Cover art by Mike Hinge. • “[The Family] is an unforgettable fusion of journalism and poetic prose that still holds up precisely because it has no use for category, for genre, or for being anything other than its own unique, obsessive self.” Sarah Weinman on how Ed Sanders wrote the definitive account of the Manson […]
Poster by Tadanori Yokoo for The Trip (1967). • Post of the week is this long-overdue introduction by Warren Hatter to the French rock and electronic music of the 1970s and 80s, a variety of Continental culture which has never commanded the same level of interest in the Anglophone world as its German equivalent. The […]
Edge of Industry (2009) by Anne Starling. • “In her darkroom with her silver salts and gelatine plates, she experimented with the mercurial effects of light, time and temperature.” Hailey Maxwell on the photographic art of Dora Maar. • A Visionary Work Renew’d: A conversational review of Swan River Press edition of William Hope Hodgson’s […]
Ito Takashi’s early experimental films achieve their delirious effects with a minimum of means: flickering lights, projected images, and pixillation of the camera and the blurred figures that flit through the frame. Not all are on YouTube at the moment but Thunder (1982) and Ghost (1984) are exceptional works, both with electronic soundtracks by Yosuke […]
Man’s body dish for Sashimi under the cherry blossom (2005) by Ryoko Kimura. • Godley & Creme’s Consequences (1977) is reissued this month on CD and vinyl. Originally a three-disc concept album with a theme of climate disaster and the natural world’s revenge on humanity, Consequences was released at a time when punk and prog […]
Echoes And Reverberations, the latest themed collection of music presented by A Year In The Country, has a title that might refer to the Hauntological idiom in general. Not so much nostalgia, more the refashioning of memories, or imagined remembrances of the past, into something new. Echoes And Reverberations is a field recording-based mapping of […]
Femme avec des fleurs (c. 1912) by Romaine Brooks. • “Boring people tend not to exile themselves to rocky islands, but even among the intriguing personalities we encounter in Capri, some individuals prove more extravagantly memorable than others.” Steve Susoyev reviews Pagan Light: Dreams of Freedom and Beauty in Capri by Jamie James. • “The […]
In the week following the Moon-landing anniversary I’ve been re-reading The First Men in the Moon by HG Wells. This was a late entry in Wells’ extraordinary run of science fiction novels, and is both shorter and lighter in tone than his earlier novels, some of which veer at times into outright horror. The First […]
“Spectra of various light sources, solar, stellar, metallic, gaseous, electric”, print by René Henri Digeon; plate IV in Les phénomènes de la physique (1868). • More polari: Thom Cuell this time with another review of Fabulosa!: The Story of Polari by Paul Baker. Good as it is to see these articles, one thing they all share […]
Poster art by Hiroo Isono. • “[Divine] didn’t want to pass as a woman; he wanted to pass as a monster. He was thought up to scare hippies. And that’s what he wanted to do. He wanted to be Godzilla. Well, he wanted to be Elizabeth Taylor and Godzilla put together.” I can’t help linking […]
Pink Floyd, Lee Michaels, Clear Light (1967) by Bonnie MacLean. • Electronic musician Mort Garson has been subject to a revival of interest recently, with reissues of his works as Ataraxia (The Unexplained), and Lucifer (Black Mass). The latest reissue is Mother Earth’s Plantasia (1976), an album released under Garson’s own name, and one of […]
Fracture (1977) is a short animated film from France by the Brizzi Brothers (Paul and Gaëtan), a duo better known for their work on feature-length animated films such as Asterix versus Caesar (1985), and a number of films for Disney. Fracture is their earliest work, and isn’t remotely Disney-like, delivering an SF/fantasy scenario of alien […]
“Surrealism is not aesthetics. It is a philosophy,” says Jan Svankmajer in James Marsh’s short (25 mins) portrait for the BBC from 1990. This was broadcast at a time when Svankmajer’s films were receiving more attention in the UK than they had before or since, thanks in part to Channel 4′s screening and funding of […]
X from Theodore Howard’s ABC (1880) by Theodore Howard. • “[Parade] has everything: joy and sadness, get-down and wistfulness, mourning and melancholia, group funk and Debussy interludes, echoes of Ellington, Joni, film music, chanson. It’s a perfectly realised whole.” Ian Penman on the enigmas and pleasures of Prince. • “Mescaline reads like the culmination of […]
“The atom shall work for peace…” Soviet poster promoting the benefits of nuclear power. • RIP Mac Rebennack aka Dr. John Creaux, The Night Tripper. Dan Auerbach remembers the man whose return to funky form, Locked Down, he produced in 2012. Elsewhere, Michael Hurtt details Mac Rebennack’s pre-Dr. John exploits; some of his music from […]
Almost ten years have elapsed since I devoted a week of blog posts to one of my favourite fantastic creations, the Obscure World/Obscure Cities of Belgian artist-and-writer team François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters. Schuiten and Peeters’ mythos is a multi-media project with a series of bande desinée albums as its core, a cycle of stories […]
Artwork by Kuldar Leement (maybe…I’ve yet to see a credit for this). • In Search Of Hades: The Virgin Recordings 1973–1979, is a retrospective box set comprising 16 CDs and 2 blu-ray discs devoted to the first phase of Tangerine Dream’s output on the Virgin label. For enthusiasts of the group’s Virgin recordings (myself among […]
The Simulator (1936) by Dora Maar. • Surprise of the week for me was the discovery of a new album, Kshatrya – The Eye Of The Bird, by cult French composer Igor Wakhévitch. This had been out for a while but I’d managed to miss the announcements. The music was recorded in 1999 so isn’t exactly […]
I’m surprised this has managed to evade my attention for the past eight years but better late than never. Into the Vortex is an hour-long music mix by Radio Soulwax whose visuals are one answer to the question of how best to illustrate a diverse playlist, if illustrate you must. The solution, directed by Wim […]
The Star (1970) from The Aquarian Tarot by David Palladini. • Artist David Palladini died in March but I only heard the news this week. His poster for Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu has been a favourite of mine ever since the film’s release, while some of his other works have featured here in the past. Still […]
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