Hexa (1971) by Victor Vasarely.
• New music of the week is Tape 05, three minutes from Boards Of Canada following their thirteen-year silence, which was released on Thursday after several days of the group and their record label teasing a comeback with mysterious VHS cassettes and cryptic posters. I’ve been listening to the Sandison brothers’ discography for most of the week while trying to get a major illustration commission finished; this revelation has been the icing on a deteriorated, over-processed cake. I’m now looking forward to whatever emerges next.
• The Long London Uncovered: Alan Moore (again) and Iain Sinclair (again) in conversation. Alan’s second novel in the Long London cycle, I Hear A New World, will be published next month.
• RIP Chris Mullen. Not a name that most will recognise but Mullen’s sprawling website, The Visual Telling of Stories, has been linked here on many occasions. A remarkable resource.
• More new music: Boots On The Ground by Massive Attack, Tom Waits; Angel Lost by Luca Formentini; Phaser For The Ocean, Chorus For The Moon by Hatchback.
• Coming soon from Strange Attractor: Sensual Laboratories, Light Shows, Experimental, Film and Psychedelic Art by Sophia Satchell-Baeza.
• At Public Domain Review: “A beautiful purplish hue”: Frank Dudley Beane’s experience with ergot and Cannabis Indica (1884).
• Mixes of the week: An Invisible Jukebox mix for Irmin Schmidt at The Wire; and DreamScenes – April 2026 at Ambientblog.
• At The Quietus: Greg Anderson and Stephen O’Malley of Sunn O))) discuss their love of hiking.
• At Film Quarterly: Elinor Dolliver on the surprising folklore of analogue horror.
• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Gilway Paradox.
• The Strange World of…Spacemen 3.
• Tape Kebab (1974) by Can | The Attic Tapes (1975/6) by Cabaret Voltaire | The Black Mill Video Tape (2012) by Pye Corner Audio
Sorry to hear about Chris Mullen. I wonder if the site will continue to be curated or just archived? J F Ptak, the manager of one of my favorite sites, PTAK Science Books, has cut back on his blogging over the last year, although he keeps his store open. It’s easy to take these resources for granted and forget how dependent we are on enthusiastic individuals for the quality to be found online. Present company included!
Mullen’s family may keep paying the bills for the place. Otherwise there’s always the web section of the Internet Archive. I ought to try downloading everything. It’s usually fairly easy to preserve a clone of an entire site if it’s HTML-only.
I have a couple of archaeologist friends who tell me that archaeologists are worried that our present era will be a dark one for researchers in the future. People no longer write letters or leave physical records in the way they used to do. But then in the long term nothing will last. A million years from now it’s unlikely that Stonehenge and the pyramids will still be standing after the continents have rearranged themselves, never mind everything else that humanity has produced.