June 2017 – { feuilleton }

From The Furthest Signals

It’s been a busy year so far for A Year In The Country with two themed compilation albums being followed this month by a third, From The Furthest Signals. The latest theme is an intriguing one, taking as its starting point the erasing of broadcast tapes by British TV companies in the 1960s and early 1970s which destroyed hundreds of hours of dramas, concerts and other programmes. This was done as a money-saving measure (tape being expensive and reusable) at a time when the output of the BBC and the independent stations was regarded as mostly ephemeral and of little value. There was also a patronising class aspect to the practice: John Peel used to bitterly remind people that the BBC had saved its tapes of gardening shows while wiping concerts by the likes of Captain Beefheart.

Track list:
1) Circle/Temple – The Séance/Search for Muspel-Light
2) David Colohan – Brass Rubbings Club (Opening Titles)
3) A Year In The Country – A Multitude Of Tumblings
4) Sharron Kraus – Asterope
5) Time Attendant – The Dreaming Green
6) Depatterning – Aurora In Andromeda
7) Sproatly Smith – The Thistle Doll
8) Field Lines Cartographer – The Radio Window
9) Grey Frequency – Ident (IV)
10) Keith Seatman – Curious Noises & Distant Voices
11) Polypores – Signals Caught Off The Coast
12) The Hare And The Moon – Man Of Double Deed
13) Pulselovers – Endless Repeats/Eternal Return
14) Listening Center – Only The Credits Remain

All those wiped broadcasts may be lost down on Earth but they still exist somewhere in the halo of television and radio signals which is expanding into space. From The Furthest Signals is a speculation about the content of these remote signals, a tuning in to decayed transmissions and imagined broadcasts (that word—”broadcast”—being examined here in its widest possible sense). Some of the entries nod to fictional analogues: The Séance/Search For The Muspel Light by Circle/Temple is a reference to A Voyage to Arcturus, David Lindsay’s unique and remarkable science-fiction novel. Other entries like Brass Rubbings Club (Opening Titles) by David Colohan are suggestions for imaginary theme tunes. This is an excellent collection, one of the best to date from A Year In The Country with pieces ranging from the folk-oriented balladry of Sproatly Smith to the deteriorating electronics of Grey Frequency. The album ends with a number by Listening Center, Only The Credits Remain, whose weightless harmonies wouldn’t be out of place on Apollo by Brian Eno & Daniel Lanois.

From The Furthest Signals is out now in the familiar range of hand-crafted monochrome formats.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Restless Field
• The Marks Upon The Land
• The Forest / The Wald
• The Quietened Bunker
• Fractures

Weekend links 366

Dandelion (2009) by Tomoko Kashiki.

• “Standard Ebooks takes ebooks from sources like Project Gutenberg, formats and typesets them using a carefully designed and professional-grade style guide, lightly modernizes them, fully proofreads and corrects them, and then builds them to take advantage of state-of-the-art ereader and browser technology.”

• Obscenity and the Arts, a previously unpublished essay by Anthony Burgess, will appear in book form later this year via Pariah Press.

• Mixes of the week: VF Mix 97: Talk Talk by The Last Dinosaur, and Secret Thirteen Mix 225 by Janek Schaefer.

Rub any two writers together and similarities will show. No two writers, however different, are completely different. Here’s a crucial instance: Lovecraft and Ballard both put architecture at the heart of their fiction, even though neither had the slightest formal training in the subject. And it is via this interest that the two intersect in an unexpected way. They are connected, through time and space, by that most humble of architectural events: the corner, the junction between two walls. What Lovecraft and Ballard did was to make the corner into a place of nightmares — and in doing so, they reveal its secret history.

Will Wiles in a long and rewarding essay, The Corner of Lovecraft and Ballard

• Dungeons Deep, Forests Dark – A beginner’s guide to Dungeon Synth by Daniel Pietersen.

• Alex Ross on Joséphin Péladan, the Symbolists and the occult roots of Modernism.

• Cooling the Tube: engineering heat out of the [London] Underground by IanVisits.

• Caroline on the mysteries of Pye Corner: Flames, poltergeists and bodysnatchers.

• The Saint of Sin City – Tony Kail Visits Las Vegas’ Santuario de la Santa Muerte.

• Photographs of Art Nouveau architecture by Keiichi Tahara.

• A stream of the new Porter Ricks album, Anguilla Electrica.

• Jasper Sharp on 100 years of Japanese animation.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: 197 clocks.

• On The Corner [Take 4] (1972) by Miles Davis | Corner Crew Dub (1976) by Augustus Pablo | Empty Avenues And Dark Corners (Pye Corner Audio Mix) (2013) by John Foxx and the Belbury Circle

Under the Pendulum Sun by Jeannette Ng

Once again I’m a little behind with putting new pieces of work on these pages, a consequence of the reduced rate of posting and the delay between finishing various works and them being announced by publishers.

Under the Pendulum Sun is a fantasy novel by Jeannette Ng whose cover was revealed this week by Angry Robot. I was very pleased with the way this one turned out so it’s good to see it being given a positive reception. Jeannette’s novel is a dark hybrid of Gothic drama and fairy story, the main characters being a pair of Victorian missionaries attempting to bring the Gospel to Arcadia, a very real and very sinister fairyland. The model is that of the Victorian missionary heading into what were regarded as the benighted places of the world then finding themselves and their beliefs subverted by the alien culture they were hoping to enlighten. It’s a clever concept, and the novel is filled with strange invention, so much so that I had to scale down the amount of things I wanted to get into the cover. This often happens with inventive novels (the ones I’ve done for KW Jeter suffered from this), you find yourself with enough material for three or more covers but only the one cover to contain everything.

There’s no need for me to go into any detail about the art and design when I did that earlier for the cover reveal at Fantasy Faction. The book itself will be published at the beginning of October.

Weekend links 365

Il Fascino Della Morte (1988) by Albin Brunovsky.

• One of the forthcoming books featuring my cover art is Behold! Oddities, Curiosities, & Undefinable Wonders, a story collection due to be published next month by Crystal Lake Publishing. Bleeding Cool talked to editor Doug Murano about the collection and its contributors.

• Six episodes of Tom Keating on Painters, a TV series from 1983 presented by Britain’s most well-known art forger. In six further episodes Keating examines the work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists.

• Opening at the Guggenheim, NYC, at the end of this month: Mystical Symbolism: The Salon de la Rose+Croix in Paris, 1892–1897.

The most potent form of gatekeeping is religion. When certain beliefs are deemed sacred, they are put beyond questioning. To challenge such beliefs is to commit blasphemy. The accusation of cultural appropriation is a secular version of the charge of blasphemy. It’s the insistence that certain beliefs and images are so important to particular cultures that they may not appropriated by others.

In Defence of Cultural Appropriation by Kenan Malik

• Mixes of the week: FACT Mix 605 by Anthony Parasole, and Secret Thirteen Mix 224 by Fanny Kaplan.

• Artist Tom Phillips at 80: “I’m still reading books. Nothing changes and everything changes.”

• Negative Chambers is a new album by Yair Elazar Glotman and Mats Erlandsson.

• “Pornhub is the Kinsey Report of our time,” says Maureen O’Connor.

• “Postmodernism is dead. What comes next?” asks Alison Gibbons.

• Cat Street View

• Mystic Eyes (1965) by Them | Mystical Dream (1965) by The Roland Kirk Quartet | Mystic Green (1985) by Rain Parade

A Portrait of the Author

Portrait of James Joyce (1929) by Constantin Brancusi.

A post for Bloomsday. Joyce’s writing was always concerned more with words and phonics than with the appearance of things—understandable given his failing eyesight—but throughout his life he was a persistently attractive subject for portraits and caricatures. This was partly a consequence of being surrounded by artists but it’s also the case that the figure he cut as a man, especially in his younger years, is striking enough to be recognisable in a hasty sketch as much as a study in oils. Prior to John Lennon, Joyce’s round spectacles are the most famous in the arts of the 20th century; when added to a high forehead, a trim moustache and beard, a broad-brimmed hat and a lanky figure you have a subject that even a non-caricaturist such as myself was able to deal with when drawing the Reverbstorm series.

I’ve limited the examples here to portraits produced when Joyce was still alive. There are further examples to be found (the Augustus John is one of a series), while those produced after Joyce’s death proliferate without end.

Portrait of James Joyce (1920) by Wyndham Lewis.

Joyce at Midnight (c. 1930) by Desmond Harmsworth.

James Joyce (1930) by Augustus John.

James Joyce (1932) by César Albin.

James Joyce (1935) by Jacques-Emile Blanche.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Labyrinth
• The Duc de Joyeux
• Dubliners
• Covering Joyce
• James Joyce in Reverbstorm
• Joyce in Time
• Happy Bloomsday
• Passages from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake
• Books for Bloomsday