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• I’ve wondered for years why there was such a difference in quality between Plight & Premonition (1988) and Flux + Mutability (1989), a pair of instrumental albums by David Sylvian and Holger Czukay. The former warrants repeated listening while the latter…doesn’t. David Sylvian‘s reminiscences about the recording sessions are enlightening. • “There’s something evil […]

Herald on Griffin (1516-1518) from The Triumphal Procession of Emperor Maximilian I series by Hans Burgkmair the Elder. • My design and illustration work for Pirate Utopia by Bruce Sterling continues to gain favourable comments, a novelty when reviewers often pass over the visual component of the books under their consideration. One of the most […]

Untitled painting by Jen Ray. • Lots of architecture links this week so it’s fitting that one of them is director Ben Wheatley talking to David Fear about his forthcoming film of JG Ballard’s High-Rise: “I was just thinking about this the other day, how hard it was to get a hold of stuff before […]

The Baron in the Trees (2011), a book-cut sculpture by Su Blackwell. Kurt Andersen at Vanity Fair examines the latest claims that Vermeer used a combination of lenses and mirrors to aid the creation of his remarkable paintings. David Hockney caused a considerable fuss in 2006 when he made similar assertions. Andersen recounts how Tim […]

Daughters of Maternal Impression by Arabella Proffer. A genre’s landscape should be littered with used tropes half-visible through their own smoke & surrounded by salvage artists with welding sets, otherwise it isn’t a genre at all. M. John Harrison, incisive as ever, on what he memorably labels “Pink Slime Fiction”. Elsewhere (and at much greater […]

• More Nabokov: The University Poem by Vladimir Nabokov, translated by Dmitri Nabokov and read by Ralph Fiennes. And Breitensträter – Paolino, a short story from Nabokov’s Russian period that’s only just been translated into English. • More LSD: “For decades, the U.S. government banned medical studies of the effects of LSD. But for one […]

The Golden Apples of the Sun, the first release on Arthur Magazine‘s Bastet label has been one of my favourite compilations of recent years. Golden Apples was/is one of those landmark music anthologies that appear from time to time and seem to fix a moment perfectly as they capture a sudden flourishing of new music, […]

Left: Comets on Fire at the Arthurfest, Los Angeles, 2005. Bassoons, flamenco, monks’ cowls… welcome to the new rock underground Julian Cope explains why heavy metal, so often maligned, is at the heart of today’s rock avant-garde Julian Cope Friday August 18, 2006 The Guardian IN APRIL THIS YEAR, after my half-hour stint as a […]

The New York Times finally gets hip to the new folk/weird America thing. Arthur receives a passing mention. Summer of Love Redux By WILL HERMES Published: June 18, 2006 ASA IRONS of the Vermont musical collective Feathers is stroking his beard. It is formidable beard; a biblical beard. He and his band mates—who mainly operate […]