October 2015 – { feuilleton }

A mix for Halloween: Teatro Grottesco

Teatro Grottesco by Feuilleton on Mixcloud

Presenting the tenth Halloween playlist, and another mix of my own. This year the compilation honours the recent Penguin collection of stories by Thomas Ligotti, hence the title and dedication. Whether a Ligotti theme can be perceived in the arrangement depends on the familiarity of the listener with Ligotti’s brand of weird fiction, but even if the mix communicates little in this direction having something to aim for helped me narrow the focus. The presence of David Lynch-related pieces is justified by Ligotti’s inclusion in a collection of fiction inspired by Lynch’s films.

As to some of the other selections: French composer Igor Wakhévitch is a {feuilleton} favourite whose orchestral works are unique, bizarre and often disturbing; Jean-Claude Eloy is another French composer who (like Tod Dockstader) has used electronics to create doom-laden dronescapes; and the piece by Sinoia Caves is an extract from the nightmarish bad-trip sequence in Beyond the Black Rainbow, a film directed by Panos Cosmatos.

Recent changes at Mixcloud mean that listeners can no longer see a tracklist before playback so here’s the detail:

Alan R. Splet, David Lynch, Ann Kroeber—Textured Night Wind Gently Rises And Falls (2000)
Igor Wakhévitch—Ergon (1970)
Coil—Cardinal Points (1988)
Tod Dockstader—Myst (2005)
Julee Cruise—Into The Night (1989)
Jean-Claude Eloy—Fushike-e (1er Extrait) (1979)
Mica Levi—Lonely Void (2014)
Stars Of The Lid—Taphead (1996)
Belbury Poly—A Thin Place (2005)
Einstürzende Neubauten—Armenia (1983)
Igor Wakhévitch—Amenthi (Attente De La Seconde Mort) (1973)
Sinoia Caves—1966 – Let The New Age Of Enlightenment Begin (2014)
Angelo Badalamenti—Dark Mood Woods/The Red Room (2007)
Bohren & Der Club Of Gore—The Art Of Coffins (2002)

Previously on { feuilleton }
• A mix for Halloween: Unheimlich Manoeuvres
• A mix for Halloween: Ectoplasm Forming
• A playlist for Halloween: Hauntology
• A playlist for Halloween: Orchestral and electro-acoustic
• A playlist for Halloween: Drones and atmospheres
• A playlist for Halloween: Voodoo!
• Dead on the Dancefloor
• Another playlist for Halloween
• A playlist for Halloween

Hugo Steiner-Prag’s The Ancestress

Another handful of macabre illustrations by Hugo Steiner-Prag. As before, these are minor works compared to the Golem illustrations and his illustrated Poe but it’s good to find something new. The Ancestress (1816) was a tragedy by Austrian dramatist Franz Grillparzer in which a woman killed by her husband for infidelity returns to haunt future generations. Steiner-Prag’s illustrations date from 1919, and may be seen at the Google Cultural Institute.

Continue reading “Hugo Steiner-Prag’s The Ancestress”

Cabaret des Truands

Up until 1950 Montmartre retained an aura of evil for provincials and foreign visitors, and did its best to satisfy them with a tawdry kind of satanism. The most famous of these places, in the Boulevard de Clichy, was called L’Enfer.

Philippe Jullian, Montmartre (1977)

L’Enfer is still the most famous of these vanished Parisian establishments thanks to photos by Eugène Atget and others of its hell-mouth entrance. Among the other novelty cabarets on the Boulevard de Clichy there was Le Ciel (Heaven) next door to L’Enfer, and the death-themed Cabaret du Néant (Cabaret of Nothingness, or Limbo as Jullian has it). The exterior of the latter was suitably funereal but otherwise mundane, although once inside you were in crypt-like surroundings.

Another cabaret with a striking exterior that I hadn’t come across before was at no. 100 Boulevard de Clichy. The Cabaret des Truands (Cabaret of Truants) had a generally medieval interior with staff dressed like serving wenches and troubadours, but the exterior could almost be that of a fairground haunted house, replete with spider webs and plaster grotesques. Descriptions in English are unclear but the spiders seem to relate to a shared establishment, L’Araignée. It’s surprising to think of all these extravagant façades standing in a single (long) street in the heart of Paris, but then Montmartre in the late 19th century was the wild nighttown. Searching for photos of the Cabaret des Truands reveals an exterior changing by degrees with the passing years.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Infernal entrances

The Monstrous

One of the books I was working on over the summer is officially published this week. The Monstrous is a horror anthology edited by Ellen Datlow, and the third Datlow collection that I’ve designed for Tachyon Publications after Lovecraft’s Monsters (2014) and Darkness: Two Decades of Modern Horror (2010).

My work on this new collection isn’t as full-on as for the Lovecraft volume: I designed the interior, and also illustrated each story but this time many of the illustrations are details or vignettes rather than full-page pictures. There are still 20 stories and over 20 illustrations, however, illustrating pieces by Jeffrey Ford, Peter Straub, Dale Bailey, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Gemma Files, Livia, Adam-Troy Castro, Kim Newman, Jack Dann & Gardner Dozois, Carole Johnstone, Brian Hodge, Stephen Graham Jones, Adam L. G. Nevill, Sofia Samatar, Terry Dowling, Glen Hirshberg, A. C. Wise, Steve Rasnic Tem, Christopher Fowler, and John Langan. Not everything here is a monster in the common sense of that word, the collection explores monstrousness in many different forms, from Sumerian demons and Japanese ghosts to Peter Straub’s disturbing portrait of a psychotic school teacher.

Missing from this selection of pages is additional pictorial material from Fortunio Liceti’s De Monstris (1665). The capitals on the contents pages are the collaged letterforms by Roman Cieslewicz taken from Dover’s book of bizarre and ornamental alphabets.

Continue reading “The Monstrous”

Oz magazine online

Oz 4. Cover art by Hapshash and the Coloured Coat.

From a television series out of time to a magazine very much of its time. The Prisoner and Oz magazine are exact contemporaries: issue 4 of Oz (June 1967) would have been on sale when Patrick McGoohan and co. were busy turning Portmeirion into The Village. In the past anyone interested in Oz had to either scour eBay for expensive paper copies or content themselves with the incomplete scans made available several years ago. But no longer, thanks to the University of Wollongong and editor Richard Neville who have made the entire run available as downloadable PDFs. These are much better quality than the previously available copies, and they also have poster inserts available as separate downloads. The wonderful set of Tarot designs created by the late Martin Sharp for issue 4 were faded and torn in the old scans so it’s a real pleasure to see this and other artwork looking so good.

Tarot designs from Oz 4 by Martin Sharp.

Continue reading “Oz magazine online”