Weekend links 81

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Black Cat on a Chair (1850–1860) by Andrew L Von Wittkamp.

• “A little bit of acid, lots of weed, and too much Castaneda and I was ready to move from the magical realm of Middle Earth into a world that was much stranger than any involving hairy dwarves and white wizards…” Too Much to Dream by Peter Bebergal, “a psychedelic American boyhood”.

This year’s Booker prize isn’t about the power of the new – there’s no experiment with form or strangeness of imagination. The winner may get on the bedside tables of middle England, but that’s not as important as changing the way that even one person dreams.

Jeanette Winterson throws the cat among the pigeons.

• 50 Watts continues to show us things you’d be hard-pressed to find elsewhere: illustrations by TagliaMani from a new edition of Les Chants de Maldoror, and War Is a Verb, collages by Allan Kausch.

• Don’t go in the swimming pool! Coilhouse directs us to Fantasy: music by French outfit DyE with a weird and nasty animation by Jérémie Périn.

• Ace album cover designer and photographic Surrealist Storm Thorgerson is having another exhibition at IG Gallery, London.

The Art of Leo and Diane Dillon, an art and illustration archive.

John Turturro reads a short story by Italo Calvino.

Spaceport America by Foster + Partners.

Your Body of Work by Olafur Eliasson.

Wonder-Cat cures all ailments.

Blogging Moby-Dick.

Krazy Kat (1927) by Frankie Trumbauer & His Orchestra with Bix and Lang | Pussy Cat Dues (1959) by Charles Mingus | Katzenmusik 5 (1979) by Michael Rother | Big Electric Cat (1982) by Adrian Belew | Purrfect (1996) by Funki Porcini.

Weekend links 52

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Three Seekers (2009) by Kelly Louise Judd.

Kevin Sessums talked to Elizabeth Taylor in 1997 about Tennessee Williams, her AIDS activism and related matters. Other related matters: Catholics lead the way on same-sex marriage and Mahatma Gandhi was in love with a German body-builder named Hermann.

• Cray porn (the computer, that is) at Barnbrook Design as the CD package for Interplay by John Foxx and The Maths is unveiled.

Michael Rother and Friends Play the Music Of Neu! A stream of an hour-long concert from August 2010.

One of the tragedies of drug prohibition is that we have never developed a culture in which young people can learn how to use powerful drugs properly from older, wiser and more experienced psychonauts. I count myself lucky to have encountered such good teachers to guide me with such drugs as LSD, psilocybin, DMT, MDMA and mescaline.

Dr Susan Blackmore on using LSD.

Another Dispatch in a World of Multiple Veils, a new release by Arkhonia.

Micromachina by Scott Bain “examines what makes the insect world tick”.

Down with art!: the age of manifestos. Related: The Manifesto Manifesto.

• John Patterson: “We’re all living in the future as seen by Philip K Dick.”

Music To Play In The Dark: A Wake For Peter ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson.

Albert Einstein, Radical: A Political Profile.

Was “God’s Wife” edited out of the Bible?

Porn made for women, by women.

Hallogallo (1972) by Neu! | Opa-Loka (1975) by Hawkwind | Jenny Ondioline (1993) by Stereolab | Hallogallo (1997) by Porcupine Tree.

Weekend links 27

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Annie Duels The Sun (2010) by Angie Wang.

I’m interviewed again, this time by James at Cardboard Cutout Sundown. Covering familiar subjects for {feuilleton} readers: art history, design, Lovecraft, the genre/mainstream seesaw, etc. Related: Jeff VanderMeer previewed my design for the forthcoming Steampunk Reloaded.

Battle over legacy of father of Art Nouveau. Prague authorities are demanding the paintings which comprise Alphonse Mucha’s Slav Epic be moved to the capital.

The films that time forgot. David Thomson on ten neglected works including a cult favourite of mine, Jerzy Skolimowski’s Deep End (1970).

The Viatorium Press: “Fine letterpress printing, digital typography, and hand painted illumination.” Among their recent productions is a poem by Clark Ashton Smith.

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À la conquête du pôle (1912); Georges Méliès vs. Jules Verne.

Taxandria, a feature-length collaboration between Raoul Servais, François Schuiten and, er, Alain Robbe-Grillet, is on YouTube. My earlier post about the film is here.

Salvagepunk, or (maybe) Post-post-modernism: “How a music micro-trend heralds an emerging, internet-enabled, aesthetic movement.” See also the latest issue of The Wire.

Drainspotting with Remo Camerota: documenting Japan’s creative manhole covers.

• Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of squid: a book devoted to Kraken Black Spiced Rum.

After Stanley Kubrick. Christiane Kubrick on life without Stanley K.

• Pills and penises and kissing boys: Tara Sinn’s Kaleidoscopes.

Found Objects: a hauntological dumping ground.

• Sandow Birk’s American Qur’an.

• RIP Frank Kermode.

Feuerland (1968) by Theo Schumann Combo; Feuerland (1977) by Michael Rother; Feuerland (2007) by Justus Köhnke.

A cluster of Cluster

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Harmonia somewhere in the 1970s: Michael Rother, Dieter Moebius, Hans-Joachim Roedelius.

Continuing the occasional { feuilleton } series exploring the byways of musical culture, this month it’s the turn of German group Cluster, prompted by their current US tour. News of their re-emergence sent me back to the albums and I’ve been listening to little else for the past week or two.

cluster.jpgMark Pilkington has very conveniently saved me the trouble of summing up the wandering history of Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius in their various incarnations with his introductory piece, Cosmic Outriders: the music of Cluster & Harmonia. Unlike many of their Krautrock contemporaries, Moebius and Roedelius have remained very active, Roedelius particularly has an extensive solo discography. I’ve never been very taken with their work since the early Eighties, however. I have an inordinate fondness for the analogue keyboards which contribute to their early sound; as the Eighties progressed they took to using digital keyboards and their music lost much of its earlier charm as a result.

The Cluster discography is very long and confused, encompassing Kluster (pre-Cluster line-up with Conrad Schnitzler), Cluster, Harmonia (Cluster with Michael Rother from Neu!), Cluster with Brian Eno, then Moebius and Roedelius’s numerous solo works and collaborations with other artists. As a result, a guide such as this is useful for the curious. So here we go with another blog list…

ClusterCluster 71 (1971)
A timeless racket. Three long noisy slabs of synth distortion that make the first two noisy Kraftwerk albums seem positively melodic. This could easily be passed off as an unreleased Throbbing Gristle or Cabaret Voltaire album.

ClusterCluster II (1972)
The second album continues the granular challenge but lets some light and music into the mix.

HarmoniaDeluxe (1975)
I prefer the second Harmonia album to the first, and prefer both to Cluster’s third opus, Zuckerzeit, recorded around the same time as this. Michael Rother’s involvement in Harmonia pushes the sound very close to Neu! in places, especially the more melodic strains of Neu! 75.

HarmoniaHarmonia 76: Tracks & Traces (1976)
Albums of studio outtakes are usually for die-hard listeners only but this one is surprisingly good with an outstanding long atmospheric piece, Sometimes In Autumn. Brian Eno was hanging out with Cluster by this point and he contributes a vocal on Luneberg Heath.

ClusterSowiesoso (1976)
The most melodic and relaxed of all the Cluster albums and the one which birthed a host of inferior copyists on the Sky label.

Cluster & Eno (1977)
Recorded at around the same time as By This River on Eno’s Before And After Science. Holger Czukay from Can is a guest on the Eno albums.

Eno, Moebius & Roedelius—After The Heat (1978)
Of the two Cluster & Eno albums this is probably the best and ends with three Eno songs which turned out to be his last vocal works until Nerve Net in 1992. Note that the CD reissue has a different (and in my view, inferior) track ordering to the vinyl original.

ClusterGrosses Wasser (1979)
Produced by ex-Tangerine Dream member Peter Baumann and recorded at his studio which gave the Cluster guys the opportunity to use his superior synth equipment. As a result a couple of the tracks here are very similar to Baumann’s solo work.

Moebius & PlankRastakraut Pasta (1980)
This album and its follow-up should be added to the list of works which influenced Eno & Byrne’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. The opening track News, features sampled radio voices (as per later Eno & Byrne) mixed with a plodding rhythm that includes a recurrent synth note that’s the spit of similar sounds used on My Life.

Moebius & Plank—Material (1981)
Genius producer Conny Plank brought out the best in many of the artists he worked with and these two collaborations with Moebius are a great example of that. He had a similar effect with Roedelius on an early solo album, Durch die Wüste, moving Roedelius out of his ambient keyboards comfort zone. The tone on Material is more strident and uptempo than Rastakraut Pasta, especially on Tollkühn which is like some mad techno synth run ten years too early.

Cluster and co. on YouTube
Cluster 71
Harmonia—Deluxe (Immer Wieder)
Cluster—Sowiesoso
Cluster & Eno—Für Luise
Brian Eno—By This River

Previously on { feuilleton }
The Avant Garde Project
White Noise: Electric Storms, Radiophonics and the Delian Mode
Chrome: Perfumed Metal
Metabolist: Goatmanauts, Drömm-heads and the Zuehl Axis
The music of Igor Wakhévitch
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts

Klaus Dinger, 1946–2008

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Klaus Dinger (right) with brother Thomas, circa 1978. From the sleeve of Viva by La Düsseldorf.

“There were three great beats in the ’70s: Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat, James Brown’s funk and Klaus Dinger’s Neu! beat.” Brian Eno

Klaus Dinger, the great drummer for Neu! and La Düsseldorf (and briefly Kraftwerk in 1971) died back in March but news of this has taken a while to emerge. Everything he did in the Seventies is essential, the Neu! albums especially. YouTube has a few choice examples such as this clip of someone playing Neu!’s finest (and oft-imitated) moment, Hallogallo, slightly too fast. Then there’s Isi from Neu! 75 and the crazy glam-punk of Hero (a tremendous period performance) shortly before guitarist Michael Rother left and the band transmuted into La Düsseldorf. For a blast of the latter, there’s the majestic Rheinita from Viva. Happily, Michael Rother is still with us and was interviewed in the most recent issue of The Wire.

Previously on { feuilleton }
Aerodynamik by Kraftwerk
Metabolist: Goatmanauts, Drömm-heads and the Zuehl Axis
The genius of Kraftwerk