The Werewolf of Anarchy

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Synchronicity is as universal as gravity. When you start looking you find it everywhere.

Thus Discordian anarchist Stella Maris, making her first appearance in my re-reading of Illuminatus! (previously) in a week when more synchronicities related to the novel have been imposing themselves. “The Werewolf of Anarchy” (published on the 23rd of the month, of course) was a picture that turned up a couple of days ago when I was searching through the back issues of Punch magazine. Punch did a lot of this kind of thing, dropping the humour now and then for some heavy-handed pictorial comment about international affairs. Given my current reading the word “anarchy” was bound to catch my attention but the werewolf image is unusual—why not a regular wolf?—while being further bound to the novel via Robert Anton Wilson’s fondness for Lon Chaney Jr’s lycanthrope. I often wondered why Wilson used to refer to this as much as he did. Illuminatus! mentions the werewolf legend from the first Universal film in its grab-bag of cultural weirdness, and I seem to recall there being more references in Wilson’s later novels. In the 1980s Wilson was living in Ireland where he wrote a werewolf-themed song with a local band, The Golden Horde, one of the few (only?) Irish groups who can be counted as part of the fleeting psychedelic revival that took place in the middle of the decade. The Golden Horde’s first album, The Chocolate Biscuit Conspiracy, appeared in 1985, and ends with Lawrence Talbot Suite, a number which is “explained” with the following words: “Lon Chaney Jr, The Easter Bunny, The primeval sleeve note, red curtain, the stings, a crush-can dominates a scowling buddha”. Whatever that means.

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Meanwhile, my RSS feed informs me that Pentagrams Of Discordia have just released a new album whose final number bears the title Planetary Radiation (RAW); Robert Anton Wilson turns up again at the end of the track to talk about Chaos Theory in relation to Discordian history. And the above item arrived in the mail this week, a two-disc CD release of a newly-discovered live recording of Steve Hillage and band performing at the Bataclan in 1979. I own a lot of live Hillage albums, along with all his studio recordings, and this is one of the very best. The concert is pertinent for including an early rendition of New Age Synthesis (Unzipping The Zype), a song that made its first appearance in 1979 on the studio side of Live Herald, and which contains what may be the first reference to Illuminatus! in song form (the album sleeve includes thanks “to Robert Anton Wilson for his intriguing books”). Hillage offered an explanation of the studio songs’ lyrics in his own mysterious sleeve note:

For those who find the lingo a bit strange—“unzipping the zype” can be defined as (rising organ music please!):—the spontaneous inner exorcism by which a person can neutralise the harmful, consciousness-distorting effects of the artificial elemental spirits (zypes) formed around each word of everyday language.

The zypes are built up by the identification process by which we manufacture “reality.” Occultists refer to them as “astral glamour,” yogis as “the web of Maya”—but no word is zype-proof, not even zype. Cherish this phrase—it’s a royal flush!

Hmm, okay… No indication there or in the lyrics as to how you go about “unzipping the zype”. New Age Synthesis is a call-and-response between Hillage and partner Miquette Giraudy in which Hillage recounts his experience with the zypes. In the first verse he mentions “word spirits” to which Giraudy replies “Egregores!”, an occult concept which—quelle surprise—has connections to Chaos Magic. In the next verse Hillage blames the existence of the word spirits on the Illuminati—”Paranoia!” responds Giraudy—only to discard this claim in the lines that follow: “It isn’t really them at all, but you and me”. Hillage’s albums of the 1970s are filled with all manner of New Age business—flying saucers, ley lines, mysticism of various kinds—but he isn’t a David Icke. Why werewolves? What zypes? Mysteries abound. This is a great album, anyway, in or out of the Synchronicity Zone.

Previously on { feuilleton }
Ewige Blumenkraft
Twinkle, twinkle little stars

Weekend links 672

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Le Vice Errant (1902) by Vincent Lorant-Heilbronn.

• “So however surreal those cities, the invisible ones that he builds, they have their counterpart in the real. They always have their counterpart in visible cities.” Darran Anderson on Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities.

• At Wormwoodiana: Mark Valentine on the centenary of The Riddle and Other Stories by Walter de la Mare, with special attention paid to The Vats, a very strange story.

• New music: A Bad Attitude by African Head Charge; Lapsed Gasps by Push For Night + Jon Mueller; Forevervoiceless by Brian Eno.

The strands of medicine, consciousness expansion, intoxication, addiction, and crime were tightly entangled in fin-de-siècle Paris, where ether and chloroform circulated among bohemian demi-mondaines alongside morphine, opium, cocaine, hashish, and wormwood-infused absinthe. These solvents were often carried in small glass vials and medicine bottles by the asthmatic, tubercular, and neurasthenic, added to patent tonics and syrups, and, on occasion, to cocktails: an ether-soaked strawberry floating in champagne produced a heady rush, the fruit preventing the volatile liquid from evaporating too quickly. Literary references to ether abounded, either as a signifier of decadence or as a literary prop to shift a realistic narrative into the landscape of dreams and symbols, where its dissociative qualities became a portal to strange mental states, psychological hauntings, uncanny doublings, and slippages of space and time.

Mike Jay on Jean Lorrain and the ether dreams of fin-de-siècle Paris

• At Aquarium Drunkard: Jim Jarmusch and Carter Logan talk about the recording of Silver Haze, their first album as Sqürl.

James Balmont offers a beginner’s guide to the films of Dario Argento.

• At Unquiet Things: Rachael Bridge’s Luminous, Technicolor Shadows.

• Mix of the week: A mix for The Wire by Erika.

Ether Ships (1978) by Steve Hillage | Ether (1998) by Redshift | Ether (2000) by Coil

Weekend links 669

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Love (1973), a poster by Nicole Claveloux.

• “Warner Brothers had been keen on a Rolling Stones movie. Jagger was keen on being a movie star. But Donald Cammell’s script was no Beatles’ jolly japes musical comedy…” Des Barry examines the ninth minute of Cammell & Roeg’s Performance.

• “…part of what made his 1970s work so original was the degree to which his band cross-pollinated guitar with synthesizer.” Aquarium Drunkard explores the esoteric jazz-rock of Steve Hillage.

• Magma, the cosmic jazz-rock group from France, have been around for 50 years without making a music video. Hakëhn Deïs is their first.

There was half-Tarkovsky embedded in async, “Solari” and “Stakra” and “Walker”, a hand outstretched to those great poems of living and light that we call films. “I had a strange dream last night,” Andrey Tarkovsky wrote in one of the diary entries collected in Instant Light, “I was looking up at the sky and it was very, very light and soft; and high, high above me it seemed to be slowly boiling, like light that had materialised like the fibres of a sunlit fabric, like silken living stitches in a piece of Japanese embroidery.”

David Toop remembers Ryuichi Sakamoto

• “Floor796 is an ever-expanding animation scene showing the life of the 796th floor of the huge space station…”

• The Electrifying Dreamworld of The Green Hand: Dan Clowes on the comic-art of Nicole Claveloux.

• At Bandcamp: Andy Thomas on the post-punk pop subversion of David Cunningham.

• At Unquiet Things: An enigmatic baroness and her collection of skulls.

• New music: River Of Dreams by Romance & Dean Hurley.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Ray Gun.

• Mix of the week: DreamScenes – April 2023.

• RIP Al Jaffee.

Skulls Of Broken Hill (1996) by Bill Laswell | The Bees Made Honey In The Lion’s Skull (2008) by Earth | Black Skulls (2018) by Jóhann Jóhannsson

Weekend links 658

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Also Sprach Zarathustra (1972), a blacklight poster by Asher Ein Dor.

• “Squaring the Circle (The Story of Hipgnosis) is a reasonably informative, if rather dry, look at a subject with much more potential for exploration,” says Dan Shindel, reviewing Anton Corbijn’s feature-length documentary about the album-cover design team. Sounds like a missed opportunity, on the whole, although the history of Hipgnosis has been so thoroughly explored over the course of several books (including a very recent one by Aubrey Powell) that any documentary seems almost superfluous. What I’d most like to see is something we’ll never have, a film about the company directed by the late Storm Thorgerson. And on that note, Thorgerson’s two-part documentary about art and drugs, The Art of Tripping (previously), has resurfaced on YouTube here and here.

• “LunaNet consists of a set of rules that would enable all lunar satellite navigation, communication and computing systems to form a single network similar to the Internet, regardless of which nation installs them. Setting lunar time is part of a much bigger picture. ‘The idea is to produce a Solar System internet,” says Gramling. ‘And the first part would be at the Moon.'” Elizabeth Gibney reports on plans to create a consistent time zone for the Moon.

• “Listening to 12, one cannot help but be struck by this deep expression of Sakamoto’s pain, of his human frailty, strength, and uncertainty about the future.” Geeta Dayal on Ryuichi Sakamoto’s latest album.

• At Public Domain Review: Illusory Wealth: Victor Dubreuil’s Cryptic Currencies by Dorinda Evans.

• At Aquarium Drunkard: Journey to inner space with The Groundhogs.

• DJ Food investigates the High Meadows psychedelic poster site.

• New music: Sub-Photic Scenario by Runar Magnusson.

• At Wyrd Daze: Disco Rd: 23 pages 23 minutes.

The Strange World of…Chris Watson.

Lunar Musick Suite (1976) by Steve Hillage | Lunar Cruise (1990) by Midori Takada & Masahiko Satoh | Luna Park (2006) by Pet Shop Boys

Twinkle, twinkle little stars

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Xitintoday (1978) by Nik Turner’s Sphynx.

It’s been a long time since I’ve had a reason to write about Barney Bubbles but I’ve finally worked out why one of his more mysterious album covers looks the way it does.

When Nik Turner was unceremoniously kicked out of Hawkwind in 1976 he headed to Cairo to consider his next move. While there he recorded an hour or two of flute improvisations inside the sarcophagus in the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid of Cheops. The resulting tapes provided the basis for his first solo album, Xitintoday, which was released in 1978 on the Charisma label, and credited to Nik Turner’s Sphynx. Steve Hillage produced the album, helping to craft the meandering solos into a suite of songs based on passages from The Egyptian Book of the Dead. Xitintoday is one of the more unusual concept albums from a decade filled with such things. I’ve always liked it, in many ways it’s closer to Hillage’s oeuvre than Turner’s, as well as being very different to anything else in the Hawk-sphere.

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A faded promo badge. The ballpoint scrawl is Mr Turner’s autograph.

Barney Bubbles’ design for the album is also very different to anything else in the Hawk-sphere, an example of what might be called his High Modernist period, when the hippy motifs and decorative pastiches of his earlier work were replaced with bold, flat colours and playful graphic designs. Xitintoday was released with a square booklet containing lyrics, notes about the mythological theme, and a series of pictures which combine diagrams and Ancient Egyptian reliefs with calligram-like wordplay. The back cover of the album exemplifies the latter, with the word “Day” spelled out in much smaller words reading “Night”; inside the booklet there’s a page for Isis the Moon Goddess where the words “Isis is is is is…” form a curve around a photograph of the Moon. The cover design continues the cosmic theme with a field of star shapes in which each star is created by the word “Twinkle”. The star field makes sense in the context of the booklet but I’ve wondered for a long time why Barney Bubbles thought it was a suitable cover design rather than simply being another booklet page.

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The solution arrived last week when work-related research had me looking through old design books for examples of Ancient Egyptian ornamentation. One of these, The Grammar of Ornament (1856) by Owen Jones, contains several pages of full-colour plates filled with Egyptian pattern samples.

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And on one of those pages there are these two squares which made me think immediately of the Xitintoday cover. This might seem tenuous when the cover design doesn’t feature any red dots but Barney Bubbles was an avid Egyptophile, avid enough to name his son after one of the Egyptian gods. A quick search revealed many more examples of this pattern which are closer matches for the cover design.

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It turns out that the yellow star on a blue background was a common way of representing the night sky in Egyptian art, you’ll find the same stars in wall paintings and on the ceilings inside royal tombs.

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For years I’ve regarded the Xitintoday cover as being uncharacteristically random and abstract, surprisingly so when Bubbles designs from the same period are all so smart and well-considered. This discovery puts the Sphynx album in the same category, a design which avoids many more obvious solutions for a combination of the very old and the very new. Another feature of Barney Bubbles design is a kind of “Aha!” moment, when your appreciation of the design catches up with the thinking behind it. The appreciation this time has taken an outrageously long time to arrive but I’m pleased to have got there in the end.

Previously on { feuilleton }
Led Zeppelin IV: Jimmy Page versus Little Bo-Peep
The Grammar of Ornament revisited
On the pyramid