August 2013 – Page 2 – { feuilleton }

The art of James Gleeson, 1915–2008

Funeral Procession in a Wounded Landscape (1945).

James Gleeson was an Australian Surrealist painter whose work I don’t think I’d seen before. The early pictures tend towards the post-Dalí school that crowds the second and third generation of Surrealist painting. More interesting for me are the later landscapes (if they can be labelled such) produced by a combination of collage and painting techniques. Some of HR Giger’s work in the 1970s explored similar organic terrain but this period didn’t last very long before he was into his biomechanical territory.

Locus Ganesa (1985).

Sky Techtonics (2002).

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive

Weekend links 174

Dress (2012) by Nao Ikuma.

• Two of my Cthulhu artworks can currently be seen in the Ars Necronomica exhibition at the Cohen Gallery, Brown University, Providence, RI. The exhibition is part of NecronomiCon, and runs to September 13th. In related news, my steampunk illustration has been nominated in the Visual category of this year’s Airship Awards. Winners will be announced at Steamcon V in October.

• “…the story of how a small cabal of British jazz obsessives conducting a besotted affair with the style arcana of Europe and America somehow became an army of scooter-borne rock fans…” Ian Penman looks back at the culture of Mod for the LRB.

• “What is it about the writer in the First World that wants the Third World writer to be nakedly political, a blunt instrument bludgeoning his world’s ills?” Gina Apostol on Borges, Politics, and the Postcolonial.

If someone had designed a work regime perfectly suited to maintaining the power of finance capital, it’s hard to see how they could have done a better job. Real, productive workers are relentlessly squeezed and exploited. The remainder are divided between a terrorised stratum of the, universally reviled, unemployed and a larger stratum who are basically paid to do nothing, in positions designed to make them identify with the perspectives and sensibilities of the ruling class (managers, administrators, etc) – and particularly its financial avatars – but, at the same time, foster a simmering resentment against anyone whose work has clear and undeniable social value. Clearly, the system was never consciously designed. It emerged from almost a century of trial and error. But it is the only explanation for why, despite our technological capacities, we are not all working 3–4 hour days.

On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber

• Ron Rosenbaum talks to Al Pacino about all the usual stuff, and reveals some detail about the actor’s obsessive interest in Oscar Wilde’s Salomé.

• More queer history: The Brixton Fairies and the South London Gay Community Centre, Brixton 1974–6.

• At Dangerous Minds: Anthony Burgess and the Top Secret Code in A Clockwork Orange

• Every day for 100 days, Jessica Svendsen redesigned a Josef Müller-Brockmann poster.

• LondonTypographica: Mapping the typographic landscape of London.

• Mix of the week: Secret Thirteen Mix 083 by Demdike Stare.

• At Strange Flowers: Alfred Kubin the writer.

• Derek Jarman’s sketchbooks.

• Rick Poynor on Collage Now.

• Thomas Leer: Private Plane (1978) | Tight As A Drum (1981) | Heartbeat (1985)

Doublevision Presents Cabaret Voltaire

Videocassette box insert. Design by Neville Brody.

A couple of years back I tracked down some of the releases on Cabaret Voltaire’s Doublevision video label, the early titles of which have never been reissued on DVD. The first Doublevision release was the Cabs’ collection of their own music videos which Mute Records reissued on DVD 2004. That reissue seems to be deleted for the moment so it’s good to find a copy of the original tape release on YouTube. As with the other Doublevision releases I was well aware of this but didn’t have a VHS player at the time so wasn’t eager to buy anything I couldn’t watch. Unlike the other releases I did get to see several of the tracks during the Cabs’ Doublevision video night at the Haçienda in 1983, an evening that ended with the group performing for an hour.

It’s good to be reminded of these videos, however crude they appear today. As with any early use of technology you need to bear in mind the limitations of the time. The tape was released in 1982 but the group had been experimenting with video equipment from about 1979 onwards. At that time commercial music video was just getting started but most of the examples on TV were paid for by the big record companies. Cabaret Voltaire and some of their associates in the UK Industrial scene—notably Throbbing Gristle and 23 Skidoo—were ahead of the game in acquiring equipment to make their own video recordings and promos. These videos were seldom shown on mainstream TV; I recall being thrilled to see a clip from the Nag, Nag, Nag promo on a pop programme but that was a rare one-off moment. The music industry was being forced to accommodate the awkward DIY merchants but the gates of broadcast television remained heavily policed.

And speaking of heavy policing, you get some of that here, the Cabs’ obsessions with coercion and control being illustrated by footage of riot squads, together with religious mania, medical surgery, psychotronic films and much else, all of it processed, fragmented and distorted. Direction was by the group and by St. John Walker, with an extract from Johnny YesNo (recently reissued by Mute) directed by Peter Care. I’ve been listening to Seconds Too Late a lot this week so it’s great to see a video for that song. There’s also a slight conundrum in the tracklisting: if you’re familiar with the free four-track single that came with The Crackdown album it seems that Badge of Evil and Moscow have had their titles swapped. The Moscow video track, however, includes a shot of an Aeroflot passenger plane so it’s more likely that the tracks on one side of the single were mis-labelled when they appeared a year later, an error carried over to the CD release.

Tracklist: Diskono / Obsession / Trash (Part 1) / Badge Of Evil / Nag, Nag, Nag / Eddie’s Out / Landslide / Photophobia / Trash (Part 2) / Seconds Too Late / Extract From Johnny YesNo / Walls Of Jericho / This Is Entertainment / Moscow

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Just the ticket: Cabaret Voltaire
• European Rendezvous by CTI
• TV Wipeout
• Seven Songs by 23 Skidoo
• Elemental 7 by CTI
• The Crackdown by Cabaret Voltaire
• Network 21 TV

Just the ticket: Cabaret Voltaire

The current issue of The Wire has a great appraisal by Keith Moliné of the musical history of Cabaret Voltaire, a well-timed piece given the recent announcement of forthcoming reissues from Mute Records. Having been a Cabophile from the start I’m rather biased, but the Wire piece has had me listening to the early albums and singles this week (between bouts of Zdenek Liska), and finding the passage of time has made those early recordings seem increasingly strange. Cabaret Voltaire were one of the few groups I liked obsessively enough to collect ephemera from newspapers and magazines. Knowing this, a friend gave me this curious fanzine/ticket from a gig the group played in Liverpool in February, 1981. The venue was Plato’s Ballroom at Pickwicks, and judging by the wording inside—”A Plato’s Publication”—it seems it was the venue’s idea to make the ticket a small (10.5 x 15 cm) booklet.

What’s surprising about this is that the fanzine the ticket is bundled with has nothing at all to do with music (or that other perennial of 80s post-punk culture, left-wing politics) but is a glimpse of life as a gay man in Liverpool. I’ve always found this fascinating for the daring it took to foist the thing on a bunch of unwitting Cabs fans, most of whom would have been straight men and not especially sympathetic to the subject matter. In the context of 1981 forcing people to look at grainy shots of naked men with accompanying text (by another man) declaring them to be a turn-on was a transgressive act. The only representations of anything gay in the popular media were a few camp (and therefore safe) comedians; Derek Jarman was still an underground figure, and as late as 1984 a BBC play about gay men was prefaced with a warning about its “contentious” subject.

I’ve no idea who was responsible for the fanzine, there are no credits, and it’s possible that the people involved didn’t want to be too easily identified. If the tone of the writing seems rather dramatic then, again, it’s important to see it in context of a country which wasn’t much more amenable to gay people than Russia is today. Saying things in public that most people didn’t want to hear was a challenging act; emotions often ran high.

Looking for information about the gig turned up this newspaper ad. (Who were Jell and Aardvarks, I wonder?) By an odd coincidence only the day before I’d found this upload from the same person of a very scarce compilation tape that happens to be from the same year, and which features contributions from Cabaret Voltaire’s Chris Watson and Richard Kirk. The Men With The Deadly Dreams was compiled by Geoff Rushton, aka John Balance of Coil, and was apparently limited to 200 copies. Among the other highlights there’s a track from Eyeless in Gaza, whose early work I like a great deal, and an electronic piece by Throbbing Gristle’s Chris Carter which I think is exclusive to this collection. Two artefacts—fanzine and tape—with brown paper covers that give a snapshot of Britain’s underground culture in 1981.

Continue reading “Just the ticket: Cabaret Voltaire”

Two sides of Liska

Et Cetera (1966).

A little more on the music of Czech soundtrack composer Zdenek Liska (1922–1983). Liska seems to stand in relation to Czech cinema as Ennio Morricone does to that of the cinema of Italy, being similarly prolific, highly regarded, and idiosyncratic to a degree that makes his work immediately recognisable. Both men could also draw on their experience outside the film world to fuel their scores: Morricone for many years was a performer with Gruppo di Improvvisazione di Nuova Consonanza, a group of Italian free improvisers, while Liska’s work with electro-acoustic composition and early electronic music explains the frequent eruptions in his lush orchestrations of tape effects, exaggerated echoes and other forms of artificial processing. This kind of cross-pollination doesn’t seem so surprising today but it’s striking and surprising in soundtracks from the 1960s.

Good examples of the opposite poles of Liska can be found in two of Jan Svankmajer’s early shorts. Et Cetera (1966) is one of the director’s most formal exercises, a series of crude drawings (or cut-outs) coming to life to perform a repetitive routine before being interrupted by the words “ET CETERA”. The film plays with the audience by beginning with a title card that states “The End”, and the piece as a whole could easily be screened as an endless loop. Liska’s score is a combination of fairly minimal orchestration with a variety of electro-acoustic effects which are closer to Pierre Henry or Ilhan Mimaroglu than other Eastern European composers.

Shade of Magritte: The Flat (1968).

At the opposite end of the scale there’s the score for The Flat (1968), a typical piece of Svankmajer Surrealism with an unfortunate individual locked in a room where everything, from walls to furniture, contradicts his expectations. René Magritte casts a long shadow over this one, with director Juraj Herz making a brief appearance as a bowler-hatted man carrying a chicken. Liska’s score has a driving and reverberent choral rhythm that always makes me think of Krzysztof Komeda’s similar music for Roman Polanski’s Dance of the Vampires (1967). For such a short film it’s a remarkable piece of orchestration. The Brothers Quay are great Liska enthusiasts, and used some of the score from The Flat (and two other Liska pieces) for their 1984 film The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer, an animated portrait of the director.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Liska’s Golem
• The Cremator by Juraj Herz