2017 – Page 4 – { feuilleton }

All The Merry Year Round

The appearance of the word “merry” in the title of this, the last in a series of themed compilations by A Year In The Country, rang alarm bells now that the end of the year is approaching. Christmas wretchedness isn’t the theme of the collection, however, “merry” in this case owes more to its prevalence in British folk culture:

All The Merry Year Round is an exploration of an alternative or otherly calendar that considers how traditional folklore and its tales now sit alongside and sometimes intertwine with cultural or media based folklore; stories we discover, treasure, are informed and inspired by but which are found, transmitted and passed down via television, film and technology rather than through local history and the ritual celebrations of the more long-standing folkloric calendar.

Track list:
1) United Bible Studies — Towards The Black Sun
2) Circle/Temple — Rigel Over Flag Fen
3) Magpahi — She Became Ashes and Left With the Wind
4) Cosmic Neighbourhood — Winter Light
5) Field Lines Cartographer — Azimuth Alignment Ritual
6) Polypores — Meridian
7) A Year In The Country — Tradition and Modernity
8) Sproatly Smith — Moons (Part 1)
9) Pulselovers — Tales Of Jack
10) The Hare And The Moon & Jo Lepine — I’ll Bid My Heart Be Still
11) Time Attendant — In a Strange Stillness
12) The Séance — Chetwynd Haze

Some of the previous entries in the year-long series have been more concerned with interstellar space than traditions and customs so All The Merry Year Round may be regarded as a return home, even if the opening number by United Bible Studies is entitled Towards The Black Sun. As with some of the label’s earlier compilations, extended drones and atmospherics by regular contributors Polypores and Time Attendant alternate with contemporary takes on the folk idiom by Magpahi, Sproatly Smith, and The Hare And The Moon, the latter offering an excellent rendition by Jo Lepine of the Scottish ballad I’ll Bid My Heart Be Still. This is another potent collection which doesn’t ignore the sinister potential of winter time, a quality I appreciate when recent offerings from the Ghost Box label have tended to be more box than ghost. The final piece on All The Merry Year Round is Chetwynd Haze by The Séance, a title that refers to ghost-story writer Ronald Chetwynd-Hayes, and a recording that provides an eerie and startling close to a collection mercifully free of seasonal cheer.

All The Merry Year Round will be released at the end of the month but is available for pre-order now.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Quietened Cosmologists
• Undercurrents
• From The Furthest Signals
• The Restless Field
• The Marks Upon The Land
• The Forest / The Wald
• The Quietened Bunker
• Fractures

Weekend links 385

• It won’t be out until late January—and then in the UK only—but the blu-ray premiere of The Mystery of Picasso (1956) by Henri-Georges Clouzot was announced this week. The initial run of the discs (there’s also a DVD) will include a booklet containing my essay about the film, something I was very pleased and honoured to be asked to write. Clouzot’s remarkable study of Picasso drawing and painting for the camera was made immediately after his masterwork, The Wages of Fear (also newly available on UK blu-ray), and this new edition will include two short extras, one of which, A Visit to Picasso (1949) by Paul Haesaerts, is an excellent precursor/companion to the main feature. More on this subject later.

• At the Internet Archive: an almost complete run of The Twilight Zone Magazine (1981–1989). While masquerading as a TV-series spin-off, TZ under the editorship of TED Klein was an excellent periodical devoted to horror and dark fantasy. In addition to running original fiction by major authors (Stephen King was a regular), the magazine contained features about older writers such as Lovecraft and Machen along with book reviews by Thomas Disch, film reviews by Gahan Wilson, interviews and more.

• “Bram Stoker was gay,” says Tom Cardamone in a review of Something in the Blood: The Untold Story of Bram Stoker, the Man Who Wrote Dracula by David J. Skal. I’ve not read Skal’s book so can’t comment on its claims but his earlier Hollywood Gothic (about Dracula on page and screen) includes some discussion of “sexual ambiguity” in Stoker’s work.

• Mixes of the week: FACT mix 625 by Elena Colombi, Secret Thirteen Mix 235 by Rhys Fulber, and XLR8R Podcast 514 by Tommaso Cappellato.

• Help, Help, The Globolinks! is a previously unreleased electronic soundtrack by Suzanne Ciani, out next week.

• La Région Centrale (1971), Michael Snow’s epic of landscape gyrations in two parts, here and here.

• Alexander Calder and the Optimism of Modernism: Jed Perl in Conversation with Morgan Meis.

• Illustrations by Lynd Ward for The Haunted Omnibus (1935) edited by Alexander Laing.

• Daniel Dylan Wray on the gay-porn music of disco pioneer Patrick Cowley.

• It’s that man again (and his drawings): Ernst Haeckel: the art of evolution.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Steve Erickson presents A Black Psychedelia Primer.

• Bootsy Collins‘ favourite albums.

• Picasso (1948) by Coleman Hawkins | Pablo Picasso (1976) by The Modern Lovers | Picasso Suite pt. 1 (1993) by David Murray Octet

An unseasonable bloom

It’s a strange thing to compare the covers of Der Orchideengarten in Franz Rottensteiner’s The Fantasy Book (1978) with the facsimile of the first issue which has just been published by Zagava. For years the two covers and Rottensteiner’s laudatory description were all I knew of a magazine that nobody else seemed to write about. As with all such enigmas, this made the magazine all the more intriguing. Der Orchideengarten was short-lived, running from 1919 to 1921, and German, which no doubt did little to aid its post-war reputation. Whatever reputation it may have had was quickly eclipsed by Weird Tales and a host of other Anglophone publications some of whose creations still dominate the fantasy landscape today. One of the many services Rottensteiner’s study provided was to treat fantasy as a genre with manifestations all over the world, not only in Britain and America.

The visibility of Der Orchideengarten began to change in 2009 when Will at the now-defunct A Journey Round My Skull, having also had his curiosity piqued by Rottensteiner’s book, acquired a few copies of the magazine. I ran some of the interior illustrations here, the sight of which was genuinely revelatory since these weird and macabre drawings had been buried for 90 years. The situation changed again late last year when the entire run of the magazine was made available at the University of Heidelberg’s remarkable online archive.

What struck me in 2009—and what continues to strike me today—is the difference in tone between the illustrations, covers included, of Der Orchideengarten with its later Anglophone counterparts, especially Weird Tales. The latter presented itself very much in the pulp tradition, and many of the illustrators of the early issues were just as happy working with adventure or detective titles as they were with fantasy or horror. The German artists are less illustrational and much more grotesque, closer at times to Expressionist painting than anything you’d find in an American magazine. I continue to wonder how fantasy as a genre might have developed if it had owed less to Britain’s ghost stories and America’s adventure idioms.

Any speculation is easier now we have this facsimile of the first issue which (as I mentioned in a weekend post) contains a translation into English by Helen Grant of the complete contents of the magazine. This has been cleverly achieved by interleaving narrower pages of translated text with the originals so the integrity of the magazine is maintained. The facsimile is a quality production with superb printing of all the illustrations and graphics. One of the ironies of our connected world is that contemporary magazines continue to be killed off while the easier accessibility of so much culture from the past makes resurrections like this one more likely.

Whether we see more facsimile issues will no doubt depend on the success of this first number which may be ordered here. A few more page samples follow.

Continue reading “An unseasonable bloom”

Macabre mixes

Lurch approves.

It’s that time of year again but I’ve been so busy for the past few months that I haven’t had time to think about a Halloween mix, never mind piece one together. So rather than an original work I’m returning to the previous policy of recommending those by other people.

First up is a multi-set offering at No Condition Is Permanent. I did have a vague idea earlier this year to do a mix of horror-themed rock’n’roll but it’s a good job I didn’t since this collection is much more wide-ranging and original than anything I would have compiled.

For Bleep.com there’s a new mix by the very adept DJ Food who blends the Death Waltz Originals electronica catalogue with samples of an interview about nightmares, phantasms and other sinister anomalies.

And the “Where We’re Going, We Won’t Need Eyes To See” Mix by The Curiosity Pipe covers all points in between, being “an unpleasant mix of noise, drone, metal, jazz, dark ambient, soundtracks, field recordings and electronica (with a few popular horror film snippets thrown in for good measure).”

Happy Halloween!

Previously on { feuilleton }
• A mix for Halloween: Analogue Spectres
• A mix for Halloween: Teatro Grottesco
• 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

Weekend links 384

Sultans of Swing by Samantha Muljat.

• Pain & Pleasure, Indivisible: Mat Colegate talks to Stephen Thrower (Coil, Cyclobe) about the meeting between Coil and Clive Barker that would have led to Coil scoring Barker’s Hellraiser if the studio hadn’t rejected the music.

• “From Arsedestroyer to Zoogz Rift: 50 underground albums you’ve never heard of” The usual presumption—I’ve been listening to The Groundhogs since the mid-1980s—but it’s a good list.

• More magazines at the Internet Archive: an incomplete run of British science-fiction monthly Interzone; and a complete (?) run of the film magazine for horror (and gore) obsessives, Fangoria.

• “…it’s background music, is what it is. But there’s nothing wrong with that. I’m very proud of it.” John Carpenter discussing his soundtrack music and his new album, Anthology.

• Mixes of the week: Aral Mix 05 by Ellen Arkbro, Secret Thirteen Mix 234 by FOQL, and Samhain Séance Six: Triffid Witch by The Ephemeral Man.

• Dallas Killers Club: Nicholson Baker reads a stack of books about the Kennedy assassinations then draws his own conclusions.

• Michael Flanagan on searching for LGB histories of Neopaganism, the paranormal and the occult in San Francisco.

• At Lounge Books: author Amelia Mangan on horror, old and new, and her favourite things.

• At Monoskop: the (almost) complete works of James Joyce in one convenient epub.

• Jillian Steinhauer on Duchamp’s last riddle.

• Hell Raiser (1973) by Sweet | Hell’s Bells (1989) by Rhythm Devils | Hell’s Winter (2011) by Earth