Weekend links 707

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Dragon and Tiger—Designs for Lacquer Inro (no date) by Mori Genkosai.

• “But where have all those copies of Corridor of Mirrors gone? Sometimes I entertain the thought that an obsessive collector has amassed them in his library lined with looking-glasses, so that nobody else can possess the book but he, and he can see them all, multiplied to infinity, as he stalks up and down in his scarlet smoking hat and velvet coat, and gloats.” Mark Valentine on the mysterious unavailability of Corridor of Mirrors (1941), a novel by Chris Massie. The film adaptation made a few years later is one I’ve managed to miss, despite its starring Eric Portman and featuring the first screen appearance of Christopher Lee. Future viewing, I think.

• “The intrepid logician Kurt Gödel believed in the afterlife. In four heartfelt letters to his mother he explained why.” Alexander T Englert explains Gödel’s explanations.

• At Open Culture: Hortus Eystettensis (1613), “the beautifully illustrated book of plants that changed botanical art overnight”.

• Mix of the week: Aquarium Drunkard presents The Secret Hemisphere: New Age, Fusion and Fourth World, 1970–2002.

• New music: Phases Of This And Other Moons by Field Lines Cartographer.

• Why Graphic Culture Matters is a new book of essays by Rick Poynor.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Japanese Designer New Year’s Cards of 2024.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Chutz.

• At Dennis Cooper’s it’s Barbara Steele Day.

The Hall Of Mirrors In The Palace At Versailles (1970) by John Cale & Terry Riley | The Hall Of Mirrors (1977) by Kraftwerk | The Room Of Mirrors (2000) by Harold Budd

Weekend links 699

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November Evening (1955) by Brian Gartside.

• The next Jon Savage compilation for Caroline True Records will be Jon Savage’s Ambient 90s, a dive into the side of rave culture that I always preferred, even while disputing the use of the “A” word. Anything with beats isn’t ambient by my definition, but I’ve been complaining about the nomenclature since 1991 to no avail. It’s on pre-order anyway.

• “They produced in me an infinity of new images and feelings, that sometimes raised me to ecstasy, but more frequently sunk me into the lowest dejection.” Thus Frankenstein’s monster during his reading of three books that happen to be important texts for the Romantic imagination. Hunter Dukes looks at the syllabus of Frankenstein’s monster.

• “Figure on Led Zeppelin IV cover identified as Victorian Wiltshire thatcher”. Last year I discovered the source for the lyrics and credits lettering designs used on the same album’s inner sleeve. Not as newsworthy, obviously, but I thought it was a good piece of cultural detective work.

• At Aquarium Drunkard: An interview with Morton Subotnick, now 90 years old. “Pioneer” is an over-used label, especially in electronic music, but Subotnick really does warrant the description.

• At Wormwoodiana: Mark Valentine on Unburied Bane, an EP by The Heartwood Institute based on a story by “the enigmatic N. Dennett”.

• At Unquiet Things: Art and captions that didn’t make the print version of The Art of Fantasy by S. Elizabeth.

• “Hidden demon revealed in the shadows of a Joshua Reynolds painting.”

• New music: Polygon by Galya Bisengalieva, and Saor by Claire M. Singer.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Letraflex.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Arthur Lipsett’s Day.

Martin Carthy’s favourite music.

Little Demon (1956) by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins | Ballad Of Maxwell Demon (1998) by Shudder To Think | On Demon Wings (2000) by Bohren And Der Club Of Gore

The Great Drone Ones

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Cover by Simon Heath with Nicolas Crombez.

October, as I’ve noted before, is drone month, and this year I finally decided to catch up with the most recent instalments in the series of Lovecraft-themed albums that Cryo Chamber have been releasing each year since 2014. I’m still waiting for the discs to arrive—the Shoggoth Mail has been taking its time to slither here from Kracow—but Bandcamp happily assuages any impatience by offering immediate downloads. All of these albums are a collaborative effort between a varying roster of Cryo Chamber artists, with the contributions being blended together to create disc-long tracks (usually two discs to an album) that offer audio portraits of the gods or beings of the Cthulhu Mythos. The contributors do their best to maintain a consistent mood (and, where necessary, the same key) so there aren’t any of the abrupt exchanges you often get in music mixes. As to the identity of the groups or individuals involved, I could name names but as I’m not familiar with their work outside these releases there’s not much I can say about them.

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Covers by Simon Heath.

Lovecraftian music used to be little more than one-off tracks on rock albums but, as with Lovecraftian illustration, there’s a lot more fully-realised material to be found today. One of the things I like about the Cryo Chamber albums is that they’re wholly instrumental (the “Cthulhu fhtagn” intonation on Cthulhu is a rare exception), and with each piece being an hour or more in length I find them very amenable as soundtracks for illustration sessions. Cryo Chamber specialises in a variety of dark ambient music that’s more evocative than the abstract equivalents produced by artists like Thomas Köner: Gothic doom and apocalyptic science fiction are recurrent themes. Since cosmic horror tends to be a blend of Gothic doom and apocalyptic science fiction it was almost inevitable that one or more of HP Lovecraft’s monstrous extraterrestrials would eventually raise its tentacles somewhere in the Cryo Chamber discography. This type of music is a better match for weird fiction than most of the rock music derived from Lovecraft’s stories, in part because it resembles the kinds of atmospheric timbres that you find on the better horror soundtracks. There’s more substance here than Köner’s “grey noise” but rhythm is minimised or omitted altogether, and there’s a general avoidance of overt musicality. One of the precursors of the Cryo Chamber sound, Lustmord, established the form in 1992 with The Monstrous Soul, an album that quotes liberally from Jacques Tourneur’s The Night of the Demon while borrowing track titles (IXAXAAR, The Daathian Doorway) from Kenneth Grant’s eldritch occult philosophies.

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Covers by Simon Heath.

The Cryo Chamber Collaborations began with Cthulhu, the only single-disc release, and one which I seem to play the most. Subsequent releases have dealt with Lovecraft’s other Mythos gods—Azathoth (2015), Nyarlathotep (2016), the only three-disc release), Yog-Sothoth (2017) and Shub-Niggurath (2018)—before working through the extended Mythos with albums devoted to Hastur (2019), Yig (2020), Dagon (2021) and Tsathoggua (2022). Some of the albums are more sonically illustrational than others: Cthulhu and Dagon evoke the oppressive chasms of the oceanic deep, while Nyarlathotep, Hastur and Yig offer intimations of the Middle East, justified in the case of Nyarlathotep’s pharaonic aspect, less so for the others. Yog-Sothoth, meanwhile, features a succession of chiming tones like those produced by Tibetan bowl gongs. Lovecraft’s fiction tells us little about the actual nature of Yog-Sothoth aside from vague references like the one in The Horror in the Museum, a story co-written by Lovecraft and Hazel Heald, in which we read of “a congeries of iridescent globes…stupendous in its malign suggestiveness.” Not an easy thing to represent in music yet the Yog-Sothoth album has its own mood and character which sets it apart from the others in the series. The most recent release, Tsathoggua, honours Clark Ashton Smith’s loathsome toad god with swathes of abrasive noise and repeated eruptions of a cthonic bass tone like those used by Deathprod on the baleful Treetop Drive.

Now that the Cryo Chamber series has made use of all the primary deities of the Mythos cycle, plus some of the secondary ones, I’ve been wondering where it may go next. There are many minor deities (or entities) created by the generations of writers that followed Lovecraft’s lead (see this list for details) but few of the names of these beings have the authority of Lovecraft’s nomenclature. They also lack the textual reinforcement that the Mythos gives to entities that would otherwise have been limited to mentions in only one or two stories. I suppose we’ll find out whether the label will be continuing the series soon enough. The albums as they currently stand run for over 18 hours in total. That’s almost enough to soundtrack the entirety of Halloween.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
The Lovecraft archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
Daikan by Thomas Köner
Cosmic music and cosmic horror
Drone month
Hodgsonian vibrations

Weekend links 697

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The Haunted Room, Painted at a Farmhouse on Exmoor (1952) by Alfred James Munnings.

• “In Scotland, children made terrifying jack-o’-lantern turnips and piled cabbage stalks around doors and windows, baiting fairies to bring them new siblings.” It’s that time of year again. Public Domain Review looks at The Book of Hallowe’en (1919) by Ruth Edna Kelley.

• At Wormwoodiana: Mark Valentine on the centenary of Visible and Invisible, EF Benson’s collection of horror stories.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: DC’s ostensibly favourite haunted attractions of Halloween season 2023 (international edition).

Mostly it was down to the environments of their sound. The aerial acrobatics of Fraser’s voice. The architecture of sound that came from Guthrie’s effects-treated guitars; not just the often-cited often-derided ‘cathedrals of sound’ but all manner of sunken ballrooms, tunnels, factories, attics, foundries, observatories, caverns. If any category was required, Cocteau Twins could have been placed within Symbolism, a hallucinatory death-rattle of romanticism in the industrial age, when all that had been discarded returned in dreams and decadence, orgiastic excess, disembodied spectral heads and ornate altars, lonely demons and alluring succubi, jewels and masks and apparitions, all the minutiae of things that the steam engine and the printing press had yet to fully exorcise.

Darran Anderson on the Cocteau Twins’ Head Over Heels at 40. His digs at the music press are a welcome riposte to the nostalgia that often attends discussion of the weekly snark-machine that was the NME, Sounds et al in the 1980s

• Follow the footsteps of the Beast in a guide to Aleister Crowley’s British haunts, with text by Gary Lachman and design by Michelle Merlin. Also at Herb Lester: Occult Paris: City of Night.

• At Print Magazine: Charlotte Beach talks to illustrator and author Edward Carey about his spooky drawings.

• “Silent movies are full of friendly ghosts.” Kathleen Rooney on Caspar, Colleen [Moore] and the Beyond.

• New music: Mizuniwa by Yui Onodera.

Spooksville (1963) by The Nu-Trends | Spooks (1981) by Tom-Tom Club | Spooky Rhodes (1997) by Laika

Fifteen ghosts and a demon

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The Secrets of Strategy (1853) by Utagawa Kuniyoshi. “Yoshitsune with Benkei and his other retainers in their ship, beset by the ghosts of the Taira, some in the form of crabs, during a storm.”

Actually more than fifteen ghosts, and at least two demons, but you get the idea… There are many ghosts in Japanese prints, from the spectral variety which manifest in all shapes and sizes, to their theatrical equivalents in Noh and Kabuki plays. Some of the best examples are those by Hokusai and Tsukioka Yoshitoshi but since these have appeared here before I’ve gone looking for prints by other artists.

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Ghost (1922–26) by Shoen Uemura.

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Lady and Ghost – Edo Embroidery Pictures (1886) by Toyohara Chikanobu.

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Scene from a Ghost Story: The Okazaki Cat Demon (c.1850) by Utagawa Kuniyoshi.

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Nissaka Station from Fifty-three pairings along the Tokaido Road (c.1845) by Utagawa Kuniyoshi. “Moonlit scene of a travelling warrior receiving a child from a ghost.”

Continue reading “Fifteen ghosts and a demon”