Jon Hassell – Page 10 – { feuilleton }

Milton Glaser album covers

Music For Space Squirrels (1958) by Al Caiola’s Magic Guitars.

Having sought out Saul Bass’s album cover designs recently, curiosity impelled me to see what fellow New York designer Milton Glaser had been doing during the same period. I already knew some of Glaser’s covers for the Tomato label in the 1970s but Discogs has many more, including a handful in the Pop/psychedelic style he used most famously for his Bob Dylan poster. Not all of these are to my taste—illustration-wise I prefer Bob Pepper’s art—but Glaser was nothing if not versatile. I’ve no idea what Music for Space Squirrels sounds like although it’s probably less interesting than the promise of those floating rodents.

Medium (1968) by The Mandrake Memorial.

Grieg’s Greatest Hits (1969).

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Weekend links 61

Marbles and Butterflies (2011) by Jennifer Knaus.

• “Cutter’s Way is a cinematic masterpiece” says John Patterson. Yes, it is, and it’s often been difficult to see (although it’s now on DVD) being one of those cult films that rarely surfaced on TV or video. Another cult film surfacing at last is Jerzy Skolimowski’s Deep End (yes, again…) which will be out on DVD & Blu-ray next month. I missed this Telegraph piece about the film. You want more? Lint: The Movie is showing at the Kino Club, Brighton, later this month.

• This week’s Eno haul: Developing Your Creative Practice: Tips from Brian Eno; Eric Tamm’s 1995 study Brian Eno: His Music and the Vertical Color of Sound is now available for free at the author’s website; Imagine New Times is an outtake from Eno’s forthcoming Drums Between the Bells which can be downloaded here.

• Mixtapes of the week: Demdike Stare with a suitably sinister and eclectic mix are out-curated by Current 93’s David Tibet who mashes together a unique blend of folk, prog, riffs, choral works and glam rock.

I began to realize the hypocrisy about sexual freedom in the feminist establishment was as bad as it is in the religious right. They do whatever they want. They look at whatever they want, they masturbate to whatever they want, they fuck whoever and however they like. I couldn’t even say everything I know in the book because it would just be too cruel and personally invasive. But I’ve had it with their lying. I spent so long trying to have these earnest conversations and now I’m like, “Fuck you — you’re as bad as the Vatican!”

Susie Bright interviewed by Tracy Clark-Flory at Salon sounding as happy and positive as she always does.

• The Gnostic #4 is out this month featuring Alan Moore’s essay on magic and related matters, Fossil Angels, and a piece examining the Gnostic influences on Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.

• “Nobody should be sent to prison for taking drugs,” says Richard Branson. Many politicians agree with him but they’re all too cowardly to do anything about it.

Untitled work by Kilian Eng.

• The Adventures of Jerry Cornelius, The English Assassin (1969–70). A comic strip written by Michael Moorcock & M John Harrison with art by Mal Dean & Richard Glyn Jones.

• The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government by David K Johnson is available as a free ebook here.

• “If I was to try to write a mainstream book I would be constantly bumping my elbows up against the restrictions.” Tim Powers is interviewed by Alison Flood.

• HOMO Online, Adventures in Homosexuality: Fiction, Fact, Art and Porn.

• Your Rainbow Panorama, a new work by Olafur Eliasson.

• Self Suck, a poem by Angelo Nikolopoulos.

• Map Of Dusk (1987) by Jon Hassell | Lam Lam (1998) by Baaba Maal (with Jon Hassell & Brian Eno) | All Is Full Of Love (1999) by Björk (Guy Sigsworth mix featuring Jon Hassell).

Ira Cohen, 1935–2011

Ira Cohen (1979) by Gerard Malanga.

Another of the psychedelic magi departed our mundane sphere this week, and for the moment his passing seems to have been unacknowledged by those cultural wardens who you’d think would know better. Ira Cohen was a poet with a gift for phrases which demand to be appended to Mati Klarwein paintings (one such phrase, The Surgeon Of The Nightsky Restores Dead Things By The Power Of Sound, was used by Jon Hassell for an album title); he was also a photographer whose use of a chamber covered in sheets of reflective Mylar turned photo-portraiture into a psychotropic art:

I never wanted to be a photographer like the commercial photographers. For me, it was more about the involvement of the mirror, and scrying, reflection, crystal-ball-gazing, trying to get to some other place. It was all about reflection, in the deepest sense of the word. (More.)

Cohen’s 1968 film, The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda, used his Mylar Chamber as a locus to create one of the key works of psychedelic cinema. More of that work can be seen here while his 1994 album of readings and music, The Majoon Traveler, is available via iTunes.

• The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda, six postcards from Aspen no. 9 (1971).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Dreamweapon: The Art and Life of Angus MacLise, 1938–1979
• William Burroughs by Ira Cohen, 1967
• The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda

Paul Schütze online

One of the drawbacks with recommending Paul Schütze‘s music lately has been a lack of availability, with most of his CDs being out of print. That changes this month with his back catalogue returning via iTunes sporting a range of impressive new artwork (above) created by Mr Schütze himself.

Schütze’s electronic music stood out for me in the mid-Nineties for a number of reasons: firstly, and most obviously, it wasn’t always tied to the rigid metronomic pulse which governed the rest of the dance world. There were 4/4 beats at times—and he even had an album on Belgian dance label Apollo under the anagrammatical pseudonym Uzect Plausch—but his music was equally subject to unusual time-signatures with chiming timbres borrowed from gamelan orchestras.

Those timbres and their attendant tropical atmospheres were a second point of distinction. Like Jon Hassell, to whom he pays homage on Stateless (1997), there’s an acknowledgement of non-Western music without any falling into pastiche. This realises one aspect of Hassell’s Fourth World concept, whereby a meeting of the First World and the Third World creates an exclusive temporary zone that nonetheless can’t exist without the contribution of either party.

A third distinction would require a detailing of Schütze’s notable collaborators—Bill Laswell and Raoul Björkenheim among them—and his inventive track titles, many of which sound like Surrealist paintings. But describing music is always a poor thing compared to experiencing it. If you want a place to start, I’d recommend New Maps of Hell II: The Rapture of Metals (1993; reissued 1996) or Abysmal Evenings (1996), two constant favourites.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Josiah McElheny
• The Garden of Instruments

More sex please, you’re artists

More sex please, you’re artists | Or less North, more South as Jon Hassell would say.