy Gibbons’ pre-ZZ Top psychedelic outfit, The Moving Sidewalks, surprised everyone by reforming for a New York gig last month, their first performance together in 44 years. • Pye Corner Audio played the Boiler Room, London, last week, and remixed a track from FC [...]
Apr 12, 2013

An oddity from the career of František Kupka, Le Cantique des Cantiques (1905) in this version is a stage presentation of the Song of Solomon by Jean de Bonnefon. Kupka provided a series of illustrations in a style similar to his Symbolist paintings which in the original printing are decorated with coloured borders. The copies [...]
Apr 10, 2013

Another animated gem, The Web (1987) is an eighteen-minute film based on Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast novels which dramatises the lethal duel between Flay and Swelter. Director Joan Ashworth reduces the cast to manservant, cook, and bedridden earl, no doubt for reasons of economy since the film was originally a student work. Economy or not, for [...]
Apr 9, 2013

Untitled cartoon by Gerald Scarfe (early 1980s). Margaret Thatcher saved career of police chief who made Aids remarks Margaret Thatcher helped save the career of a police chief constable who said Aids patients lived in a “human cesspool of their own making”, newly-released documents show. THE TELEGRAPH, 04 Jan 2012 Sir James Anderton, then chief [...]