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David Bowie’s cigaretted fingers and bulging silver crotch point the way to the future. This summer sees the fortieth anniversary of the Ziggy Stardust album’s release. The Melody Maker ad above can be found with a wealth of other Ziggy-related material at the very thorough Ziggy Stardust Companion site. For me the definitive artefact isn’t [...]

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 [...]

A few years back, while experimenting with the hallucinogens, I experienced visions of a dynamic energy in constant high-velocity motion, crystallizing and manifesting in a form which could only be described as angelic. Potential energy, crystallizing energy and structured energy were all visible in the same instant…time and space transcended. These visions, and a new-found [...]

Empusae Raptus (1977). Another post about this astonishing artist (I’ll keep talking about her if no one else does…). The pictures here are taken from the catalogue for the 2010 Sibylle Ruppert exhibition at the HR Giger Museum, Gruyères, Switzerland. Leslie Barany was good enough to send me a copy of this, and the pictures [...]

In the Land of Retinal Delights (1968) by Robert Williams. More psychedelia. I’d wanted to link to a decent version of this painting by Robert Williams for some time but it took a while for one to turn up. When people mention psychedelic art it’s usually concert posters they’re talking about. Williams’ super-detailed canvas is [...]

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 [...]

Psychopathia Sexualis (1967). This, dear friends, is what the art of the fantastic could give us but rarely does, something which combines the metaphysical intensity of the Symbolists with a post-Freudian sensibility to create what Philip José Farmer once called “the pornography of the weird”. Jim Leon was a British artist whose work gained prominence [...]

Kieran at Sci-Fi-O-Rama was in touch recently asking me to contribute a paragraph about a favourite Roger Dean picture for this feature about the artist. The following splurge of polemic was the result, something I’d been intending on writing for a while. Since so many words would have overwhelmed the other contributions it’s being presented [...]

Better late than never mentioning this exhibition which has been running at Riflemaker, 79 Beak Street, London, since mid-January. The exhibition features those artists, writers and musicians who acknowledge the need to reach a heightened or ‘altered state’ in order to create their work. We look at the mystery of the creative act; not the [...]

If book collecting is frequently a waiting game, some waiting periods can be longer than others. In the case of Mati Klarwein’s God Jokes, my patience and hope have sustained themselves for 28 years until I finally acquired a copy this Thursday afternoon. God Jokes was the second book of Mati Klarwein’s work, published by [...]

top left: Bob Pepper (1969); right: David Johnston (1974). bottom left: Mati Klarwein (1972); right: Gervasio Gallardo (1972). I wrote about the classic line of fantasy paperbacks in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series last year as part of the post about Bob Pepper’s illustration: It was the success of the publication of The Lord of [...]

Previous posts about fantastic, surreal or visionary artists. • The art of Joanna Chrobak • Giger’s Tarot • Giger’s Necronomicon • The art of Thomas Cole, 1801–1848 • Raymond Bertrand paintings • Raymond Bertrand’s science fiction covers • Visionaries: The Art of the Fantastic • Starowieyski in Switzerland • The art of Luis Toledo • [...]

Many sounds have never been heard—by humans: some sound waves you don’t hear—but they reach you. “Storm-stereo” techniques combine singers, instrumentalists and complex electronic sound. The emotional intensity is at a maximum. Sleeve note for An Electric Storm, Island Records, 1969. An Electric Storm by White Noise is reissued in a remastered edition this week. [...]