John – { feuilleton }

Frank C. Papé’s The Well of Saint Clare

I was asked recently if I’d ever written anything about British illustrator Frank C. Papé (1878–1972). The answer was no for two reasons, the first being that where book illustration is concerned I like to be able to point to whole books, and until recently there hasn’t been much of Papé’s work available in complete editions. The second reason is that Papé’s illustration is often broadly comic, to a degree that had he been born a generation or two later he might have been drawing humorous comic strips or editorial cartoons. Papé was very adept on a technical level but his drawings aren’t always to my taste so I’ve never spent much time looking for his books.

The first of those caveats has been ameliorated by recent uploads at the Internet Archive which include this volume, one of several Anatole France editions with Papé illustrations. The Well of Saint Clare (1928) is a collection of religious stories set in the medieval era. The book appeared a few years after Papé had illustrated James Branch Cabell’s Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice, a quasi-medieval fantasy which was the subject of a celebrated obscenity case in the USA. Anatole France’s satires were almost as contentious for a time—the Vatican put his books on their prohibited list—which leaves me wondering whether Papé had a natural inclination for risqué material or whether his publishers pushed him in this direction. Probably a little of both.

Continue reading “Frank C. Papé’s The Well of Saint Clare”

Inventions for echo guitars

I thought about calling this one A Young Person’s Guide to Echo Guitar but that would only end up attracting people expecting a tutorial of some kind. It’s not really a guide either, more an overview of a musical idiom whose predominant feature is guitar played through analogue or digital echo machines, often without additional instrumentation. I have a predilection for this kind of thing, something I was thinking about recently when listening to Michael Brook’s Cobalt Blue album.

A Watkins Copicat as seen (and used) in Berberian Sound Studio.

This is also another example of technology inspiring the development of new forms of music. Echoed guitar dates back to the early days of rock’n’roll but it was the advent of echo machines like the Watkins Copicat that made it possible for guitarists to produce rich clusters of sound without any other instrumentation. The Copicat was portable and could be activated with a foot pedal, making it perfect for guitar players. These machines aren’t always credited in album notes but I’d guess that one or two of the earlier recordings on this list have been made using Copicats. (John Martyn, however, preferred an Echoplex.) As for the more recent examples, one reason to write this piece is to fish for suggestions of things I may have missed. I’m sure I put a Bandcamp discovery in one of the weekend lists that involved quantities of echo guitar but I’m going to have to trawl back through old posts to find it.

Echo (1972) by Achim Reichel and Machines

Achim Reichel is an odd character in German music. In the 1960s he was a singer and guitarist in a popular Beatles-like band, The Rattles, followed by a stint with a short-lived psychedelic outfit, Wonderland; by the 1980s he was a very successful German pop artist. For a few years in the 1970s, however, he recorded a handful of albums which in later years he seems to have found embarrassing despite their being regarded now as highlights of the so-called Krautrock era. Echo is the most adventurous of these, a double album which used to be a frustrating item, being praised by those who heard it while also being very difficult to find. The two discs contain four suites that fill each side, the first one opening with long stretches of echo-guitar which soon establish the mood of the album with their unpredictable evolution. Echo as a whole is a succession of unexpected swerves and musical detours, taking in orchestral arrangements, field recordings, snatches of song, heavy rock, and (regrettably) a long stretch of glossolalic jabbering that tests the listener’s patience. I forgive the latter when the rest of the album is so good. The guitar sound that Reichel developed here became a recurrent feature of his music for the next two years, especially in live performances.

Reichel’s popularity has overshadowed his earlier recordings to an extent that Echo wasn’t given an official reissue until 2017 when he relented to persistent requests and put together a 10-disc CD set, The Art Of German Psychedelic 1970–74. This is too much Reichel for the casual listener but if you can bear his occasional lurches into Steppenwolf-style psych-rock there’s a great deal of excellent music in the collection. Among the exclusive offerings is a superb live performance of kosmische improvisation from 1973, also an entire disc of unaccompanied echo-guitar recordings.

• Einladung

Wilburn Burchette Opens The Seven Gates Of Transcendental Consciousness (1972)

Many of Wilburn Burchette’s albums would be suitable here but I chose this one because I like the title and it has the grooviest cover. Burchette’s subtitle—“A Transcendental Ballet For The Mind Of God”—suggests something more overtly cosmic than the music itself which is less freeform than Achim Reichel. This is also the first self-released album in a list which coincidentally contains several such releases.

• Opens the Seven Gates of Transcendental Consciousness

Inventions For Electric Guitar (1974) by Ash Ra Tempel/Manuel Göttsching

Cult album time. This one was labeled as the sixth release by Ash Ra Tempel but it’s really the first solo album by Manuel Göttsching, in which he used multi-track recording together with copious echo and other effects to create something that sounds more like the synthesizer music of 1974 than anything made with guitars. The cover art fixes the album in a specific time but the music itself is timeless. In 2010 he performed the album in its entirety at a Japanese music festival, assisted by three other guitarists: Steve Hillage, Elliott Sharp and Zhang Shouwang. If there’s a complete video of this concert I’ve yet to see it but there is this extract showing the musicians playing Pluralis.

• Echo Waves

Continue reading “Inventions for echo guitars”

Weekend links 735

The Adventure of the Giant Squid (c.1939) by NC Wyeth.

• Mix of the week is a superb XLR8R Podcast 860 by Kenneth James Gibson. Elsewhere there’s DreamScenes – July 2024 at Ambientblog, and Deep Breakfast Mix 267 at A Strangely Isolated Place.

• A trailer for a restored print of Time Masters (1982), the second animated feature by René Laloux, with character designs/decor by Moebius. Now do Gandahar.

• Coming soon from Strange Attractor: Music From Elsewhere: Haunting Tunes From Mythical Beings, Hidden Worlds, and Other Curious Sources by Doug Skinner.

Not only a prolific lyricist, Lovecraft considered his main vocation to be poetry. And at its best, his verse can be judged an apt expression of his philosophical vision, in which cosmic horror embodies the predicament of all sentient beings in a meaningless universe. That Lovecraft’s poetry never reaches the heights attained by such Modernists as T.S. Eliot or Ezra Pound should not diminish the fact that his is verse that, in the most archaic of ways, advances a startlingly modern metaphysic, a poetic encapsulation of what Thomas Ligotti in The Conspiracy Against the Human Race describes as an affirmation that the universe is a “place without sense, meaning, or value.” Lovecraft, with his antiquated prosody and his anti-human ethics, presented readers with a type of counter-modernist poetry. Ironically, he is the radical culmination of William Carlos Williams’s injunction of “No ideas but in things;” he is an author for whom there are only things. Graham Harman in Lovecraft and Philosophy describes Lovecraft as a “violently anti-idealist” who “laments the inability of mere language to depict the deep horrors his narrators confront.” Unpleasant stuff, for sure. It is verse that at best exemplifies something that controversial poet Frederik Seidel called for in the Paris Review: “Write beautifully what people don’t want to hear.”

Ed Simon on The Unlikely Verse of HP Lovecraft

• Among the new titles at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts: The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, by HP Lovecraft.

• At Spoon & Tamago: An ethereal bubble emerges from a Japanese townhouse.

• New music: The Head As Form’d In The Crier’s Choir by Sarah Davachi.

• Mabe Fratti’s favourite albums.

• Bubble Rap (1972) by Can | Bubbles (1975) by Herbie Hancock | Reverse Bubble (2014) by Air

Thomas Mackenzie’s Crock of Gold

Thomas Mackenzie (1887–1944) was an English illustrator whose work has appeared here before via his illustrations for a verse rendering of the Aladdin story by Arthur Ransome, a typical product of the 1920s’ boom in illustrated children’s books. James Stephens’ The Crock of Gold (1912) is a vessel of a different kind, too sophisticated for children yet suffused with a fairy-tale quality, this is more like a fable for adults:

A mixture of philosophy, Irish folklore and the “battle of the sexes”, it consists of six books, Book 1 – The Coming of Pan, Book 2 – The Philosopher’s Journey, Book 3 – The Two Gods, Book 4 – The Philosopher’s Return, Book 5 – The Policemen, Book 6 – The Thin Woman’s Journey, that rotate around a philosopher and his quest to find the most beautiful woman in the world, Cáitilin Ni Murrachu, daughter of a remote mountain farm, and deliver her from the gods Pan and Aengus Óg, while himself going through a catharsis. (more)

The illustrations, which Mackenzie created for a 1926 edition, are a little different to his earlier work, tending in places towards that Hellenic stylisation that became increasingly popular in the graphic art of the 1920s and 30s. The depictions of Pan remind me that I once tried to catalogue all the appearances of the god in prose and poetry from the 1890s on. The years from 1890 to 1930 saw Pan become a persistent presence in English literature, while also giving a title to one of the leading Jugendstil journals. The idea of trying to document all this activity is an attractive one until you set to work and find that there are many more examples than you imagined, not all of them indicated in the titles of the works.

Continue reading “Thomas Mackenzie’s Crock of Gold”

Tokyo Loop

Tokyo Strut (Masahiko Sato, Mio Ueta), Tokyo Trip (Keiichi Tanaami)
Fishing Vine (Mika Seike), Yuki-chan (Kei Oyama).

Search for the phrase “Tokyo Loop” and you’ll be offered information about the Yamanote rail line which runs in a circle through Japanese capital. The Loop that concerns us here is very different, a collection of 16 short films made in 2006:

Tokyo’s centre for experimental and art cinema, Image Forum, under the guidance of program director Takashi Sawa and coordinator Koyo Yamashita, has a knack for putting together some clever screening packages together for the Image Forum Festival every year. Many of these packages, such as Thinking and Drawing, make their way into international festivals, and in some cases even onto DVD. Such is the case with the 2006 omnibus Tokyo Loop featuring the work of both established artists like Yoji Kuri, Taku Furukawa, Keiichi Tanaami, Nobuhiro Aihara, as well as exciting younger artists such as Kei Oyama, Mika Seike, Tabaimo, and Tomoyasu Murata.

Tokyo Loop came out of Image Forum’s desire to do something to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of Stuart Blackton’s animation “Humorous Phases of Funny Faces” (1906), considered by many the first publicly screened animated film. Sawa and Yamashita commandeered the help of Furukawa who contributed to the project with a film of his own and helped recruit other independent animation and experimental artists.

The 16 artists were asked to contribute a short film inspired by the city of Tokyo. The films would also be linked by the participation of Seiichi Yamamoto, a well-known musician from Osaka’s underground music scene who composed the score. Yamamoto corresponded with the artists during the production process. He composed the music in advance based upon the sketches and storyboards provided by each animator, then revised them to fit the final edit of the film. (more)

Dog & Bone (Kotobuki Shiriagari), Public Convenience (Tabaimo)
Tokyo (Atsuko Uda), Black Fish (Nobuhiro Aihara).

Everything in the collection is animated to some degree but the experimental factor dominates, with the films running through a range of different styles and techniques. I especially enjoyed Tokyo Strut, a minimal display of wireframe animation; and Nuance, a film where nocturnal drives through city streets are presented with flickering rotoscoped shapes and colours.

Unbalance (Takashi Ito), Tokyo Girl (Maho Shimao)
Manipulated Man (Atsushi Wada), Nuance (Tomoyasu Murata).

All the films are wordless, with scores that run through a variety of musical styles, from abrasive noise and glitchy electronics to simple melodies played with guitar and synthesizer. I didn’t recognise Seiichi Yamamoto‘s name at first but he’s a versatile and prolific musician whose collaborations with other artists (Boredoms among them) are copious enough for him to be lurking on some of the Japanese CDs on my shelves. One of his own bands, Omoide Hatoba, released Kinsei in 1996, an album I bought when it was released but have never played very much. Time to give it another airing.

Hashimoto (Taku Furukawa), Funkorogashi (Yoji Kuri)
Fig (Kouji Yamamura), 12 O’Clock (Toshio Iwai).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Chirico by Tanaami and Aihara
• The Midnight Parasites by Yoji Kuri
• Sweet Friday, a film by Keiichi Tanaami
• Tadanori Yokoo animations