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Weekend links 826

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

Kay Nielsen’s Arabian Nights

Prologue.

Last week a Kay Nielsen illustration passed through my RSS feed, a picture I thought for a moment I hadn’t seen before. A quick search revealed that the illustration is in fact present in a book on my shelves, The Unknown Paintings of Kay Nielsen (1977), one of the series of art books co-published by Pan and Ballantine in the 1970s. A selection of Nielsen’s illustrations had appeared in the series two years earlier in a book simply titled Kay Nielsen; the arrival of a follow-up made the Dane the only featured artist aside from Frank Frazetta to be the subject of multiple volumes.

Prologue.

Nielsen’s illustrations in the second book were labelled “unknown” because they hadn’t been printed before, despite being commissioned for a new Danish translation of The Thousand and One Nights by Arthur Christensen. Hildegarde Flanner, a friend of the Nielsens when they were living in Los Angeles in the 1940s, writes in an introductory “elegy” that Nielsen worked on the illustrations from 1918 to 1922, but publication of the book was abandoned as a result of the economic climate in post-war Denmark. There were further difficulties later on. When Nielsen died in 1957 the illustrations still hadn’t been published. Nielsen’s widow, Ulla, passed them on to Hildegarde Flanner and Frederick Monhoff who subsequently tried to place them with museums in the USA and Denmark. None of the institutions they contacted were interested, an unthinkable situation today.

Prologue.

There’s more of an adult tone to Nielsen’s Arabian Nights than there is in his earlier works, a quality which suits the material but which may explain why they had to wait until the 1970s to see print. Simplified versions of the tales of Aladdin and Sin(d)bad have seen The Thousand and One Nights continually miscast as children’s fiction when the original stories were intended for adults; Scheherazade invents a new story each night to save herself from execution in the morning. Nielsen’s illustrations bring the stories closer to their origin while also maintaining the influence of Persian art on the style of his drawings.

The Tale of the Little Hunchback.

The copies you see here show the colour plates alone but Nielsen also created a number of monochrome vignettes and other pieces to be used as decoration elsewhere in the book. The Unknown Paintings of Kay Nielsen doesn’t reprint the stories so has to pad out its pages by combining details from the colour plates with the ink borders. More recently the illustrations were reprinted in one of Taschen’s expensive editions which is closer to Nielsen’s original plan for the book.

The Tailor’s Tale of the Lame Young Man.

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Weekend links 825

Hexagon Sequence II (c. 1970) by Rosalie de Meric.

• Boards Of Canada obsessives have been in a frenzy this week following the appearance of mysterious VHS cassettes sent at random to a small number of users of the Warp Records mail-order service. The contents of the tapes look like this. With the group having been silent for the past thirteen years there’s been an understandable flood of wild speculation on the BOC Reddit page, the supposition being that the tapes (and now an equally cryptic set of posters) mean that a new record release is on the way. We’ll find out soon enough. In the meantime, here’s DJ Food’s O Is For Orange 2025 (version 3), a Boards Of Canada-themed mix that I neglected to link to last year.

• “There is no artistic process that isn’t magical in that it’s an attempt to magically conjure an idea, something that is invisible and intangible, into material form…” Alan Moore (again) talking to Dominique Musorrafiti about art and magic. Also the comics business, which people really ought to stop asking him about when his reluctance to discuss his old work is so evident.

• “I’m not a commercial director—I’m not even a professional film-maker.” Jim Jarmusch talking to Amy Raphael about his career and his latest film, Father Mother Sister Brother. At Little White Lies, Claire Biddle examines the music in Jarmusch’s films and his collaborative albums.

• “Painting and sculpture influenced me greatly. You start to see the world, the outside, everything around you, the tone, with the eyes of seeing a picture that’s framed.” Irmin Schmidt talking to Adelle Stripe about his early life and Requiem, his new album.

• New music: All Clouds Bring Not Rain by Memorials; Afterlife Requiem by Those Who Walk Away; Where Light Pauses In The Silence Of The Sun by Abul Mogard & Rafael Anton Irisarri.

• At Colossal: Daniel Sackheim traverses Los Angeles’ noir side in The City Unseen.

• At Bandcamp Daily: Jim Allen on the sound of the ’70s French Underground.

• At the BFI: Rory Doherty selects 10 great Australian debut features.

• NASA Johnson

• Hexagon (1990) by Ruins | Octagon (1994) by Basic Channel | Triangles And Rhombuses (1998) by Boards Of Canada

Weekend links 824

“A view of Earth taken by NASA astronaut and Artemis II Commander Reid Wiseman from one of the Orion spacecraft’s windows after completing the translunar injection burn on April 2, 2026. The image features two auroras (top right and bottom left) and zodiacal light (bottom right) is visible as the Earth eclipses the Sun.”

• I was surprised this week to find myself quoted by David Hudson at Criterion Current in an overview of the schedule for Cold War Visions: Nuclear Anxiety in Eastern Bloc Cinema, a short season of films that will be showing at the Barbican throughout this month. One of those films is Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, a cult film round here, which a handful of lucky Londoners will be able to see on a big screen.

• 邪神三十六景 (Thirty-six Views of the Evil Gods) is collection of drawings by Takeki Yamada that combine Hokusai’s celebrated views of Mount Fuji with beings from Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. I’m a little underwhelmed by the results but the book is out there for those who want it.

• Among the new titles at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts: Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon. (Previously)

• Coming soon at Unquiet Things: The Art of the Unknown: A Visual Treasury of the Esoteric, Uncanny, and Unexplained by S. Elizabeth.

• At Public Domain Review: Elizabeth I’s manuscript copy of Pierre Boaistuau’s Histoires Prodigieuses (1559).

• New music: Enter the Nuummite Cosmos by Brotherhood Of Sleep.

• At the BFI: Where to begin with Peter Weir.

• A Brief History of the Dust Jacket.

• Out Of The Unknown (1984) by Died Pretty | Brian’s Nightmare / The Unknown, Part One (2005) by Robin Guthrie / Harold Budd | A Gift Of Unknown Things (2017) by Teleplasmiste

Tadami Yamada’s weird covers

Earlier this year when I wrote about Tadami Yamada’s illustrations for William Hope Hodgson I mentioned the existence of books by other authors that were published along with the Hodgson as part of a series. Kokusho Kankōkai published ten of these books from 1976 to 1977, most of them being collections of short horror fiction by European and American authors, with the series as a whole being referred to as the “Dracula” editions. Yamada painted the covers and provided interior illustrations for eight of the books, including, as I suspected earlier, a Lovecraft collection. I was hoping I might be able to find copies of his interiors for the Lovecraft but so far nothing has turned up, Yamada’s web pages only featuring illustrations from the Hodgson and Henry S. Whitehead collections. Searching elsewhere is complicated by a number of factors such as the age of the books, their being Japanese publications, and the sheer quantity of Lovecraft-related material to sift through.

Yamada says that his illustrations weren’t appreciated by readers who were expecting more typical horror imagery. This doesn’t surprise me given the Surrealist tenor of his work as a whole. The Hodgson illustrations are relatively orthodox but many of his other book illustrations from this period are collages that resemble the simpler things Max Ernst was doing in his collage novels. Collage is also evident on the “Dracula” covers, together with decalcomania, another Surrealist technique visible in the Hodgson illustrations. These books are a minor diversion in Yamada’s wide-ranging career but, as is often the case with Asian publications, none of them are currently listed at ISFDB. I’d still like to see his Lovecraft illustrations, if only to assuage my curiosity.

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