{ feuilleton }

One Hundred Lavish Months of Bushwhack (2004) by Wangechi Mutu. I wouldn’t be so bold as to call Benjamin Noys’ contribution to the recent The Weird conference at the University of London a highlight, but it was a surprise to find Lord Horror in general and the Reverbstorm book in particular being discussed alongside so […]

L’uomo che piantava gli alberi (2013) by Sofia Rondelli. Via Form Is Void. • I’m looking forward to hearing the new album by Chrome Hoof, a band whose ambition and attitude makes many of their contemporaries seem lukewarm at best. Mick Middles gets to grips with Chrome Black Gold here. John Doran interviewed the group […]

Ectoplasm Forming by Feuilleton on Mixcloud Presenting the eighth Halloween playlist, and this year I decided it was time to finally make a proper mix of my own. Reluctance in years past has been mainly a result of the time it takes me to put things like this together, hours spent pondering the order of […]

La table qui tourne (1943) by Robert Doisneau. In [Gödel, Escher, Bach], Hofstadter was calling for an approach to AI concerned less with solving human problems intelligently than with understanding human intelligence—at precisely the moment that such an approach, having borne so little fruit, was being abandoned. His star faded quickly. He would increasingly find […]

Mirror of Water (1981) by Reika Iwami. • The week in comics: Paul Gravett interviews Enki Bilal. | Paul Kirchner’s wordless and inventively surreal strip, The Bus, was republished in France last year but it’s been out-of-print for years everywhere else. Read it online here. | Bill Watterson has made the entire run of Calvin […]

Continuing the Cocteau theme, this fascinating film remains (for the time being) unavailable in a better copy despite its artistic all-star cast. 8 x 8: A Chess Sonata in 8 Movements (1957) can be regarded as a follow-up to Hans Richter’s Surrealist anthology Dreams That Money Can Buy (1947), the directorial credit this time being shared […]

One of Jonathan Andrew‘s photos of coastal bunkers and concrete defences from the Second World War. In 2006 JG Ballard looked at the way these structures embody the functional nature of Modernist architecture. • “Utamaro, whose prints of famous courtesans were regarded as the very models of sober beauty by 19th-century Western collectors, in fact […]

Quatermass paperbacks from Jovike’s Flickr pages. This may be another occasional series in the making since there’s already been a post about Roadside Picnic/Stalker music, and one about music inspired by the cosmic horror of William Hope Hodgson. I was going to write something earlier this year about music derived from the works of Nigel […]

Pretty Pictures, a new book by designer Marian Bantjes, is out on October 1st. • A writer admired by Angela Carter, Michael Moorcock, Harlan Ellison, Anthony Burgess, Jonathan Meades and Iain Sinclair; a “writer’s writer…[whose] best stories bear comparison with the Ficciones of Jorge Luis Borges”; a writer with an “unsettling quality to his writing, a […]

A new Wicker Man poster by Dan Mumford appears on the cover of the forthcoming DVD/BR reissues. Prints are available. • The long-awaited release of a restored print of Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man approaches. Dangerous Minds has a trailer while The Guardian posted a clip of the restored footage. The latter isn’t anything new […]

This week PingMag was looking at Czech film posters. This one by Bedrich Dlouhy is for the belated 1970 release of Kurosawa’s Rashomon. • In October Alison Goldfrapp curates an exhibition for The Lowry, Salford, featuring her favourite art. Examples will include work by Leonora Carrington, Lotte Reiniger and Henry Darger so I’ll definitely be […]

Having enthused recently about Czech soundtrack composer Zdenek Liska, and about Juraj Herz’s The Cremator (1969), I can’t avoid mentioning the release this month of Liska’s soundtrack for Herz’s film which comes twinned on CD with Lubos Fiser’s equally distinctive soundtrack for Herz’s Morgiana (1972). Both films are available on DVD from Second Run. Having […]

A new addition at the Ubuweb archives that’s catnip for anyone interested in the history of electronic music. Electronic Music Review was Reynold Weidenaar & Robert Moog’s short-lived journal devoted to the world of electronic music at a time when the field was rapidly growing away from the academic, “serious” side of musical composition and […]

Heartbeat of the Death – Queen Elizabeth the First (2013) by Haruko Maeda. • “The casual mixing of people from across the world at The Garden broke down many barriers. Its rich, beautiful, smart, and successful people were confident enough to exercise the kind of sexual freedom that would land you in jail elsewhere in […]

Dress (2012) by Nao Ikuma. • Two of my Cthulhu artworks can currently be seen in the Ars Necronomica exhibition at the Cohen Gallery, Brown University, Providence, RI. The exhibition is part of NecronomiCon, and runs to September 13th. In related news, my steampunk illustration has been nominated in the Visual category of this year’s […]

Videocassette box insert. Design by Neville Brody. A couple of years back I tracked down some of the releases on Cabaret Voltaire’s Doublevision video label, the early titles of which have never been reissued on DVD. The first Doublevision release was the Cabs’ collection of their own music videos which Mute Records reissued on DVD […]

The current issue of The Wire has a great appraisal by Keith Moliné of the musical history of Cabaret Voltaire, a well-timed piece given the recent announcement of forthcoming reissues from Mute Records. Having been a Cabophile from the start I’m rather biased but the Wire piece has had me listening to the early albums […]

Icarus (1974–75) by Lili Ország. • The Cabaret Voltaire albums released on the Virgin label in the 1980s have suffered the same shoddy treatment on CD as other Virgin reissues, a situation to be rectified in November with an extensive revisiting of the CV back catalogue. The long-overdue reappraisal will also include the release of […]

Ralf and Florian, 1973. Back cover photo by Barbara Niemöller. Kraftwerk’s third album, Ralf and Florian, is forty years old this year. It was recorded and mixed from May to July, 1973, and released three months later. As with the first two Kraftwerk albums, it still hasn’t been given an official CD reissue. When so […]

I wasn’t going to write about album cover art three times in a row but things keep catching my attention this week. Anyone interested in the history of electronic music knows the name Tonto’s Expanding Head Band, the duo formed by Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff to create music with Cecil’s huge, custom-built TONTO (The […]